This week's prompt is:
dinner 🍖

Anyone can join, with a 50-word creative fiction vignette in the comments. Your vignette does not have to include the prompt term. Any (G or PG) definition of the word can be used.

So, you got my opinion on Heated Rivalry, but I gotta say, I will never not read fanfics structured like ongoing internet sagas.

Also, gotta love the one dude, BostonSportsBro69, who posts in both /r/relationship_advice and /r/hockey going around in /r/hockey saying "Uh, no, it's just normal sportsbro rival stuff, you're all reading way too much into this" when because he absolutely knows better. (I don't think he's supposed to be one of Ilya's teammates, just a fan.)

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( Links )

Last weekend, we stayed in a Landmark Trust property a mere half-hour journey to Bletchley Park. We were surprised by nice weather on the Saturday, so we made the trip. Below is an assortment of photos from the selection of buildings we managed to visit over the course of five hours. I don’t think we saw more than a third of it, so we’ll definitely take advantage of the year-long entry that the steep admission price gets you to see the rest.



The dingy basement has had a lick of paint and yet somehow doggedly retains its character.



Listening stations.



Keiki does some Morse code-breaking.



Humuhumu does some Enigma encoding.



A surprisingly dry and sunny day after all the rain we’ve been having.



Daffodils were not quite ready.



The Mansion seemed like it was a bit of all right.



Not so sure the Intelligence Factory needs this.





Humuhumu and I spent quite a while on this interactive exhibit, plotting the locations of various maritime assets and enemies.





Many of the personal testimonials in the exhibition mention how boring and repetitive some of the intelligence work was.



You can see why they resorted to putting frogs in the pneumatic tube system to liven up the day.

The Park is beautifully maintained and the interactive exhibits are well designed and engaging - I’d say from the age of about 10 on up - so well worth a visit. I restrained myself to one book in the gift shop (The Walls Have Ears by Helen Fry) but could easily have brought home a stack.

Day 5 of a cursed head cold.

Title: Out of the Shadows
Fandom: The Hobbit (2012-2014)
Author: rodo
Length: 2,398 words
Rating: 6+
Characters: Legolas & Tauriel
Disclaimer: Everything belongs to Warner Bros. et al.
Beta: starsprightly
A/N: written for Nicky_Gabriel during 2026’s candyheartsex

Summary: To Tauriel, Legolas was barely more than a stranger – until the day she stumbled into saving his life.



( “Have any of you seen Prince Legolas? The king is looking for him,” Tauriel’s captain asked. )

Was reading a fic and laughed out loud at it.

Am delighting myself writing Dollshops & Deathmages. I'm halfway done and happy with how it's shaping up.

Had an excellent peach kombucha to drink.

Have the house to myself for a glorious while, because my relatives are travelling.

Am enjoying a k-drama tremendously. Undercover Miss Hong. It's halfway aired, let's hope the rest of it is just as good. (You know those silly Hollywood action movies where there's a guy doing some kind of secret operation, and women who are in the narrative all have crushes on him, and he's too busy doing Important Stuff to notice? Imagine if it was the heroine doing stuff too Secret and Important to pay much mind to the men growing feelings for her, and you have Undercover Miss Hong. Trust k-drama to make something assuming *I* am watching the way other media industries make things assuming men are watching. And it features strong female friendships!)

Three out of the five things I have put down here are related to stories. 역시, whenever I'm happy, stories are usually at the heart of my happiness.

found via sweetmeow

Adults responsible for your care actively helped facilitate your early learning. (Reading at bedtime, playing educational games, going to child-friendly museums...)
our mom read to us (brother & me) there were no museums, child-friendly, or otherwise, near us. mom probably taught us basic math too, but i was young & that was a long time ago.

You had a library card.
yes. only because a children's library card was free if you lived in the school district the library was located in. otherwise we would not have had one.

( the rest here )

Sunday Word: Bricolage

bricolage [bree-kuh-lahzh, brik-uh-]

noun:
1 a construction made of whatever materials are at hand; something created from a variety of available things.
2 (in literature) a piece created from diverse resources.
3 (in art) a piece of makeshift handiwork.
4 the use of multiple, diverse research methods.


Definitely useful if you like upcycling.

Well, I've accomplished a few things at least. Got up early enough to do my knee exercises, eat breakfast, and get distilled water for the humidifier/Nosh Steam Oven, and veggies/fruit, paper towels, and other mildly essential groceries. When I was putting said groceries away, the kitchen light decided to burn out. I notified the super - that it needs to be replaced (I have light bulbs). And transferred the small lamp that I have in the living room to the kitchen. It fits. So it will work for the interim. (Oh to have a ladder and a handy person to fix it - because I can't do it without killing myself. Tempting. But no. Mother would miss me. And knowing me - I wouldn't die, I'd just critically injure myself.)

