mific: (A pen and ink)
[personal profile] mific posting in [community profile] drawesome
Thanks to [personal profile] mekare for suggesting this challenge. It was originally proposed by [personal profile] minoanmiss, and is a tribute to her memory.

text


Challenge #77: Windows and Openings


The spirit of the challenge is the way we're drawn to look through openings, whatever those may be. Windows, doors, holes in walls, in rocks, in trees, in fences around construction sites. You can draw or paint the view on either side - someone or something looking through, or what's to be seen on the other side. More abstract or conceptual interpretations are fine as well - a window on the past, the future, the eyes as windows of the soul, and so on. 

If you want to create something to commemorate [personal profile] minoanmiss, some of her favorite things were the Minoan civilisation, goddesses, recursive images, and anything hopeful.

Once we reach May we're including mermaid-themed art as well, and mermaids were another thing [personal profile] minoanmiss loved. There are of course openings in rocks and seaweed forests under the waves, and windows in underwater cities. We'll do a reminder about the MerMay theme being added in when we get to May.

A round-up post for submissions to this challenge will be done at the end of May.

mific: (Art brushes pencils)
[personal profile] mific posting in [community profile] drawesome
text


Entries submitted for Drawing Challenge #76 - Tattoo Style:

Ilya'a Tattoo by [personal profile] mific - Heated Rivalry, G
Shane's Tattoo by [personal profile] mific - Heated Rivalry, G

As usual, this challenge as well as all of our previous challenges will remain open, so you can continue to submit entries to the community any time after the Round Up date. Be sure to tag your art post with the challenge name, so that it can be added to the list.

Challenge 202 - Voting

Apr. 16th, 2026 10:59 pm
luminousdaze: Legion. Oliver Bird, Astral Plane rap battle scene (Legion | Astral Plane sparkles)
[personal profile] luminousdaze posting in [community profile] iconthat
There were over seventy spectacular icons entered! Thank you very much to all fifteen participants!
Voter Guide
Anyone is welcome to vote.
Please choose your top favorite SIX (6) icons for the main placements and one each for the categories Best Color (Coloring), Best Image Crop & Best Composition.
Please don't vote for your own icons or ask others to vote for your icons.
Please try to vote for the best quality icons, not only for the fandoms or creators.
Important:
Please vote for a different icon for each of the categories (Color, Crop, Composition).
There is a checkbox & text answer combo poll, to change your votes, click the poll link.
Voting will be open for one week.
Thank you for voting!
If Imgur content is not available in your region, please try using Rimgo to view the icons. Sorry, I cannot make a screenshot of the icon table because there is a dim light on one side of my screen that may effect it.

🗳️ Voting 🗳️ )

Garden, Walk

Apr. 16th, 2026 08:51 pm
ranunculus: (Default)
[personal profile] ranunculus
Got the first summer squash plant planted today.Garden gossip )

M and I drove over to the gate to Duck Lake and took a short walk to look out over the landscape below Split Rock. There were flowers everywhere. The cows grazed this pasture hard this winter/early spring so there isn't as much grass hiding the flowers as there is on the rest of the Ranch. It is hard to photograph sheets of wildflowers like these Goldfields. Here are a couple of my attempts. 







Stars, and space, and absent friends

Apr. 16th, 2026 10:53 pm
med_cat: (Hourglass)
[personal profile] med_cat
A tribute, by Sabotabby

For [personal profile] minoanmiss , in whose LJ I first saw this poem, several years ago. 

The Old Astronomer to his Pupil

Reach me down my Tycho Brahe, I would know him when we meet,
When I share my later science, sitting humbly at his feet;
He may know the law of all things, yet be ignorant of how
We are working to completion, working on from then to now.

Pray remember that I leave you all my theory complete,
Lacking only certain data for your adding, as is meet,
And remember men will scorn it, 'tis original and true,
And the obliquy of newness may fall bitterly on you.Read more... )

Here's an illustration by Charlie Bowater


"When You Were the Stars"

A Response to Sarah Williams' "The Old Astronomer to His Pupil"

You told me not to fear the dark-
that stars were born from deepest night,
and even death, you softly said,
was just a turning into light.

