thuviaptarth | Reading

Registration for WisCon Online 2026 is Open.

Welcome to the oldest feminist inclusive convention held Memorial Day Weekend, May 21-25, 2026.

https://reg.wiscon.net/

Sign up for the newsletter here, if you haven't already!
https://wiscon.net/news/e-newsletter/

settiai

The extended stay hotel that I've been living in for over a year-and-a-half is being sold, so I've been desperately trying to find somewhere else to move. Through a lot of luck, I think that I've found a basement apartment in the home of an older woman nearby if I can get the money together to cover the deposit and first month's rent sooner rather than later. Which leads to this post. I don't have a lot left to try to sell right now, at least not until I really go digging in my storage unit to see what all is there, but I'm going to try to sell what I can in the hope of raising enough to get this apartment.

First, I have a few Nintendo Switch games for sale:

Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu! (example on Amazon)
Spyro Reignited Trilogy (example on Amazon)
TemTem (example on Amazon)

And then a few TTRPGs that were Christmas presents so they're still in basically like new shape:

Candela Obscura Core Rulebook (example on Amazon)
Daggerheart Core Set (example on Amazon)

If you're not interested but know someone who might be, please point them my way.

For payment, I have CashApp ($Settiai), PayPal, Venmo, or Zelle (nancy.lynn.foster@gmail.com).

