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[personal profile] rocky41_7 posting in [community profile] booknook
Title: The Tyrant Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade series book #3)
Author: Seth Dickinson
Genre: Fantasy

Today I finished the latest book in the Baru Cormorant series (fourth book remains to-be-released), The Tyrant Baru Cormorant. Y'all, Baru is so back.

! Spoilers for books 1 & 2 below !
(Book 1 review) (Book 2 review)
 
If you've looked at other reviews for the series, you may have seen book 2, The Monster Baru Cormorant, referred to as the series' "sophomore slump." I disagree, but I understand where the feeling comes from. The Monster feels like a prelude, a setting of the board, for The Tyrant. The Monster puts all the pieces in place for the cascade of schemes and plays that come in The Tyrant. They almost feel like one book split into two (which is fair—taken together, they represent about a thousand pages and would make for one mammoth novel).
  
 
 
 
 

 

but_can_i_be_trusted: (Escalated Quickly)
[personal profile] but_can_i_be_trusted posting in [community profile] vocab_drabbles
Title: 'The Sorceress'
Fandom: Original Fiction
Author: [personal profile] but_can_i_be_trusted
Rating: G
Word Count: 300
Characters/Pairings: Original
Warnings: None
Notes: Crossposted to [community profile] 100words
Summary: His is an opinion that I have a great amount of respect for.

The Sorceress )

WIP Title Meme

Jul. 10th, 2025 11:48 pm
redfiona99: (Default)
[personal profile] redfiona99
Pinched from [personal profile] idleleaves

I've bolded the ones that I still haven't finished from the time I did this in 2016. Several of these have "real" titles they have developed as I've written them but they're not the title of the file.

Untitled Crossfire Fic
Untitled RDJ verse fic
CommentFic2017
Untitled Blade Trinity Fic 1
Untitled Star Trek Into Darkness Fic
X-Men First Class - gender swapped Is actually 3 fics, one both women, one each of the inevitable horror if only one is.
Swings_and_Roundabouts
Untitled GI Joe Fic
Dreamers Awake
The Woman That Walked The Earth
Replicants Fic
Sabin's Knees
3 First Times and 1 Time They Didn't
Untitled James Bond Fic
Blade Runner 2
Untitled X-Men Fic
Before the Impossible Planet
CastleAU
Doctor Who MPREG
Skip to the End
lgbtlist2007
lgbtfest2012
lgbtfest2011
lgbtfest2009
lgbtfest2009b

Henry V
Untitled Moulin Rouge Fic
Untitled Buffy Fic
ttss
Thor 2
Headmistress
lgbtfest2007
lgbtfest2010
lgbtfest2013

lgbtlist2010
lgbtlist2011
lgbtlist2012

OPI
Pornbattle
10candlewax
22Blindfold
32branding

(no subject)

Jul. 10th, 2025 03:02 pm
olivermoss: (Default)
[personal profile] olivermoss
* Murderbot season 2!

I still need to finishing S1. During one of the episodes a lot of people are talking softly and like... I cannot get my computer to turn up enough. I need to finish it out wearing headphones. My laptop has good audio, but some Apple TV shows are just quiet.

I assume if they are doing an S2, they are probably doing more because it makes sense to film sort of concurrently due to the way characters pop in and out of the narrative. If they want to keep the actors, concurrent filming and maybe some 'meanwhile back on PresAux' moments. They dropped the first person POV, and again, that might be part of why, figuring out how to make it a viable project to continue.

