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ooh belated happy birthday to wpadmirer !!! 🎈🎂🥳🎈 hope you were feted as you deserve!

sorry I'm late, I was at No Kings and baby sitting and stuff.

Note to self: NO MORE HISTORICAL AUs. EVER!

but it's done! coming in at 25,430wds and just 3.5 hours past the deadline, it's my July Rough Trade project for the Transcendence challenge:

Title: Lighter Than A Feather
Fandom: SGA, The Sentinel
Pairing: McShep
Rating: R
Tags: Magical AU, Paranormal, Action Adventure, Mystery, Historical AU, Crossover, Fusion
Character: Rodney McKay, John Sheppard, Teyla Emmagan, Ronon Dex, Teer, Richard Woolsey, Elizabeth Weir, Ladon Radim, Dahlia Radim, and a whole bunch of surprise guests!
Warnings for Character Bashing (Ladon Radim, Elizabeth Weir)
Summary: Rodney McKay thought he was the best founder in Lanta; heck, all of Merka. But then he encountered the artisans at T&J's Linens, who make a pillow so incredible, so almost magical, people say it's like laying your head on an airy cloud. If only Rodney could discover their secret! It fully justifies him following John Sheppard around…

Warning: this is a rough trade product, which means it's hot off my kbd, no edits, no beta. This is what my writing looks like without refinement. If you want to wait until it's been spanked into shape, then please do! It will be posted to AO3 in about a month.

 My WIP for Rough Trade's Transcendence Challenge:

note to self: do not purchase children's bandaids. children's bandaids were invented by an unlicensed sadist. sure, they're cute. but there's a reason kids hate having them removed, and that is: they don't come off! not without taking your skin with them.

boycott children's bandaids. even if they have SpongeBob on them.

I just had an interesting question from a reader, who asked what actor or famous male I was thinking of when I was visualizing my OC. I don't! I mean, I do visualize people, but they are people of my own invention (I believe). I don't think they are real people, just features I come up with.

How about any writers out there? Do you choose actors or people you know? Or do you make up your OCs in your mind palace?

people, I have heard many things about growing old: that it sucks, that it's not for the weak, that it sneaks up on you, but never have I heard it turns you English.

and yet, here am I: a lifelong coffee drinker and lover of the brew, yet recently I've started to crave...tea?

I know! yet slowly but surely, I more often reach for a tea bag than my trusty beans. it's a pure mystery!

so, having long since found my favorite coffee, I'm now on the hunt for the perfect decaf tea.

hit me with it, my fine tea friends!


GIF by happycabbage

You guyssssss I felt a profound sense of satisfaction for completing the Three Weeks challenge and very much enjoyed my long weekend after an exasperating work week only to discover I had one post left! Oh noes!

Fortunately, runpunkrun and mific gave me something to post about! They did an awesome mcshep collab while I was away and what a treat! So awesome to have terrific art and podfic and story as one. Like the fandom days of old *sobs in old-timey*

It was a marvelous distraction from my usual hobby of staring in blank horror at the news. Speaking of which...

I beg everyone to please contact your senators about the Big PoS Bill! For too many reasons, but also because I just found out it includes sneaky provisions that completely undermine the judiciary, including *retroactively* making previous rulings and court orders unenforceable! Such as, oh, orders to return US Citizens and illegally deported immigrants from overseas gulags. The administration is angry at the lower courts for ruling against them, so they are trying to use Congress to render the judiciary impotent. See Section 70302 of One Big Beautiful Bill Act 119th Congress (2025-2026). Not to mention, of course, the bill raises taxes on the poorest, adds trillions to the deficit, drops the tax on gun silencers (what?), chops SNAP, medicare, and medicaid, and lines the pockets of the already wealthy with more and more tax cuts. I want to puke.

If you live the US, please CONTACT YOUR SENATORS and tell them you are so very against this Big Ugly Bill for more reasons than can be counted. Tell them to kill it or they will smell your vengeance come midterms.

Thanks, my friends.

So what is absolutely stunning to me but shouldn't be, is we have regressed! Regressed but it's packaged as progress, and I went along with it every step of the way like a little lamb. But no more! I'm tired of this commercialism crappy, and when I say this is absolutely the last iteration of laundry detergent I will buy, I mean it!

It's not my fault, I swear, I went from mom buying the detergent at home, to college, where I followed in her footsteps. She swore by Tide, possibly on the advice of one of her new American friends.

First this Tide:


A white powder with cleaning surfactants, sodium carbonate and sodium silicate to soften the water, also possibly bleach and enzymes to break down food stains, and suds reducers and brighteners and fragrances and such.

Then came the innovative! Liquid in jugs! Wow! Just an excuse to charge more, I think. What was wrong with the powder? Oh, because then you could more successfully rub it in your stains beforehand I guess. I dunno. But jugs meant no more cardboard, just plastic, plastic, plastic:



Then, of course, they came out with pods of the liquid. But the pods were even more ridiculous, because some of them came in plastic jugs as well! And! And, it turns out the pods don't melt entirely: they introduce microplastics into the water system as well as the plastic containers getting tossed in the landfill. Oh, joy. (I skipped the pod step. Maybe because some people were reported to have eaten them. I feared becoming a tide zombie.)

So people tried to solve the pod problem by coming up with sheets! And we were so eager to embrace strips/sheets because they came in cardboard sleeves (I am an eco-warrior!) and weighed absolutely nothing on the walk down to the laundry room, we didn't discover until later that the strips themselves were bonded together with microplastics. (*They often contain polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), a plastic-based polymer, which some manufacturers claim is biodegradable, but its biodegradability is questionable and not well-studied.) Oh, woe!

So, Self, does anyone make, I dunno, powdered detergent that comes in a box? Why, yes! Wouldn't you know. So many different ones. I found one called Meliora that's low-sudsing and unscented and literally takes a tablespoon to clean a giant double-load of clothes and my clothes smell *fantastic*. One tablespoon. Jeez, I mean. It comes in a cardboard tin that you can refill from a cardboard box and I will never, ever step away from powdered plain old surfactant again.

My long laundry journey is done.

(And wouldn't you know it, and this just kills me, but Tide still makes):

You guys you guyyyyyyys look what popped up on my notifs! the wait is finally over!!!



I'm 15 minutes in and I'm just....

( tiny spoiler )

so rewatching Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, what a touching moment when Holga dies heroically having saved their world from the scourge of the creepy tattooification of the Thay -- me, I'm only for consensual tattooing -- but when Edgin is having his big moment! of realizing he could, I dunno, gee, bring his best goddamn friend in the whole wide world back to life, why is the only motivation he sees in his mind's eye touching scenes of Holga being motherly toward Kira?

Is that the only reason Holga deserves to live? Because she's so mommy to his kid? I mean, I get it, his journey is realizing he needs to be less selfish -- not choosing to bring his wife back, but rather the true mother of his daughter, blah blah blah, but wow, Holga is so much more than that, and has BEEN so much more than that throughout the film, so yeah. I hugely resented it on her behalf, because his thoughts are once again selfish -- I bring you back to life bec you are surrogate mother to my child! not because you are a human being with her own destiny and I want to see you live it.

wow, I didn't realize how pissed I was.

Holga is so awesome tho.