Current Mood: hopeful

galadhir posting in

chenqing_100

Title: A Meditation Upon the Dawn, by Lan Xichen
Author: Galadhir
Word Count/Drabble Type: 100 words
Character(s)/Ship(s): Lan Xichen/Jin Guangyao (remembered)
Rating/Warnings: None
Summary: Lan Xichen stands at the doorway of his seclusion and muses about the sunrise in Cloud Recesses

~~~~

Where there are no shadows one may attain a kind of snow blindness. Light, in its perfection, robs the eyes of sight, even as the tomb, closing, blots out all hopes, thoughts and dreams.

Early morning. I stand by my half open door and look out at the sunrise. There, at the horizon, night and day are co-mingled in glory. A burst of gold more splendid than any Jin-created tower. A colourless dew-drop coruscates upon the water-weighted pine. I step forward, exaltation kindling in my heart.

And then the clouds return.

In mist too there is a kind of blindness.

condnsdmlk posting in

vidukon_cardiff

Registration is now open for VidUKon 2026! Join us 5-7 June in both Birmingham and online for vidshows, panels and socialising. Friday programming will begin in the afternoon. As in previous years, Thursday evening will include some online-only pre-con programming to kick things off.

In-person attendance this year is £50 (same as last year!); virtual attendance also remains unchanged at £20. Optional add-ons this year are a collectable coaster (£2) featuring this year's VidUKon artwork and the physical conbook (£5).

One big change we're making this year is that we will no longer offer a DVD case with USB key as an add-on. This is due to the increasing difficulty in sourcing and assembling DVD cases each year. We know this was a nice-to-have collector's option so we will make artwork for the DVD cover available after the con should attendees wish to print out and assemble their own DVD case. Premieres will also be available as a download.

To register for this year's con, you'll need to log in or create an account at the VidUKon website. This year we're offering payment directly through the website via Paypal. There's also an option to pay using a credit/debit card (also processed by Paypal). Strangely, vendor fees for card transactions are considerably lower than for Paypal transactions, so if you prefer paying by card, please do!

We hope the registration process goes smoothly for everyone, but should you run into any issues while registering, please get in touch with concom. We keep an eye on the VidUKon channel in the Vidding Discord and you are also welcome to DM us. Alternatively, you can email us at vidukon@gmail.com or respond to this post.

The deadline to register for in-person attendance is 30 April. Online registration will remain open until 4 June, but if you'd like add-ons (conbook + coasters) you'll need to register by 15 May.

Sponsorship/donation
VidUKon has a small pot built up, so a couple of fee waivers are possible for those who would like to attend the con but who are unable to afford the membership cost. If you would like to give a bit extra to help sponsor attendance for someone else and/or support the con, you can do so during registration.

If you'd like to attend the con but are unable to afford the membership cost, please get in touch with us at vidukon@gmail.com to find out more about this. (You do not need to disclose anything about your personal circumstances in order to qualify).

Equally, if folks would like to pay registration for friends, they can do so using this option. Just flag it to the con email so that we can double-check details and register the extra attendees.

Important dates
19 April – deadline to submit to Vidder’s Choice, Premieres and the themed submissions show
30 April – deadline to register for in-person attendance
15 May – deadline to register for online attendance + add-ons (conbook; coasters)
4 June – deadline to register for online attendance only
5-7 June – VidUKon \o/

We hope to see you at this year’s con!

celli

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naye

You know what's awesome? Vids. Which is why I had the best time watching almost all of the 128 Festivids from this year. I am avoiding certain spoilers, warnings and tags, so I did not in fact watch all of them, but I definitely got through well over a hundred. An absolute feast!

While I was watching (mostly before reveals) I was also putting together a document of vids I really liked so I'd be able to go back and check who'd made them after reveals. It's not the most intricate of rec systems - it's got the title, vidder, fandom and the comment I left after watching, and they are sort of but not fully in reverse alphabetical order. But if you like vids, you will probably enjoy these!

Fandoms include: A Man on the Inside, Dimension 20, Steerswoman, The Pitt, Jeongnyeon: The Star is Born, Men's Pole Vaulting (the sport), Murderbot, Babylon 5, Conclave, Dykes to Watch Out For (the comic), Star Trek: Lower Decks and Hades. This is not an exhaustive list! Check out all the Festivid fandoms here. (Or rather: all the fandoms with canon AO3 tags. One of my vids isn't in this list, so I guess there are plenty of others that aren't either.)

( Come get your recs here! )

aurumcalendula

The Xena fanvid VHS arrived safely!

There's 30 fanvids on it (~2 hours of time in total)

Most don't have vidders listed.

I think it might be a mix of VCR and digital vids (there's some with effects and/or fanart included) and I think the tape is from sometime after 2001 (since there's footage of the finale in some vids).

Some (not all) have significant horizontal pink and green lines - I'm wondering if that's from the VHS or the footage in those vids (and/or a result of me initially having the VCR set on LP instead of SP).

I have a DVD-R of it recorded in LP quality and I'm recording one in SP quality.

( list of vids )

ranalore posting in

chenqing_100

This week's prompt is: Cloud Recesses.