Your voice would echo through the dusk,
so calm, so sure, so infinite-
as if the sky itself leaned in
to listen what your soul had meant.I watched you trace Orion's belt... )
sovay: (Otachi: Pacific Rim)
[personal profile] sovay
Under very few circumstances while watching Ishirō Honda's Atragon (海底軍艦, 1963) does one have to hand it to Agent No. 23 of the Empire of Mu, the shoregoing operative of a barbarically advanced civilization gathering itself from the bed of the Pacific to reclaim its former colonies which in the millennia since its Atlantean sinking had the temerity to strike out on their own as the nations of Earth, but he is played by Akihiko Hirata in a gold-glint of dark glasses and an out-of-season scarf tucked against the chill of the surface world and when he is held at gunpoint with his back to the tide-line, he only smiles in the slightest of farewells before leaping into the day-for-night-blue surf without even taking off his shoes. "He escaped into the sea?" His introductory getaway was more technically audacious when he drove a stolen taxi straight off a quay, but if he were human he would look like a suicide and once he's in the water instead he rejoins his phosphorescently submerged comrades without so much as catching a bullet. In a high-concept blend of lost-world pulp and post-war politics, he's a wonderfully uncanny touch without special effects, which is not to deprecate the film's ingenious panoply of images from hydronauts in a looseleaf of silver scales to a dragon coiling like a moray from the side of an oceanic trench to the crimson-clouded detonation of a geothermal sun. The people of Mu run hotter than seals: the sea smokes like a geyser around them, a wrench turns red-hot in the agent's contemptuous grasp; one of his colleagues appears capable of generating an eellike stunning charge. "We have special energy. It's useless." Elsewhere their civilization resembles a sort of Egypto-Minoan fusion by way of Verne and Haggard, its laser cannons sheathed in the coils of bronze ceti and the blinkenlights of its enormous computer banks carved around in cyclopean bas-relief. The empress of Mu looks like a nascent anime design with her hood of clementine-colored hair and new wave eyes, a casual ransom of pearls collared over her brilliant draperies and finely ringed mail. Humanity's last, best hope if it can be repurposed from a dream of militaristic nationalism to the defense of global ideals, the Atragon-class submarine of the title suggests a garfish down to its countershading, a sleek leviathan of spy-fi industry artfully equipped with a few indistinguishably magical tricks of its own. When Mu calls in its marker on the land, the inevitable destruction of Tokyo is a one-two doozy of practical and animated effects—business districts jolted to flinders by a precisely triggered earthquake, container ships set ablaze by an enemy sub's lancing ray—but the eye candy doesn't crowd out the food for thought when the sunken empire makes such a successfully fantastical double for the imperial past that Japan must explicitly repudiate in order to inhabit its international future. I wouldn't kick any of it out of bed for eating seaweed crackers, especially not the first glimpse of the sea-dragon Manda, a thick shield-wall of scales, seemingly endless, breathing. I just remain enchanted with the liminal simplicity of Agent No. 23 in his anonymous dark suit, a Magritte figure whose very ordinariness makes him surreal. His voice will narrate a history of his empire from a spool of 8 mm and deliver its modern ultimatum on reel-to-reel. "Admiral, this earthquake isn't a coincidence. Remember me?" He'd be namelessly memorable even if I hadn't loved his actor since Dr. Serizawa. This sea brought to you by my special backers at Patreon.

Book 34, 2026

Apr. 16th, 2026 09:45 pm
chez_jae: (Books)
[personal profile] chez_jae
A Cup of Poison: A cozy Mystery (The Siamese Sleuth Mysteries)A Cup of Poison: A cozy Mystery by Caleb Finch

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


View all my reviews

Last night I polished off another ebook: A Cup of Poison by Caleb Finch. It’s the first in the “Siamese Sleuth” mystery series. The main character is Miss Dulce, a retired teacher, and her Siamese cat, Cleo.

