Sunday, February 22nd, 2026 01:23 pm
Today is cloudy and cold.

I fed the birds.  I've seen a large flock of sparrows plus one female and two male cardinals separately.

I put out water for the birds.












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Sunday, February 22nd, 2026 08:14 pm

Week 7

is started now. Good luck, everyone!

Under the cut, you find the weekly playlist. To check out what prompts/minimum/points are waiting for you this week, please visit the Board.

If you can't find your name on this list, you might be moved to the Hiatus List.
This is not a punishment, but it makes the playlist clearer for everyone. You are always welcome to jump back into the game. Use three tokens to post two of your missed prompts.

In case you have missed a week or you don't like your prompts, remember your Joker Card. Every Joker Card comes with 15 tokens.
Use three tokens, and you can create two extra works for two missed prompts.
Use two tokens to roll the dice again.
Use five tokens to move to any square of your choice (exception: go!, chance, jail)

To re-visit the rules go here.

Weekly Playlist )

There is a chance for even more points for those who did sign up for the Team Challenge.

Post all your finished works at [community profile] fandom_empire_workplace until Sunday, March 1, 18.00 UTC, but I will allow belated works until I've made the closing post. Countdown here.
Sunday, February 22nd, 2026 03:10 pm
Reading: Last week I finished Stephanie Burgis' Wooing the Witch Queen (fun!) and read Heated Rivalry. I opted to just skip straight to the actual HR novel rather than first reading the Scott/Kip novel, which worked out fine, since I also had that context from the show. I enjoyed it a fair bit, but now I'm in the awkward position of wanting to see the next chunk for Shane and Ilya but no more urgently than after I finished watching season 1 of the show. The choices now are a) read the entire series (presumably doubling back to actually read book 1), b) skip ahead and read The Long Game, or c) hold off entirely and wait for season 2 of the show.

I also read a few more volumes each of Hikaru no Go and The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, but I'm still in rereading territory with both. (I think I've already read up to vol. 12 of Kurosagi, but for Hikaru, I think the odds are against me really realizing when I've hit new territory until I go to enter a volume in Goodreads and find it's not already on my Read list there.)

Watching: [personal profile] scruloose and I are caught up on both The Pitt and Frieren, and we finished Midnight Mass last weekend (a very solid, intense ending).

With my crunch time at work starting, it's not an ideal time for us to start a show that's a significant time commitment or that's going to leave me desperate to see a next episode when work is eating most or all of my evenings. It's possible this will result in me just showing [personal profile] scruloose Heated Rivalry, since it's apparently our key cultural export of the decade and all. *g* Only six episodes and I don't have to worry about being impatient to see what happens next or about being spoiled.

(I still don't feel actively fannish about HR at all, but am enjoying being adjacent to it and seeing all the fannish excitement and meta and such. I have saved many fic recs to my read-later list on A03, but have yet to actually read a single one [and may never, given how slowly I go through fic--there's still a steady stream of Guardian fic I haven't read that also goes on that list].)

Weathering/Working: We have what sounds like a significant nor'easter arriving at some point tomorrow, with heavy wet snow. Will this be where our luck fails for the season and we lose power for the first time? (I'm completely astonished that it hasn't happened yet. Probably it's not really because the generator and backup power are warding that off, like carrying an umbrella around...)

And of course the spring crunch is set to start tomorrow in the late afternoon, right around when the storm is likely to be in full swing. Will the weather have much impact? (Mainly, I guess, in terms of Those Who Speak all being able to make it there safely; I kinda hope that there's some kind of backup power in their actual building, but I don't know for sure one way or the other.)
Sunday, February 22nd, 2026 08:00 pm
Posting for week 6 is closed now. Thank you to everyone participating this week.

Regular Challenge
We have had a total of 13 participants this week.

Maximum weekly points:
[personal profile] elian_panatomicpublishing reached a maximum of 9 points.

Maximum regular points in total:
[personal profile] melacka has reached 37 points.


