bitter white skies

Out of the Auditary returns for another year! This is a fest for podficcing works that don't fit into the "standard" fiction format, such as meta, not!fic, epistolary and chatfic, video game codes entries, fake scientific articles, poetry, and many more! Rules and details are here on AO3; submission deadline is March 30th! If you'd like examples as to what was created for this fest in previous years, check out the parent collection.

If you want to promo the fest, RT this skeet on Bluesky, boost it on mastodon, reblog this tumblr post, or just copy & paste this code:

<a style="font-weight:bold" href="https://archiveofourown.org/collections/OutOfTheAuditary2025/profile"><img src="http://sylvaine.parakaproductions.com/outoftheauditary/ootabanner.png" alt="out of the auditary promo banner" /> Out of the Auditary</a>: a fest for podficcing works that don't fit into the "standard" fiction format, such as meta, not!fic, epistolary and chatfic, video game codes entries, fake scientific articles, poetry, and many more!

Title: Bracketed
Author: softestpunk
Fandom: The Sandman
Reader: sylvaine, kdheart, podfic_lover, robin_fai
Cover Artist: kdheart
Length: 0:05:05
Rating: G
Pairing: Calliope/Dream of the Endless/Hob Gadling
Content: Fluff, Cuddling & Snuggling
Summary: They have a ritual, now. Hob knows, always knows ahead of time, when Dream will have need of it. It isn’t clear how he knows—the world news, listening carefully to the things Dream says, some extra sense of things that warns of turbulence in the mind of the Lord of Dreams, but he knows. There is magic in the knowing, and Dream does not wish to dispel it.

Dream comes to his lovers for comfort when the world weighs too heavy. They hold him up.

Notes: Recorded at Europodfriends 2023 during our traditional PodFarr! :D Also one for the accidental EPF 23 theme of "assigned people non-speaking roles". xD

This is something of a companion piece to Coveted.

Also on AO3, on tumblr, on on the Audiofic Archive and on Archive.org.

Download links (left-click to stream, right-click to save):
mp3 (4.2 MB) | m4b (3.1 MB)

Or you can listen to it right here:

acoup_feed
acoup_feed
acoup_feed

*I am aware the answer is "probably not" and "we're lucky to have even one corner of the internet that still does RSS". But it still amused me!

Also, I'm fascinated by how few feeds can be described as even remotely "popular" here. XKCD has over 2,000 subscribers, but the next most popular one is in the hundreds, and by the time we're out of the top 20 we're already well into "20ish subscribers". It's so neat to see!

I desperately need to clear out my subscriptions here so I can maybe actually face my reading page again and interact with people occasionally. :creys:

----

Anyone want a letter/card from me? Not the usual kind, though, and not the semi-regular winter holiday ones, either! You play a cryptid with an ailment and I play your apothecary. So a bit more of a roleplaying game!

Sounds fun? Here's how it works! You will need a deck of playing cards (the kind that starts at 2 rather than 7) - if you don't have a physical one, the card shuffler from random.org works just as well - and separate out the hearts and spades. Draw a heart for your cryptid race and a spade for your ailment! I'll copy out the list of each here:

♡ HEARTS: Preternatural Patients ♡
A: Buru | A ~3′ tall bipedal lizard with a penchant for Hawai’ian shirts
2: Mothman | six-foot wingspan, bulbous red eyes, humanoid arms
3: Dobhar-chú | otter-dog-fish, often seen in pairs
4: Jackalope | jackrabbit with antelope horns and love of line dancing
5: Ahool | noisy primate with enormous, bat-like wings
6: Ozark Howler | feline with glowing eyes and twisted horns
7: Sasquatch | upright, ape-like, introverted
8: Emela-Ntouka | heavy-tailed, semi-aquatic, horned quadruped
9: Tatzelwurm | serpentine with a cat-like face and two short forearms
10: Bunyip | dog-headed with tusks, clawed flippers, and a duck-like bill
J: Nightcrawler | armless, faceless biped, like a great ambulatory clothespin
Q: Jersey Devil | kangaroo body, horse head, bat wings, claws, horns
K: Olgoi-khorkhoi | enormous worm that secretes poison