During the Spring Bloom Fair in Rosehill Village, one of the attendees drops dead after taking a sip of her tea. Miss Dulce doesn’t believe that Cordelia died of natural causes, and when Cleo keeps finding clues, Dulce launches her own investigation. As she closes in on a killer, the killer is closing in on her.

This had a decent start, but it fell all to hell by the end. The narrative became far too repetitive; therefore, I am once again calling bullshit on AI. Dulce’s floral shawl was always drooping off her shoulder, each time she carried the wicker basket containing all the clues she’d amassed (as one does) we had to read an itemized list, the mailman’s hat was always tilted, Cleo’s tail flicked back and forth like a metronome (an interesting analogy when first introduced but boring by the tenth time), and Dulce had an irritating habit of assuring this character or that that she wasn’t accusing him/her of anything…yet. Worst of all, where was the chief of police in all of this?! We’ve all read enough cozies to know that the sheriff/detective/chief of police is always telling our main character to butt out and leave the investigation to the professionals, but not once was Dulce even questioned about nosing around town and shaking people down. Wouldn’t keeping important clues be interference? And how was it that Cleo kept finding notes and photos outside that were, like, 20 years old?! Yes, that sound you heard was me rolling my eyes. Finally, the cat depicted on the cover of the book is a ginger, not a Siamese. Hmpf.

Favorite line: “I leave you folks for one afternoon, and you’re killing each other over scones?”

The story wasn’t ba-ad. It would have earned an average score, but the irritating repetition knocks the score down to a two.

the rain will never stop falling

Apr. 16th, 2026 10:15 pm
musesfool: girl with umbrella (rainy days and mondays)
[personal profile] musesfool
Almost forgot to post!

Shoulders
by Naomi Shihab Nye

A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.

No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.

This man carries the world's most sensitive cargo
but he's not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.

His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy's dream
deep inside him.

We're not going to be able
to live in this world
if we're not willing to do what he's doing
with one another.

The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.

*

Still dwadling along..somehow...

Apr. 16th, 2026 08:38 pm
shadowkat: (Default)
[personal profile] shadowkat
Sigh, I continue to collect doctors. Price of growing older, I guess? health issues..which are seemingly endless )

Books...

I'm making my way through two Illona Andrews books, one in hardcover, This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me - which is lovely (in that I'm really enjoying it - the heroine is clever, strategic and not a killer and it has engaging characters and banter - if a touch pedestrian in the description department. I prefer good dialogue to description anyhow, so not an issue. And right now, the brain doesn't want all that much description.) but I've little time to read it? I can't cart it with me to and from work. Too bulky.

And..."The Silver Streak?" I think that's the name of it? It's the second novella in the Kinsmen series. More science fiction than fantasy. It has a neat subversive take on the personal assistant/powerful boss romantic trope. The set up is: Read more... )

I like Andrews - partly because their novels remind me a little of ones I've written or stories I've told. Not exact, but similar vibe.

Andrews is also more into weird nerdy details than the mere description of interiors. They briefly state what everything looks like - kind of like, okay now I have to tell you what they are wearing and where they are - done - off to the more interesting bits - such as how does one buy or rent a house in this place? Or how does a bio-network work. While other writers give you specific details on clothing, attire, and scenery, but skimp on how you rent a house or get into an Inn.

The Silver Streak provides details on the job. I'm a fan of books showing me what folks do for a living and how they do it - and I prefer jobs that aren't glamour (fashion, magazine editor, novelist, singer, chef) or educator. (Too many writers write about professions they've done, and folks - after the fourth book - student, professor, writer, editor - gets really boring. I'd rather read about a pilot or an intelligence officer.) Books that skimp over that sort of thing, tend to annoy me.

***

The result of International Buffy Day? Hard to say. We live in a very noisy world? Read more... )

A spot of ...good news? Apparently it is illegal for anyone "living" to appear on a US coin, postage stamp, currency of any kind, bond...

Trump Commemorative Coin Spurs Portland Man to Act - it Bugged Me

Blurb )

(Most of the article is distressingly beneath a pay wall. And no, I refuse to subscribe. I'm having issues getting rid of the subscriptions I already have.)