You have until midnight your time on Friday, March 13, to answer this prompt. Please post your fills of the prompt as separate entries to the community (i.e. not replies to this entry), tagged with the prompt tag. You may post multiple standalone drabbles per entry in addition to drabble sequences and series.

As a reminder, this community has no official presence elsewhere. You are encouraged to share the prompt on social media, if you so desire. It may take me a bit to create the AO3 collection, so please be patient.

Also, I'm going to go ahead and drop a link to the prompt suggestions post here. New suggestions are always, always welcome.

caramarie

I went to ‘Wuthering Heights’ last night, spontaneously, and enjoyed myself. Cried copiously at the end (as well as the montage after Cathy’s marriage). Although I also appreciate the woman in the audience who on the very final shot said, ‘What the fuck?’ Indeed.

I haven’t read the book, so have no feelings about the film as adaptation. I do apparently think that period-breaking is okay, but NOT with plastic dresses. No plastic please.

Also, getting rid of Heathcliff’s beard was a mistake. Pre-timeskip with long hair and beard = hot; clean-shaven and short hair = not. It’s not like I’m even into beards! Or so I thought -_-

aurumcalendula

I was watching

killabeez's awesome Special Ops: Lioness fanvid the other day, and now I have a bit of a vidbunny for a different fandom.

Any idea if there's a cover of Can't Help Falling in Love with a similar vibe, but with a male vocalist? (there's a ton of covers of it, but I haven't found one that fits what I'm looking for yet)

china_shop

Previous poll review
In the spam SPAM spam poll, 52% of respondents only check their spam folder when they're looking for a specific thing, 30% check it maybe once a month, 10% weekly, and 8% daily. (This question was inspired by gmail sending multiple emails in the middle of threads to spam, wtf.)

In ticky-boxes, blanket cocoons and comfort food came second to hugs, 62% to 74%. Judgy koalas came third with 56%. Thank you for your votes! ♥

Reading
I read Courtney Milan's The Earl Who Isn't, which was just as enjoyable at the others in the series. Her kissing and UST are excellent, and I love everyone in Wedgeford.

Bounced off Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfield, with prejudice. (That was one of my library books.) The first "chapter" (of three in the entire book) was a blow-by-blow account of working backstage at SNL; the second "chapter" (which I flicked through) was lockdown correspondence. I didn't like either of the characters.

I don't know what I'm reading next. Or listening to on my own. But Andrew and I have about 2.5 hours left in Barrayar.

Kdramas
Oh no, I finished One Spring Night and kind of... went back to the beginning and started it again. With occasional diversions into Something in the Rain (which ha, is by the same writer, as well as having vast numbers of cast members in common, so that explains that). At some point I'll emerge from this Jung Hae In fever dream and start something else.

Pru and I finished Family by Choice (I LOVE IT SO MUCH), and next week we're starting Love Scout (\o/).

Other TV
We're on the final disk of extras for Return of the King, and that'll be it. It's stressful seeing the last-minute absolute chaos behind the scenes, but also kind of magical. Still going on The Pitt, and we've watched a couple of episodes of Dinosaur, a UK sitcom about two sisters, one of whom is autistic. I like it!

Got a few things lined up: new seasons of The Lincoln Lawyer and Dark Winds, more Scavengers Reign, there were probably some other things, idk.

Audio entertainment
Writing Excuses, some Better Offline, some What Matters Most (chatty general life psychology/advice), Cross Party Lines (local politics), Letters from an American (just a few /o\), Heaving Bosoms (chatty recaps of romance novels, just for something relaxing to put in my ears), Movie Briefs (lawyers talk about law movies, ditto).

Online life
*hugs you all, so much*

...

Writing/making things
My Yuletide treat is at beta at last. \o/ Now I've started in on my Yuletide assignment fic, unfinished at 7k words. I'm imposing a new structure on it to see if that might make it more finishable. No drawing practice.

Life/health/mental state things
Idk, I'm okay. Getting some things done, at least. Getting a fair amount of sleep and exercise. Doing righteous battle with my health insurer. Spending too much time tweaking my new phone to make it behave how I want.

Goals
This week: make a batch of vegetarian dumplings, make a mini quiche in the air fryer. All my goals are food, hi!

Good things
Sunshine. Helpful, supportive people. The 520 Day Guardian Reverse Exchange is coming soon! Kitty. New phone is mostly behaving itself. We went to a delightfully geeky talk about dragonflies.

Poll #34329 Being an audience

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 40

View Respondents

In the last six months, I've been (in person) to

View Answers

cinema
19 (47.5%)

theatre
11 (27.5%)

live music gig
8 (20.0%)

ballet
1 (2.5%)

opera
2 (5.0%)

sports game
2 (5.0%)

other
5 (12.5%)

ticky-box full of bakery treats
24 (60.0%)

ticky-box full of keeping a paper appointment diary
8 (20.0%)

ticky-box full of rambling around the podcast 'verse getting your ears dirty
8 (20.0%)

ticky-box full of softly squishable snow puppies snuggling in a heap
20 (50.0%)

ticky-box full of hugs to you all <3 <3 <3
30 (75.0%)

celli

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thistleingrey

I've learned what I can from the heavily modified slipover that I knitted and re-knitted all through the past two months. Because the recent absence of a subcutaneous pain-mesh layer has coincided with thermoregulation's partial return to service, I no longer want a personally sized blanket layer in sport-weight wool/alpaca. I've bound it off, both to keep as a measurement reference and because the yarn wouldn't survive further reuse.

( non-knitting digression )