♠ SPADES: Mystic Ailments ♠
A: Extreme sensitivity to light and the color green
2: Spontaneous misinterpretation of gravity
3: Mood affects weather conditions in five-mile radius
4: Experiences time at wildly varied rates
5: Regurgitation of random objects at inconvenient moments
6: Own shadow gains partial solidity and interferes with daily life
7: Everything they touch turns into turnips
8: Processes all sound as off-key narrative singing
9: Perpetual emission of rancid stench intolerable to loved ones
10: Footprints fill with toxic spores
J: Hair grows at accelerated rate and gains autonomous motion
Q: Uncontrolled rearrangement of furniture/belongings in their sleep
K: Fixation on pursuing a literature degree

Once you know your race and ailment, you can optionally tell me:

• How long have you been experiencing symptoms?
• How have you been coping?
• What unrelated yet charming anecdote do you share with me?

In return, I will send you a letter/postcard with the cure and how to take it!

If you want to join in this game, either give me the above info along with your address in the comments (which are screened), or send me snail mail instead (if you need access to that post, lmk) (and don't forget to give me a return address here too! And your username so I can place you :P).

15) A guilty pleasure

I don't believe in guilty pleasures, bah. But for "things for some reason often considered a guilty pleasure", if anyone has recs for femslash monsterfucking/exophilia, I am always interested in that! ::eyes::

16) A fandom where I have so many femslash ships

Hmmm. I think Dragon Age: Inqisition might be the best fit for this question!

17) A femslash pairing I like on principle without even being in the fandom

Xena/Gabrielle!

18) A character I headcanon as lesbian/wlw without having big ships with her

I don't generally have firm headcanons about characters.

19) Rec day! Canon or fics, as long as it's femslash! Or even shippable!

Because I'm at work *guilty face*, let's just stick with one:

Boots and Card Games (2,693 words) by Misfit_McCoward
Fandom: Naruto/Yu-Gi-Oh!
Rating: T
Relationships: Kujaku Mai | Mai Valentine/Yamanaka Ino
Additional Tags: Attempted Seduction, Crack Treated Seriously, Gambling, very little knowledge of yugioh is required to enjoy this fic
Summary: For the prompt: "a crossover romance but it's mai and ino."

“You’re a dealer here, right?” Ino asks after she’s accepted her drink. An entire wedge of watermelon adorns the side of the glass. Amazing.

“I recognize you from my table,” Mai says. Then she leans in conspiratorially, so close that whisps of her curly hair tickle Ino’s upper arms. “I didn’t even report your friend for counting cards.”

I'm a big fan of throwing characters from two different franchises together and seeing how they work. In this case? They work extremely well, and I almost wish there was more, except they clearly work best like this - as a one-time meeting of likeminded individuals who are awesome and sexy and smarter and better than the men around them and enjoy having fun together. :D

20) Do you like your femslash homophobia-free?

Yup. I can deal with homophobia being a thing, depending on how much of a main point of conflict it is, but in general I'm in fiction for escapism, so.

21) Thoughts about lesbian tragedy and bad endings?

Unhappy endings generally aren't for me! But they work for other people, and I understand the historical reasons for lesbian tragedy being a thing. So long as I know what I'm getting into in advance, it's all good.

- only a day belatedly, too! ;)

8) Some femslash poly ships? What are your opinions about f/f/m poly?

I mean, look, if there is fic of it, I ship it, y'know? I'm not particularly married to pairings anymore these days (and I never was particularly monoshippy in the first place, anyway). If a fic can sell me on a dynamic, I'm all for it! (And I firmly believe that the right author and the right fic can make me believe in any pairing.) And art is easy to appreciate anyway, no matter the pairing, just because it's a much shorter time investment. That said, I... can't think of any outright? I've even looked at my AO3 bookmarks (and pinboard bookmarks!) and found nothing. :|

My opinions on F/F/M: I've only ever seen it in harem fics written very, very obviously by straight men, so in that form? Meh. As a concept in itself? Neutral, just like any other pairing configuration.