Finished my taxes (although it cost me more to do them this year than my actual refund, also I have to pay NY State, damn it). ( tax hell )

It was nice weather today - in the upper thirties and forties, high about 45 degrees F (which is practically balmy considering the temps we've been having in NYC this winter). And the grocery store - was surprisingly sparse, not as many customers as expected, considering a big storm is moving in. (People are procrastinators - so they all probably came late in the day or tomorrow.)

I'm trying not to fret too much about the upcoming hellish winter storm. Breaking Bad warned me, but it didn't register and I didn't get it - I was overwhelmed with work this week - being blind sighted by C leaving. (C tracks everything for us and is my liaison with the project team, also one of the few people I can talk to.) Her last day was Friday. So, I was kind of discombobulated, and recovering from a head cold, so didn't pick up on the fact that a huge winter storm was coming on Sunday night. Figured it out when I got home - and saw the weather report. We're supposed to have blizzard conditions between 1 am and 10 am on Monday. I don't know if I can get to work in that? I walk and take the subways, which are above and below ground?
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I really wish the storm hit Friday night into Saturday instead, like last time. When I actually did take Monday off.

Dinner was "shrimp, brussel sprouts, and aspergus in the air fryer" - seasoned with red pepper, teriaki, fauk garlic salt (this is amazing on shrimp and veggies), and Mrs. Dash. (Which I need to get more of at some point.)

Also watched both Destiny and Harm's Way of Angel S5 rewatch. Picked up on the following:

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Question a Day - February Meme:

18. What is your favourite shellfish dish (if you have one)?

Lobster, preferably with melted butter, and lemon.

19. Have you ever worn false eyelashes or had eyelash extensions?

No. Or not that I recall? I might have - I have a vague memory of trying to do that - and it not working, and being a mess. Makeup and me are kind of unmixy things - particularly eye-makeup. I can do foundation but that's it.

20. Are you a fan of mayonnaise in a sandwich (either egg-based or vegan)?

No.

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21. When was the last time you heard music played live (at a concert, in a musical)?

The Broadway musical SMASH this past summer.

I'm not really a live concert person, I'm a live theater person. I like sitting in a seat and watching folks dance, sing, act, and tell a story on stage.

Today we went to the Crimson Market and made a few other stops.

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If Mexican Gothic left you craving more South American fantasy horror, Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez of Argentina (translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell) has you covered. This is a family epic intertwined with the dark machinations of a macabre cult and its impact. It's also a splendid allegory for the evils of colonialism and generational trauma. This book was #15 from the "Women in Translation" rec list.

The book begins with Juan, a powerful but ill man who acts as a "medium" for the cult to commune with its dark god. Juan, struggling with the health of his defective heart, the wear-and-tear of years as the medium, and the grief and rage of his wife's recent death (he suspects, at the orders of the cult he serves) is desperate to keep his son Gaspar from stepping into his shoes, as the cult wants. Juan's opening segment of the book is about his efforts to protect Gaspar.

From there, the book branches off into other perspectives which give background to both the cult and the family. This is a great way of giving us a holistic and generational view of the cult, but it does drag occasionally. Gaspar's sections--in his childhood and then later in his teens/young adulthood--together make up the majority of the book, and while enjoyable, do amble off into great detail about his and his friends' day-to-day lives, such that I did wonder sometimes when we were getting back to the plot. I don't like to cite pacing issues, because I think that gets thrown around a lot whenever someone didn't vibe with a book, but the drawn-out length of these quotidian sections doesn't fit well with how quickly the climax of the book passes and is wrapped up. I would have liked to have spent less time with Gaspar at soccer games and more on his plans for addressing the cult.

However, on the whole, the book is a fun, if very dark read. It also serves well as a critique of Argentina's moneyed class and of colonialism in general, and how money sticks with money even across borders. Here, Argentina's wealthy have more in common with English money than with the Argentine lower classes (and that's how they want it). The cult, populated at its upper echelons by the privileged, is an almost literal blight on the land, willing to sacrifice an endless amount of blood, local and otherwise, to beg power off a hungry and unknown supernatural entity.

It brutalizes its mediums, which it often plucks from poverty to wring for power and then discard. Juan was adopted away from his own poor family at six, under the insistence his parents would not be able to pay for the medical care he needed, and he is the least-abused of the cult's line of mediums. As soon as the cult sets their eye on his son, Juan must begin scheming how to keep Gaspar away from them.