* I got D&D in an hour. I don't have time to check if the new episode Worldcon drama is legit or not, dammit.
sovay: (Rotwang)
[personal profile] sovay
It was helpful of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Elder Race (2021) to include a dedication to its inspiration of Gene Wolfe's "Trip, Trap" (1967), since I would otherwise have guessed Le Guin's "Semley's Necklace" (1964)/Rocannon's World (1966) as its jumping-off point of anthropological science fiction through the split lens of heroic fantasy. As far as I can tell, my ur-text for that kind of double-visioned narrative was Phyllis Gotlieb's A Judgment of Dragons (1980), some of whose characters understand that they have been sucked down a time vortex into the late nineteenth century where a dangerously bored trickster of an enigmatically ancient species is amusing himself in the Pale of Settlement and some of whom just understand that Ashmedai has come to town. I got a kind of reversal early, too, from Jane Yolen's Sister Light, Sister Dark (1988) and White Jenna (1989), whose modern historian is doomed to fail in his earnest reconstructions because in his rationality he misses that the magic was real. Tchaikovsky gets a lot of mileage for his disjoint perspectives out of Clarke's Law, but just as much out of an explanation of clinical depression or the definition of a demon beyond all philosophy, and from any angle I am a sucker for the Doppler drift of stories with time. The convergence of genre protocols is nicely timed. Occasional Peter S. Beagle vibes almost certainly generated by the reader, not the text. Pleasantly, the book actually is novella-proportioned rather than a compacted novel, but now I have the problem of accepting that if the author had wanted to set any further stories in this attractively open-ended world, at his rate of prolificacy they would already have turned up. On that note, I appreciated hearing that Murderbot (2025–) has been renewed.

Simple Life and more Life soon

Jul. 10th, 2025 10:17 pm
schneefink: Taako looking excited (TAZ Taako excited)
[personal profile] schneefink
New Life series already!! First episode confirmed to come out tomorrow 5pm BST. Which is right when L and I are checking out a free beginner's swordfighting class, but I'm pretty sure that'll be cool enough to be a good distraction xD

I realized I never posted about this year's April Fool's special episode, Simple Life. It was a lot of fun. Superflat was a good concept to play around with for a one-off. I watched Cleo and Scar and half of Grian's, and then I planned to watch a few more but didn't get around to it and forgot to post about it.

Simple Life )
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[personal profile] innitmarvelous_og posting in [site community profile] dw_community_promo
image host





+++
About the comm.
 
 
It's one part dream.
One part disaster.
And absolutely 100% fandom.
It's Your OTPs/Fandoms combined with our chaos.

Challenge(s) 2025:

Challenge 1: Hodge Podge A new challenge idea I came up with all sorts of things to get players rolling out the fills and scoring points!

Sign up: July 3 Rd to July 19th @
8PM EST / 12AM GTM
Opening Date: July 20
Closing Date: October 12

I hope to have a variety of challenges in this comm, but they make take some time for me to figure out as I don't want to copy other comms out there. I have an idea or two for an abbreviated challenge after this one and I'll be working on getting it ready go if you guys want to play with me again after this round

-

fandom things

Jul. 10th, 2025 11:41 am
snickfic: Oasis: Noel and Liam Gallagher, text "Cigarettes & Alcohol" (Oasis Gallaghercest)
[personal profile] snickfic
- As of July 6th, I'd written more words this year than I had in all of 2024. Mostly this tells you how much 2024 sucked creatively, but also damn, that's a pretty good pace! I'm currently working on something for Summer of Horror and daydreaming about that Liam/Liam/Noel time travel fic that I may finally go back to working on.

- H/C Exchange finally went live! I got Re-Animator mpreg, which was DELIGHTFUL, and I wrote... something completely unexpected, literally on the day of the deadline after I finally gave up on all previous plans.

- I did end up signing up for Battleship. I'll participate for the eight days of it that happen before I leave for vacation. I also prompted a variety of forever OTPs (Liam/Noel) and rarepairs I haven't thought about in ages (Dawn/Illyria). Hopefully someone will be inspired.

- I picked up a couple of things in the summer Steam sale, and thus have done basically nothing the last 2-3 days but play Cult of the Lamb, the cutest little cosmic horror game you ever did see.

what’s the opposite of tsundoku?

Jul. 10th, 2025 01:10 pm
bluedreaming: cute forg reading a book and enjoying some brews (**heyheymomo - forg and bok)
[personal profile] bluedreaming
With my second load of ordered danmei arriving,1 I came to the bizarre realization that after so many years I’m…buying books with the intention of…reading them? What a paradigm shift!

This isn’t quite 100% accurate, but through my life I was first in the stage of borrowing books from the library and then buying them to keep if I really liked them, then a lot of ebooks, never mind my massive fic reading numbers, and all throughout I’ve also had a strong general practice of buying select books to have for whatever reason, often with not much intention of reading them, at least not anytime soon.2

I do have rules! I’m only “allowed” to collect things that fall within certain parameters, though some of the new ones (danmei, light novels that are horror/certain others) are a bit loose and will need to be tightened up eventually. I don’t have enough space for an infinity of books. I also generally buy ebooks if I can get them DRM-free, and after that, depending on the title, I may go for an audiobook instead if it exists.)