Ultimately the issue is this: I don't go out explicitly seeking out femslash-heavy fandoms, which by nature of fandom, society, and media, means the characters skew heavily male, whiiiiich means if it's a femslash pairing, it'll be either F/F or not feel quite right to me because the characterization doesn't work for me/the fic is too short for me to buy why these three characters are into each other. And if it's a poly fic, 90% of the time it's F/M/M, because shippers like their slash but increasingly they also like their canon F/M pairings.

9) Do you feel like shipping femslash is different from shipping slash, het or other? How?

Heh. Well, I think it's harder to find. Slash clearly has its home on AO3. Places like FFnet and Wattpad are very het-friendly. Best as I can tell, there's no big mainstream fic archive that has ended up being femslash-heavy. And sometimes people seem to be convinced that femslash shippers are only doing it for brownie points or because they feel morally superior, which is very silly and pretty tiring. And - possibly as a result of the relative dearth of femslash fics - I find that it's a lot harder to find the full breadth of genres that I would find for other ship types. Rarely is a femslash pairing the background relationship to an epic time-travel adventure fic the way slash and het ships are allowed to be! And I'm not getting into the whole sexism complex-of-reasons behind that because that's gonna end up entirely too depressing!

10) Favourites tropes for femslash ships?

Iunno man I just want to give a fuck about the characters and feel like they're into each other as well. Although I am a sucker for villains getting away with it.

11) Fluff, humor, angst, or smut?

Ennnnh not angst. Other than that it super depends on the author.

12) Are there some m/m or m/f ships that you love genderswapped as f/f?

I mean, again - all of them! There's few ships that can't be improved by making them F/F. ;) That said, I have a particular liking for rule 63!ing awful villain ships, because that's just not a dynamic easy to find in canon female characters. See: Kakuzu/Hidan, Tesla/Nnoitra, Breakdown/Knock Out.

(Also gimme gimme gimme those "canon dude discovers they're actually a trans woman while in their canon F/M relationship, navigating THAT fucking difficulty together)

13) Did you already write original femslash? If so, what was it about? If not, what would it be about if you did? If you would never, why?

*squints* I... can't remember. Possibly? I feel like most of my writing ends up accidentally ace as hell and nonbinary as hell. I don't know what it would be about! If I had an idea, I'd be writing it, wouldn't I? (I wouldn't because writing is hard and takes too long but shush.) If I never end up writing original femslash, it'll be because writing just isn't my main hobby, not even in my top 5.

Oh! I've totally done art of original F/F though.

14) Favorite femslash ship of all times

I was gonna be like *big shrug* about this like I've been about basically all of the questions, but then I remembered that SakuIno exists! So, yes, favourite femslash pairing is Sakura Haruno/Ino Yamanaka from Naruto. Because they're fantastic fucking disasters and it's basically canon anyway, the creators just don't know it.

(I'm sure there's other pairings I love, but "first one that comes to mind" is gonna be a pretty good contender for "favourite" anyway!)

A post from Sylvie? In 2022?! It's more likely than you think!

Sadly it is not the update I owe y'all (because boy, have things happened!), but I've been very slowly creeping back onto here, looking at my reading page every once in a while, even interacting with people! I missed this place, but For Reasons it's been very difficult for me to get back! Relatedly, I've been unsubscribing from people who I never interact with - lmk if I managed to hit the wrong button and accidentally unsubscribed to you! It isn't as easy to do as on tumblr, but still plenty easy on mobile. (That's another thing - the only time I'm on my computer anymore is to play games, and posting to DW on mobile is still very much not my favourite thing to do. Phones: excellent tools, but decidedly consumer-end rather than producer-end.) Anyway, Snowflake Challenge 14 is a picspam scavenger hunt, and if there's one thing I'm weak to it's those. So uh, you're getting that instead of an update! :D?