Thinking through some incidents has been aided considerably by working with yarn bought when my skin first felt oddly cold. I've used it recently as a memory prop, then undone the deliberately false start and restarted the project with different yarn. As part of the process, I've finally recovered the skeins that were reused to become about half of a Little Wave cardigan, then abandoned when I realized that the pattern's proportions and mine would never agree. Instead, I'm meditating upon Capsa.

Thanks, long-ago clearance-discounted yarn, oddly too heavy for past me to crochet, for taking good care of me.

I've tried the first few rows of a swatch for New Terrain in Lavold Hempathy yarn---old, if not as old as the yarn meant first for the blanket I couldn't crochet. Perhaps my 2019 hands could've managed it, but my current hands will need a bit of wool in the yarn blend to keep those slipped stitches even. Hempathy is cotton/hemp/rayon, with no bounce/spring to it.

Yamagara's New Terrain interests me because its shoulder-yoke is constructed similarly to that of the Sundial tee, except that Yamagara is actually competent at designing patterns with carefully considered details---all the finishing touches that Sundial's designer (Wool and Pine) tends to skip. As a fallback, I could make a version of New Terrain without the terrain, plain across the torso, if the slipped stitches and my hands can't agree at all.

bluerosekatie posting in

fancake

Fandom: The Protomen
Pairings/Characters: Protoman & Megaman, Protoman & Dr. Thomas Light, Protoman & Dr. Albert Wily
Rating: Unrated, estimated to be Teen and Up
Length: 3,178
Creator Links: ricefu on Ao3
Theme:
Siblings, Science Fiction, Apocalypse/Dystopia, Robots, Androids and AI, Trauma & Recovery, (Not Really) Character Death, Old Fandoms
Summary:
You have heard me tell this story many times before you sleep... This time listen carefully.
Reccer's Notes:
A beautiful and sad character study of Protoman, the older sibling of two tragic brothers in the Protomen universe. It connects his backstory and dives into psyche throughout the canon storyline, including his relationship with his younger brother, his father, and the main antagonist. Although I'm tagging the Not Really Character Death theme for a reason, this is a tragedy, so tread carefully.

Fanwork Links:
The Inevitable Fall of the Firstborn on Ao3

modzilla posting in

yuletide

fffx is a multifandom gift exchange where the standard minimum of a gift is a fanfic of 10,000+ words or fanart in panelled comic style of 40+ panels.

We've passed the deadline and have 5 remaining pinch hits, mostly requiring a half-length gift of 5,000+ words (fic) or 20+ panels (comic art).

Please take a look if you think you might be able to post a gift of this kind by 11:59pm EDT, Thursday 19 March.

My participants and I are very grateful for your interest!

Pinch hit #32 - fic - Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (TV), Murder She Wrote, Jem and the Holograms (Cartoon), G.I. Joe (Cartoon), Voltron: Lion Force (1984)

Pinch hit #39 - fic - Stargate Atlantis, Kolja | Kolya (1996), Cesta do pravěku | Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955), Jurassic Park Original Trilogy (Movies)

Pinch hit #62 - art, fic - 少年歌行 | The Blood of Youth (Live Action TV), 莲花楼 | Mysterious Lotus Casebook (TV), 琅琊榜 | Nirvana in Fire (TV), 伪装者 | The Disguiser (TV), 少年白马醉春风 | Dashing Youth (Live Action TV), 杀破狼 | Sha Po Lang - priest )

Pinch hit #65 - fic - Columbo, Criminal Minds (US TV), Grey's Anatomy, Miss Marple - Agatha Christie, NCIS: Los Angeles, SEAL Team (TV), Sherlock (TV) The Professionals (TV 1977)

PH #67 - art, fic [varies by request] - Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Video Game), Original Work, Crossover Fandom [Brooklyn 99 & The Labyrinth], Hades (Supergiant Games Video Games)

settiai

In tonight's game, ( the rest under a cut for those who don't care. )

And that's where we left off.

Current Mood: accomplished

kass

I wrote a trio of Stardew ficlets for PeacePangolin for

purimgifts. (And the images I shared along with them are simple re-colorings of in-game images; I am chagrined now to see the kinds of beautiful things people created, and I will need to level up before next year!) Anyway: here's what I wrote.

1. Sam (373 words) by Kass
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Stardew Valley (Video Game)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Sam/Sebastian (Stardew Valley)
Characters: Sam (Stardew Valley)
Additional Tags: Collection: Purimgifts Day 1
Summary:

He can’t remember a time before he knew Sebastian.

2. Sebastian (443 words) by Kass
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Stardew Valley (Video Game)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Sam/Sebastian (Stardew Valley)
Characters: Sebastian
Additional Tags: Purimgifts day 2
Summary:

Nevermind I’m going to delete all of this and start over.

3. Abigail (401 words) by Kass
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Stardew Valley (Video Game)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Sam/Sebastian (Stardew Valley)
Characters: Abigail (Stardew Valley)
Additional Tags: Collection: Purimgifts Day 3

kass

My final

purimgifts fic and collage are Lady Astronaut ones again -- absolutely lovely. Thank you so much, Mystery Author! You have brightened my Purim a ton.

2329 Days (329 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Lady Astronaut Series - Mary Robinette Kowal
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Elma York, Nathaniel York, Jean-Paul Lebourgeois, Estevan Terrazas
Additional Tags: Canon Jewish Character, Canon Compliant, Collection: Purimgifts Day 3, Outer Space
Summary:

A moment of prayer for when Elma sees the stars

likeadeuce

I've entered the "Fandom Trumps Hate" auction this year. How this works is offering to create fanworks to people who pledge charitable donations. I'm offering fic, and I'm open to pretty much any fandom that I'm familiar with (ask if you're not sure). My auction page is here with more information!