1 These aren’t “large” publishers like 7seas that I can get via my local bookstore but rather Rosmei & Via Lactea etc. and are physical-only (somewhat limited run?) publications.
2 i.e. I somehow randomly decided to start collecting C. J. Cherryh’s sci-fi books in hardcover, and now I’m too far in.

did Cohost lose?

Jul. 10th, 2025 10:59 am
alyaza: a gryphon in a nonbinary pride roundel (Default)
[personal profile] alyaza
Alyaza Birze (July 10, 2025)

i've noticed a plethora of new Cohost people on Bluesky in the past few days—not an interesting observation to most of you, i'm sure. what makes it interesting to me is that so many of these people swore off social media when Cohost announced its shutdown. but here they are, on social media again. this feels like a rather depressing coda to the website, and it makes me think.

did Cohost lose? i use that somewhat rhetorically here—a website can't lose, Cohost's ideals will probably always be represented here or there and by its userbase—but it does feel like most of the initial optimism of what would come after Cohost has faded away, replaced with nothing but resignation to consolidating where everyone else is. for some people there had been a sense that a Cohost blogosphere would rise from the ruins of the site and, at least initially, a lot of people did set up blogs or personal websites. there were other projects too; my particular lot has been cast in with the Website League and Auldnoir (a forum not intended to be a post-Cohost, but which had huge overlap with the site), while others set up the Fourth Place Forum

but less than a year later it doesn't seem like much of any of this is going anywhere. Website League is reasonably active for what it is, but entropy has clearly taken its course in momentum for the project; it's worse with Fourth Place Forum as far as i can tell. and the Cohost blogosphere is, frankly, moribund from my perspective and in my pretty sizable RSS feed. a lot of people have lapsed into complete dormancy, while even blogs that aren't often really post with any consistency.1 most of the updates are made by about five blogs.

what we've all seemingly done is, as Jae described in "(a) cohost postmortem", consolidated back into the mostly-corporate places we already were—retreated into smaller communities on Discord or Tumblr and stuck outposts on Bluesky to signal that we still exist. this is very understandable—most of my social interactions with others are also on Discord (via OTAlt), so it's not like i'm in some holier than thou position to throw stones here—but it does also suggest that, collectively, we've given up on better things being possible online. if not by word, undoubtedly by deed. perhaps if Fukuyama had simply theorized that dissolution of Cohost was the fabled end of history rather than the dissolution of the Soviet Union he'd have a real argument. the Last Website seems a very capitalist-realist one these days, more a Twitter and less a Cohost.

the n+1th website reality—what a time. we're all in our own silos now, and naturally we're (unless you're fortunate enough to have a good Mastodon instance, i suppose) no closer to having any input over the form and function of those silos in practice. the creep of theocratic fascism and technofeudalism continue on the backend, the hegemony of the technolibertarians continues over the front. when Discord inevitably shits itself everybody will presumably be in for some rather painful adjustment having put our eggs in one basket. but we're already paying for consequences of the silo model besides a singular point of failure. "you are probably better served among friends," says Jae, and i agree with this, but the Group Chat form—as mediated through the silos we're all stuck in now—is not exactly conducive to large-scale reproduction. if Cohost was the public square where i could constantly interact with (and receive feedback from) many people of all stripes, what is now asked of me is structurally analogous to personally visiting dozens of homes every day for a social gathering. even if i had the energy to do that (i don't), i don't want to. neither do most people. most of my Cohost connections have withered as such.

anything meaningful that can be done to change course is a task that necessitates something higher-order than individual theory or action. i am exhausted. but i laid out my cards (for what that's worth) in minifesto for a democratic website confederation (draft)—because what else is there to do?—and i struggle to think what else i can say on the subject. i quoted Gramsci on the interregnum there because it implies some possibility of drastic change, but maybe i should quote Mike Davis on Gramsci instead. "Everyone is quoting Gramsci on the interregnum," he observed before his death, "but that assumes that something new will be or could be born. I doubt it." what next? what next?

notes

1 admittedly, i have lapses of not blogging for a few months myself—it's been particularly hard to even think about restarting Cohost Union News in the site's shadow, because the prosociality is part of what made it feel useful to blog about union stuff.