Team Challenge
Team Alpha
3 participants
individual points will get rewarded after finishing a line!
32 team points in total

Team Omega
4 participants
individual points will get rewarded after finishing a line!
29 team points in total


Maximum points (regular+team) in total:
[personal profile] dianafortyseven, [personal profile] melime and [personal profile] peppermint_shamrock have reached 50 points.


To check out all scores, have a look at the Google Highscore Sheet. If you find an error or have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me.

The playlist for week seven will be online soon!
Sunday, February 22nd, 2026 02:48 pm
Driven by my interest in the influence of US clear-channel stations, I was curious what they actually sounded like back in the day. Thanks to archive.org, I found aircheck recordings that let me experience what is otherwise an ephemeral medium. Currently, I’m diving into a 1970 Top 100 countdown with DJ Bruce Morrow. Between the music and his quintessential New York accent, it’s a fascinating listen. Had I been born early enough to seek it out, I definitely would have been a fan.

Radio is, by its very nature, an ephemeral medium—a stream of data pushed into the ether, meant to be experienced in the moment and then lost forever. Unlike a book or a film, which are curated for the shelf, these broadcasts were 'disposable' culture. Finding these recordings on archive.org feels like intercepting a ghost signal; it’s a rare chance to catch a broadcast that was never truly meant to survive the night it aired.
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Sunday, February 22nd, 2026 01:29 pm
BEWARE
This post contains spoilers for the movie Rental Family.

Rental Family staring Brendan Fraser is about an American actor living in Japan. He works for a company where citizens hire actors to play parts in their lives. He could be paid to be a groom, a mourner, a biographer or even a father for a fatherless child. Of course any of those roles could become personal if he gets too attached to a client.

This movie is not at all what I expected. I'm not sure why I thought it would be heart-warming or a comedy. What I got was something sad, something that made me think about how grim it is that people have to hire others to be part of their lives. The fact that it's become a common practice made it even more depressing to me.

It was an interesting movie, but not something I really enjoyed. It did, however, make me think about the human condition in modern times.
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Sunday, February 22nd, 2026 05:58 pm
 Picture Diary 120

1. One small step....


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2, Annoying little brother

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3. Emergence

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4. Missing the point

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5. Hide and seek

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6. I spy

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Sunday, February 22nd, 2026 01:48 pm

More snow tomorrow. Nam has the precipitation at around 25mm water equivalent, or 25cm total.

Will renew my wife’s skiing trail, but I’m reticent on clearing the driveway with my bum knee.
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Sunday, February 22nd, 2026 11:09 am
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Sunday, February 22nd, 2026 09:41 am

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Spent the afternoon at Hugh and Meredith's, where Hugh showed Sophia how his 3d printer works (and how he makes 3d dungeons out of foam). Very cool stuff, and they both enjoyed their souvenirs.
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

Sunday, February 22nd, 2026 09:20 am
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The Entity this morning. I got out the z5 camera for a change. I can't remember the name of the weird lens that is on it. It's meant for an old style 35 mm camera. I might remember the name later. It's not on the lens.

Hazel didn't end up coming up yesterday so I have lots of free time until Sebastian's birthday dinner tonight. We're eating at the chinese buffet so that makes it easy for me - no cooking.

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Bluetit that I finished yesterday. We don't have bluetits in america and I've never seen one in person but the pattern was in the book and it's pretty cute. Next I'd like to somehow change the pattern and make the bird be colored as a nuthatch or tree sparrow for Dave. Those are his favorite birds. He seems to be taking more of a delight in these little amigurumi things than I would have ever imagined. Usually he's not that interested in my artwork or the crochet things that I make. Oh, he's supportive for sure of everything I do but he is much more animated about liking the little crocheted creatures for some reason.

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Snow. Almost all the snow had melted in the last couple days and then this morning when I woke up there was snow again. About 2 to 3". I actually gasped aloud when I saw it. I was all ready for Spring to be here.
Sunday, February 22nd, 2026 03:17 pm
I'm really tired, and don't feel in any way prepared for the upcoming working week, but I've been trying to mitigate that with a very lazy Sunday. I had grand plans to plant the first of the spring seeds and start germinating seedlings in the growhouse, I had plans to go out for a walk with Matthias (the weather today is gorgeous), but instead I've spent the whole day vegetating in my wing chair in the living room, watching the tail-end of the Winter Olympics from the corner of my eye, watching Olia Hercules cook borshch on a BBC cooking show, scrolling around on Dreamwidth, and so on.