Oh by the way... The Rook by Daniel O'Malley was turned into a television series - adapted by Stephanie Meyer (Twilight - yes that one) of all people - but she left after two episodes due to creative differences.
There was only eight episodes and it was Starz in US and Virgin TV Ultra HD in the UK, until Starz cancelled it in 2020.

I'd like to find it - but it may be impossible. It got mixed reviews.
Good acting, bad pacing. (Which was actually my difficulty with the book - interesting characters and world building, bad pacing.)

***

The heat affecting the rest of the country, finally caught up with NYC this week. We've been in the upper 80s and made it to 90 degrees in some areas (mainly mid-town Manhattan and upstate) over the past three days. It only made it to 83-85 degrees in my area - I'm near the water. Still hot though.
But I didn't mind it that much. My knees didn't hurt as much. When it's warmer, I don't hurt. Which most likely means cold climates may be out for retirement? I won't be able to move without pain.
[syndicated profile] in_the_pipeline_feed

Artemisinin-based therapies are the absolute mainstay of malaria treatment the world over, so this new paper deserves attention. The drug is often given in combination with the older aminoquinoline agents like choloroquine, piperaquine, and amodiaquine, but the authors here make a strong case that this is actually counterproductive.

As the paper notes, heme is central to the mechanism of action for both kinds of drugs. The aminoquinolines bind to it and affect heme homeostasis, and may well product toxic adducts that inhibit parasite growth. Meanwhile, the famous peroxide group in artemisinin gets cleaved by heme to form its active metabolite which causes a variety of protein alkylation events in situ, damaging the parasites from several directions at once.

Naturally enough, people have looked for drug-drug interactions between these two classes, but the paper makes the case that these were not done under realistic conditions to reflect the in vivo state. Pulsing the active dihydroartemisinin (DHA) dose (since it has a short half-life) shows that in chloroquine-resistant parasites the two drugs interfere very strongly. It looks like the quinoline drugs actually block the effects of the active DHA, which is really, really not what you want to be doing. 

The hypothesis is that the heme complexes formed by the quinoline drugs leave the heme unable to cleave the peroxide bond in artemisinin, and in the chloroquine-resistant ones it appears that transport of it out of the parasite digestive vacuoles in enhanced. The authors show that you can actually rescue all the DHA-induced protein damage in the parasites by giving them chloroquine beforehand! This problem can vary according to the exact combinations used and the background genetics of the parasites themselves, but overall it seems to be quite general across the quinolines and across different peroxide-containing antimalarials. From what I can see, though, chloroquine is definitely the worst for cancelling out artemisinin.

These results argue that we need to understand more about the interactions between these antimalarial drugs, and that it’s quite possible that we’ve been impairing malaria therapy out in the field by thinking that we understood enough already (!) We need to at least pick the least antagonistic combinations possible, and with an eye to parasite genetics whenever that’s feasible. Malaria has been an extremely wily enemy, and that hasn’t changed one bit.

Shades of the same.

Apr. 16th, 2026 08:54 pm
hannah: (Jack Aubrey - katie8787)
[personal profile] hannah
It got sticky enough today to warrant the tower fan for cooling purposes. It's not even May. The day wasn't helped by the very little sleep I got last night, so between the fallout nausea and the heat, very little got done.

But, on the plus side, the home transcription gig's been given the go-ahead to more or less be a temporary full-time job, so I may take that as the smallest possible win.

movie: Project Hail Mary

Apr. 16th, 2026 07:50 pm
mellowtigger: (Saturn vortex)
[personal profile] mellowtigger

I said last year that I wouldn't go see Project Hail Mary in the theater, even with a mask.

Unfortunately, I lied.

I did go see it with a mask today. It took much of the day. I walked out the front door about 1:35pm and walked back in at 6:45pm. It's a long bus ride to that Roseville theater, but at least there's a single route that goes directly there from near my house. Life without a car just doesn't have the convenience of life with a car, but that's perfectly fine. Maybe the world would be better off if humans couldn't indulge their whims so easily, requiring actual effort to do things, making choices about how to spend precious hours of their lives.