Although he acts out of love of his son, Juan is also a deeply flawed person. He is secretive, moody, lies constantly (there is actual gaslighting here) and doesn't hesitate to knock Gaspar around to make him obey. The more he deteriorates--a common problem with all cult mediums--the less human he becomes. Part of this is his work, but much of it is also attributable to years of being used by the cult for its ends and the accumulated emotional trauma. This, of course, is then inflicted on Gaspar through his father's tempers and secrets.

Similarly flawed are the other members of the immediate family. Juan's wife Rosario, despite a better nature than her parents, still supports this cult and is eager for Gaspar to follow in his father's footsteps as a cult medium, in part for the prestige it will bring her as his mother. Gaspar, although far more empathetic and gentle than either of his parents, eventually grows up with his father's temper. Watching him grow from a sweet-natured little boy into the troubled young adult he becomes after years of his father's abuse and neglect is painful, but realistic.

The book is also unexpectedly queer. It's not often a book surprises me with its queerness, because that's usually what landed it on my radar in the first place, but this one did. Juan and Rosario are both bisexual and later in the book we spend some active time in Argentina's queer scene, including during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. 

The translation was great! It read very naturally, even the dialogue, and it never felt stilted or awkward in its phrasing.

An ambitious novel that for the most part, pulls off what it's trying to do. As mentioned, I wish the ending had gotten more room to breathe, and I would not have minded this coming at the cost of some of the middle bits of navel-gazing, but I still felt the story was satisfying. 

candyheartsex had creator reveals and this is what I wrote. :)

Title: i don't want anybody (but you)
Fandom: 9-1-1 (TV)
Pairing/Characters: Buck/Eddie
Rating: Teen
Word Count: 1821
Summary: The real reason Eddie doesn't date.

Title: not an ending (just a new beginning)
Fandom: 9-1-1 (TV)
Pairing/Characters: Buck/Eddie, Christopher
Rating: Teen
Word Count: 1565
Summary: When Buck watches Abby leave, he doesn't expect to immediately run into the two people who will be his future.

Scientists just mapped mysterious earthquakes deep inside Earth

Scientists at Stanford have unveiled the first-ever global map of rare earthquakes that rumble deep within Earth’s mantle rather than its crust. Long debated and notoriously difficult to confirm, these elusive quakes turn out to cluster in regions like the Himalayas and near the Bering Strait. By developing a breakthrough method that distinguishes mantle quakes using subtle differences in seismic waves, researchers identified hundreds of these hidden tremors worldwide.

The Canadian federal government should do for the Heritage Foundation what they did for the Proud Boys: designate them as a terrorist organization.

(Noting that I have been privately and rightly warned that this might backfire given the setting of precedent, depending on who forms government over the years and decades to come.)

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Title: Appleading
Author:kat_lair
Fandom: Wheel of Time (technically just the books but it's not really contradicting anything re the show either)
Pairing: Liandrin Guirale & Moghedien, Liandrin Guirale/Moghedien
Tags: Ficlet, Control, Power Dynamics, Choking, Torture 
Rating: M
Word count: 632

Summary: In an old townhouse in Amador, Liandrin begs with eloquence she didn’t even know she possessed. It’s a wonder what fear can do, to loosen tongues and inhibitions.

Author notes: Response to merryfortune's prompt of You're appealing to emotions that I simply do not have (from 'It’s Hard to Say ”I Do”, When I Don’t') over at likealighthouse's Fall Out Boy Femslash Febrary Ficathon. Takes place during Book Five when Moghedien catches the Black Ajah in Amador. This is unbetaed so if you spot a typo/mistake, please do let me know. Except for the title which is me mangling the English language on purpose. For my amusement.

Appleading on AO3

( Appleading )

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When did you last…

1. Scrounge for change (couch, ashtray, etc.) to make a purchase?
   
   I honestly can't remember. So many places are cashless now that I often don't carry any. It must have been pre-Covid.
   
   
2. Visit a dentist?
   
   Five months ago. My next clean is in March.
   
   
3. Make a needed change to your life?
   
   The most significant recent change was changing to a gym I actually want to use, at the start of the year. I really needed that. I feel so much healthier.
   
   
4. Decide on a complete menu well in advance of the evening meal?
   
   Most nights, tonight included. We have to plan because of the kids. Most days we eat breakfast and supper at home as a family because we have the luxury of schedules that allow us to do so.
   
   
5. Spend part of the day (other than daily hygiene) totally/mostly naked?
   
   No idea. I hardly ever do this. It's flippin’ cold here most of the time. For those who say the UK temperatures are mild, okay, maybe to you, but I spent most of my life in the tropics before I moved here and I wasn't wandering around naked there either.