Matthias and I saw Marty Supreme at the community cinema earlier this week, and we'll be heading out to see Hamnet tonight, so it's definitely been a film-heavy time by our standards. I'm anticipating a lot of cathartic crying tonight.

I've continued to make my way through mythology/fairytale/folktale retellings recommended by you on a previous post. This week it was Girl Meets Boy (Ali Smith), a slim little novella in conversation with Ovid's Metamorphoses, concerned with fluidity in gender, gender presentation, sexuality, and so on. It felt very, very, very of its time and place (the UK in the 2000s), but that's not to say that its specificity was a bad thing.

I also read The Swan's Daughter (Roshani Chokshi), a lush, surreal fairytale of a book in which the titular daughter (one of seven sisters born to a power-hungry wizard and his swanmaiden wife) finds herself caught up in a competition to win the hand of the kingdom's prince in marriage. Chokshi's previous books have been very melodramatic and earnest, and she's relished the opportunity here to shift the tone to something much more humorous and knowing, while still digging into her favourite big themes: the tension between love and vulnerability, genuine love requiring an embrace of uncertainty, and the interplay of love and monstrosity made literal.

It reminded me so much of one of my very favourite books — The Forgotten Beasts of Eld (Patricia McKillip) — although the latter is portentous and serious where Chokshi is whimsical and humorous that I picked up the McKillip for yet another reread. I've written about it here before, so suffice it to say now that it remains an incredible book — sharp and perceptive, devastating and beautiful.

I'll leave you with this fantastic link to a Shrove Tuesday tradition in which contestants dressed in costumes race through central London while flipping pancakes in pans. It's as delightful as you might imagine.
Wednesday, February 18th, 2026 10:32 am
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.)

***************


Links )
Sunday, February 22nd, 2026 09:54 am
This early PC platformer is of no small historical interest, as it was the first game released by everybody's favorite totally uncontroversial and non-resented game publishing company, Electronic Arts. Like most of their titles then and now, it wasn't developed in-house; Michael Abbott and Matthew Alexander get the design and programming credit for this one.

grid of construction scaffolding with gaps and chains hanging down to climb

But you don't need to me to tell you the illustrious history of EA (or, as it was briefly called at its inception, "Amazin' Software"—and I can't tell you how disappointed I am that we don't live in the timeline where they kept that name). I guess you also don't technically need me to tell you about this ridiculous game and my memories of playing it while being unable to identify most of the characters and objects it contains, but I'm going to go ahead anyway.

In Hard Hat Mack you play as a construction worker. I did understand that much. In the first level you have to collect pieces of a beam and use them to fill in the gaps, and then grab a wandering jackhammer to hammer them into place. This is where my understanding of the game began to break down; I thought the jackhammer was a tornado. )

Hard Hat Mack is... well, it sure is a game. You can find it on abandonware sites, but I couldn't really get it to run well on any version or emulator I tried. The DOS version (which I had as a kid) runs too fast in DOSBox by default, but when I reduced the clock speed I found that it lagged badly when multiple objects were moving, which made the second level pretty much unplayable. We probably shouldn't hold our breaths for EA to offer a re-release, and maybe that's for the best.
Sunday, February 22nd, 2026 09:33 am
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Can America's well-financed, highly-experienced, heavily-armed war machine hope to prevail against a numerically insignificant, poorly-armed, American teen movement?

Dance the Eagle to Sleep by Marge Piercy
Sunday, February 22nd, 2026 02:01 pm
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.

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

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Listening stations.

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Keiki does some Morse code-breaking.

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Humuhumu does some Enigma encoding.

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

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Daffodils were not quite ready.

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

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Not so sure the Intelligence Factory needs this.

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

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

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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.