I was very right, at least, about this movie being a great influence for encouraging humans to being open to new experiences. I've been following the subreddit for the story, and it was people waxing poetic about the impact of the movie that made me decide to splurge and go see it on the big Imax screen while it's still here, after most of the crowds had already attended. It is indeed a powerful film for that effect.

Having read the story, however, I was still disappointed about so very much storytelling left out of the film. I've heard that there is footage for more than 4 hours of film, and like others I hope that we'll someday soon get the director's cut that includes everything. Some people are asking for that extended version to be released in theaters too. I'd be happy to watch this movie with an intermission. It was several decades ago that I saw "Gone With The Wind" at a theater in west Texas, with my mother and another relative. I don't even know if another movie has been released since then that included a break to allow people to move around and visit the restroom. I would gladly, though, watch a 4-hour version of Project Hail Mary.

For people who are interested in it beyond the movie, more than a few people have said that the audio book is an excellent experience, something in between the movie and the text book.

L&O season 3: Episode 2

Apr. 16th, 2026 08:14 pm
sabotabby: two lisa frank style kittens with a zizek quote (trash can of ideology)
[personal profile] sabotabby
This one's about crypto, which admittedly makes my eyes glaze over even though it's really important. It's just that I know enough about economics to know that all money is fake, but crypto is especially fake, and really has all the downsides of money without the advantages of money. Also everyone involved is an asshole, much more so than is depicted in this episode. It's based largely on Andean Medjedovic (and good job casting someone who looks a great deal like him) and the many attempts to find the real Satoshi Nakamoto.

Warning that this episode discusses autism in ways that are fucked up and shitty.

WAGMI )

(no subject)

Apr. 16th, 2026 07:59 pm
skygiants: Mary Lennox from the Secret Garden opening the garden door (garden)
[personal profile] skygiants
As I mentioned on my last Pern post, Dragonsdawn was always the most memorable Pern book for me -- for my sins, and sins indeed they are. That said, having reread it, I can understand exactly why I found this so compelling. This was the book that sold me on the fantasy of planetary exploration and colonization as a delightful and desirable experience! You could go to a beautiful new world and discover baby dragons and have random islands named after you! You could build a new Utopian society! Is Anne McCaffrey's vision of a Utopian society uncomfortably libertarian? Sure, but I was ten, I didn't know what libertarians were, I just understood that Sorka was having a very cool time as a happily free-range child exploring the Pernese landscape. I don't think it was until I read Mary Roach's Packing for Mars as an adult that I fully came to terms with the fact that going to space actually sounded like a deeply unpleasant time, logistically speaking, and let the faint wisps of the Dragonsdawn dream of First Feet Down on a beautiful new planet that's functionally just like Earth with bonus charming telepathic fauna dissipate into the ether.

I mean, it is sort of an open question though: early Pernese culture, potential paradise or libertarian cult? I do think McCaffrey knows that the colonist's blissful vision of If Everyone Has Enough Land For Themselves We Can All Just Be Chill And Not Actually Bother Society-Building is doomed to some degree of failure on account of bad actors, even before it's interrupted by Thread. She could have just made it a book about dealing with Thread and developing dragons about it, and it would probably be a better book if she did, but she's so grimly determined to put some bad actors in just to demonstrate she knows they exist. This at least is my theory of how we got Evil Sexy Avril Bitra, perpetrator of history's most inexplicable heist. "If I go on this fifty-year mission, I can steal some diamonds, steal an escape pod, launch myself back out into space, and get picked up back in a society that's moved on a hundred years from the one I left! Probably they'll still want diamonds and I'll re-adapt just fine!"