Round 70: Jump for Joy-Information!

Jul. 10th, 2025 07:47 pm
abyss_valkyrie: made by <user name=narnialover7> (Default)
[personal profile] abyss_valkyrie posting in [community profile] ic_animated


Welcome to round 70. For this round show your characters being happy. If you can find screencaps of them jumping for joy, even better.

Below are some examples to inspire you.

[personal profile] xeena  [personal profile] spiderbraids   [personal profile] thesleepingbeauty   [personal profile] 22degreehalo   [personal profile] abyss_valkyrie 


Rules & Guidelines:
  • You can submit up to 5 icons. Please, post the URLs of your icons along with the icons.
  • Icons must not exceed 60 kb for DW and must be 100 px X 100 px.
  • Animaton is allowed.
  • Submit your icons as a separate post to the community.
  • Your subject should be as round 70: jump for joy by username.
  • Tag your post with username and round number.
  • The deadline is 24th July, 2025.

Starling House by Alix E. Harrow

Jul. 10th, 2025 08:53 am
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


Desperate to pay her brother Jasper's way out of Muhlenberg County, Opal accepts a job at an infamously cursed mansion.

Starling House by Alix E. Harrow

Couple of nice things

Jul. 10th, 2025 07:54 am
hunningham: Beautiful colourful pears (Default)
[personal profile] hunningham

Himself had lost his favourite tote bag - it was buffy-themed, not just your random thank-you-for-over-spending-in-our-shop bag. We turned the house upside down, and then I found it yesterday. It was in the car and has probably been there for weeks. Man reunited with buffy tote bag, all is well.

Cat is doing okay. Something happened to him Sunday night (chased by a dog, got lost IDK), and he spent Monday being a very tired old sad cat. I was that worried, I phoned the vet. Got told to let sleeping cats sleep, bring him in if condition persisted. Anyhows, he cheered up and Tuesday he had energy enough to eat an entire can of tuna, complain loudly and wash himself fluffy. All is well.

Nomination Clarifications/Updates

Jul. 10th, 2025 02:42 am
classicfilmex: (Default)
[personal profile] classicfilmex
⏩ Person who nominated Albin/Georges for La Cage Aux Folles: from what we can tell, the character who is named George in the play and musical is called Renato Baldi in the film -- is this who you mean to nominate? If not, please help us out with a clarification!

⏩ A final remember to folks who nominated OCs: they are not allowed in this exchange (see the rules or this post for specifics), but you are more than welcome to nominate characters under the "SOLO" label, and then request fic exploring their relationships with people outside of/before the film in question. If these nominations are not edited accordingly in the next 48 hours, they will be rejected.

Nomintions are open for another week!

July Challenge - Day 9

Jul. 9th, 2025 12:41 am
pf_mod: modern pseudo-cubist painting of a red headed woman holding a book with a red cover (Default)
[personal profile] pf_mod posting in [community profile] poetry_fiction
From War

Death is the broom
I take in my hands
To sweep the world
Clean.

Goblin Emperor and Midsummer

Jul. 10th, 2025 01:24 am
chomiji: hand with crystal orb and word Magic (Fantasy Orb)
[personal profile] chomiji
 Given that Edrehasiver VII became known as the Winter Emperor, I’m not shocked that we don’t have much info about how Midsummer is celebrated in the Ethuveraz (Elflands) in the first book.

But after some searching, I’m saddened to report that there’s nothing in the entire Cemeteries of Amalo on the subject either.  In fact, The Grief of Stones has not a single mention of the word “summer,” and the other two only mention it in reference to things like the summer homes of the nobility.

I’m trying to come up with something for a project, and so far I’ve only come up with fireworks and summer fruits like strawberries and plums.   I imagine that there are various agriculture-related  activities in rural areas among commoners (for example, bonfires rather than fireworks), but does anyone else have any inspirations for Summernight activities among the nobility?
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