Look around your current space, whether digital or brick-n-mortar. Post a pic or description of:

( pics behind cut, I hope I got the sizing right but dear got it's been forever since I touched html this is frankly embarrassing )

Out of the Auditary returns for a third year! This is a fest for podficcing works that don't fit into the "standard" fiction format, such as meta, not!fic, epistolary and chatfic, video game codes entries, fake scientific articles, poetry, and many more! Rules and details are here on AO3; submission deadline is March 28th! If you'd like examples as to what was created for this fest in the previous year, check out the 2019 collection and the 2020 collection.

If you want to promo the fest, just copy & paste this code:

<a style="font-weight:bold" href="https://archiveofourown.org/collections/OutOfTheAuditary2021/profile"><img src="http://sylvaine.parakaproductions.com/outoftheauditary/ootabanner.png" alt="out of the auditary promo banner" /> Out of the Auditary</a>: a fest for podficcing works that don't fit into the "standard" fiction format, such as meta, not!fic, epistolary and chatfic, video game codes entries, fake scientific articles, poetry, and many more!

kat_lair asks "Favorite traditions or rituals? Could be festive traditions to mark significant dates (personal or national for example) or just small everyday rituals that are important and meaningful to you."

Wellll in terms of festive traditions my favourite was always Christmas. I don't particularly want to talk about Christmas right now, but as it turns out I've answered this question before!

Going to Catholic church at Easter is occasionally important to me? There's something very special about going into the completely dark church, lit only by the candles you're all carrying that were lit at the fire outside, and singing with no accompaniment from the organ, before Christ officially rises and the lights blaze on and the organ sets in grandly and we all burst into song. It's a very cool, effective ritual!

Generally speaking, I don't think of things I do regularly as rituals, more habits. I guess rituals don't have a big place in my life at the moment! I do stuff like "prepare all my clothes and my breakfast the evening before", but that's not ritual, that's practicality. *g* And "deal with all my phone notifications before going to bed" isn't ritual, it's somewhere between "symptom of mental illness" and "occasionally maladaptive coping mechanism".

I do like one thing that my family always did, though, and that's pause before meals. Just close your eyes, take a few slow breaths, enjoy the silence, and take the opportunity to center yourself before you start in on eating. I would like to be able to re-introduce that to my life, if I can do that without all the mental baggage attached to it. :P

cmcmck asks "Do you have a favourite poet?"

Initially I was going to say "no" - I generally find it difficult to connect to poetry. I do have a tag of them on tumblr of ones I enjoyed, and we had a CD pack of Classic Comic Verse from the BBC that I very much enjoyed and did not, in fact, mind listening to multiple times on long car rides. So I suppose generally I prefer to read prose - I am a very fast reader and don't generally enjoy being forced to slow down. :P - but I do enjoy humorous poetry! It feels like a very good format for humour. Jokes tend to be short, too, after all!

... that said, all of my favourite poets I can name are... not English? ^^;;

I have very fond memories of Julian Tuwim, a Polish poet who I remember mostly for his children's poetry. My favourite of his is Okulary (about Mr. Hilary, who has lost his glasses and turns the house upside down to find them) and Lokomotywa (about a locomotive! It's very onomatopoeic, gets stuck in your head. :D). I haven't been able to find English translations of either, but I am somewhat limited on my work computer. ^^;;

I remember greatly enjoying Josef Guggenmos' children's poetry (no English Wikipedia article on him! Shame), but I don't remember any of the poems enough to find them right now, either.

... although I did find this poem by Friedrich Nietsche that I fucking loved as a teen so there's that!

As for modern poets, I'm a huge fan of slam poetry! It's often great fun, and the performance aspect makes it way easier for me to get into it. My current favourite by far is Jan-Phillip Zymny, who doesn't have an English Wikipedia article either. There are sooooo many of his sketches that I love, but Nehmen Sie Awesome! (Take Awesome!) comes with English subtitles! \o/

The icon is absolutely a dig at the formatting of most of the websites I've linked to.