So, I can understand, I guess, why Avril Bitra. I don't understand and don't think I will ever understand why Avril Bitra's narrative foil is a would-be tradwife who nonconsensually aphrodisiaced her way into marriage with a man who has never shown any romantic interest in anything except cave systems and then spent the next eight years making a shocked Pikachu face about the fact that he continued to not be all that into her. Why is Sallah Telgar's plot in this book? What is it doing here? Why is Avril Bitra evilly torturing Sallah on the spaceship given so much page space and weird psychosexual intensity when literally nothing about this plot actually impacts the colony's situation IN ANY ACTUAL WAY? I thought a reread would leave me less confused about all this than I was when I was ten and in fact I think it did the opposite. Anne, please ... you must have had some thoughts about this, thematically, structurally ... I'm coming to you, hat in hand, asking for answers.

I do think it's very funny that in the years between 1968 and 1989 Anne McCaffrey decided that it was a bit embarrassing that she'd built biological differences into her dragons such that the queens don't breathe fire, and decided to blame it on the fact that the dragons were genetically designed by an Extremely Traditional Chinese Grandma instead. Is it also racist? Yes, extremely. But if we start talking about all the unfortunate well-meaning racism in Dragonsdawn we'll be here all day and I don't have that much day left. Racism aside I did find myself unexpectedly somewhat moved by the subplot I did not remember at all in which Kenjo Fusaiyuki, a guy who has made a Profound Mistake in moving to an isolated colony planet that's dedicated itself to being low-tech and abandoning spaceflight, desperately hoards fuel for as long as possible to put off the time when he will have to at last give up for good and all the thing he loves most and is best at in all the world.

And you know who could've saved Kenjo Fusaiyuki's life, if she had stopped to help the two guys Avril Bitra clonked on the head instead of uselessly pursuing her into space? YES, IT'S ANOTHER SALLAH TELGAR CRIME. Sallah Telgar, you have so much to answer for.

Wednesday What I'm...

Apr. 16th, 2026 08:18 pm
reeby10: the lower half of a person laying on grass and reading with the words 'time to escape' and a ripped looking border (reading)
[personal profile] reeby10
Reading
  • I finished Mister Monday by Garth Nix (Keys to the Kingdom #1). Fun book! The coal mines part was really the only part of this series I remembered going in to it lol
  • I started reading Grim Tuesday by Garth Nix (Keys to the Kingdom #2). Enjoying it so far.
  • Ficwise, I've been reading VegasPete. Currently I'm on an HP AU called More Than He Bargained For by kerrikins and raelle that's pretty good so far. And very long, which is nice!
Watching
  • The roommate and I watched an episode of Running Man Thailand. This one was scifi and aliens themed and oh my god, the costumes! Loved Tay as one of the Planet of the Apes apes and TeeTee as a Vulcan especially.
  • The roommate and I finished watching Caged Again. It was something. I didn't really like it, not for any real reason in particular other than that I found the characters a bit boring and I just didn't feel interested in what was happening.
  • The roommate and I started rewatching We Are. One of my top five Thai BLs and I'm having a blast revisitng it :)
  • The roommate, best friend, and I watched the latest episode of Duang With You. Finally meet the family time! Very cute :)
  • The roommate, best friend, and I watched the latest episode of Only Friends: Dream On. The embezzlement storyline with Pete is very odd and I hope we actually find out more about why the fuck he did that. The cowboy costumes for the party were very funny as well.
  • The roommate, best friend, and I watched the Love Upon a Time. Starting to get interesting with Nakhun remembering things from Klao's life! And everyone being super sus about it of course.
Listening
  • Was feeling the pop punk this past week and found a playlist to listen to. Really made me feel like I was back in hs lol
  • Have still been listening to a lot of t-pop. Particularly, this past week was a big holiday in Thailand (Songkran), and there were a ton of musical performances all week that I've been watching.
Writing
  • Wrote some more on the omegaverse ArmTae fic. I think I'm starting to see the finish line in view? Other than that I'm thinking about adding another scene. Of course.
Learning
  • Thai: Did some review of the symbols that I know so far. It's hard, but I actually really enjoy the flow of writing them. Also started watching some LYKN lyrics videos to try to help with listening/pronunciation. And also just so I can maybe sing along better when I see them in August!
  • WM: Did some article readings.

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