Week 4 of the Stuff I Love: Top Ten Edition promoted by dreamersdare This week's theme is Relationships in our media, but as it doesn't particularly appeal, I've gone for general stuff I love, again in no particular order.
...Cake! This one combines two hot and happening trends: gray and ombre. Plus polka-dots, which will never go out of style.
Let's hope gray doesn't, either, because pretty much my entire house is painted gray. Some people might think that sounds depressing, but just look at this cake:
Then I learned that it was modeled after a Vera Wang gown, and I felt totally smart and stylish for a second. Then I looked down at my ensemble of mismatched sweats and slowly lowered my hands from their 'raise the roof' position.
Isn't it great how all the ribbon and fabric look like actual ribbon and fabric? Just amazing.
I sure hope you enjoyed today's gorgeous gray gateaux and that your Sunday is especially sweet!
******
P.S. I was browsing "gray whale" things to link today - because whales are awesome -but then this blue whale butter dish popped up and it's so stinkin' cute you get it instead:
Candy Hearts Exchange has been revealed, and I now know (well, I was already pretty sure) that sanguinity wrote my lovely gift fic There My Heart Forever Lies! It is a 16K (for a 300 word minimum exchange!) Flight of the Heron story that riffs off the musical Brigadoon, which I had never heard of before, where Ardroy is saved by being taken out of time. I especially appreciate that the story took time to develop Keith's relationship with Francis as a counterweight for his eventual choice.
As for me, I wrote the following for sanguinity (which of course she guessed)! We do keep getting paired up in exchanges, which is no wonder considering the rareness of the fandoms. I had fun writing Laurent being his usual earnest, passionate self, while also, well, rising to the occasion. Thanks as always to garonne for beta reading. <3
In Which Laurent Rises to the Occasion (4150 words) by Luzula Fandom: The Wounded Name - D. K. Broster Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Laurent de Courtomer/Aymar de la Rocheterie, Aymar de la Rocheterie/Avoye de Villecresne Characters: Laurent de Courtomer, Aymar de la Rocheterie, Avoye de Villecresne Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Pre-Poly Summary: Aymar despairs of clearing his name and leaves France, leaving only a letter behind.
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.
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.
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.
Title:Hold Me on AO3 Artist:mific Rating: Gen Fandom: Heated Rivalry Characters/Pairings: Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov Notes: Made in Procreate for the ICE OUT donation challenge, and for challenge #75 - Romance
Can America's well-financed, highly-experienced, heavily-armed war machine hope to prevail against a numerically insignificant, poorly-armed, American teen movement?
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.
We have the following PHs looking for a loving home.
PH 9 - Superman (Movie 2025), The Librarians (TV 2014), Leverage (US TV 2008), Star Trek: The Original Series, The Mandalorian (TV), Star Trek: Voyager, Constantine (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Crossover Fandom
PH 10 - Marvel Cinematic Universe, KPop Demon Hunters (2025), Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia (Anime & Manga), Heated Rivalry (TV), 9-1-1 (TV), Arcane: League of Legends (Cartoon 2021), DCU (Comics), Marvel (Comics), Teen Wolf
PH 11 - Hazbin Hotel (Cartoon), Bugsnax (Video Game)
PH 12 - The Mummy (Movies 1999-2008), Original Work
I have a pinboard account, from way back when we all had delicious accounts and delicious got shut down. I was surprised as heck when I tried to bookmark something yesterday and got the notification that my subscription had expired. (Apparently there was an email a month ago. It probably got spam-filtered, but I didn't actually check.)
I re-upped, but it also gave me a push towards actually using the bookmark feature on AO3. (PRIVATE BOOKMARKS ONLY AT THIS TIME, I DO NOT WISH TO BE PERCEIVED, EXCEPT FOR HOW I POST ON THE INTERNET EVERY DAY, WHAT AM I THINKING???)
This time my pinboard subscription should be good for a whopping 10 YEARS, and who knows what the internet will be like by then!
Dr. Chen's talk will be Wednesday, February 25th from 12:00 – 2:00pm in the Wolf Humanities Conference Room (WILL 623).
Abstract
Today most Chinese celebrate the annual return of their birthday just like people elsewhere. However, this was not the case prior to the medieval era. There were insurmountable obstacles, both technical and ideological, to this practice in ancient China, some of which remains true to this day. We then discuss the religious and political elements of birthday celebration in the Ancient Near East starting with the Book of Genesis, especially the notion that it was an occasion to highlight the relationship to one’s guardian deity, and that it became an important part of royal cults, most prominently in the Roman Empire. As observed by Herodotus and Plato, the ancient Iranians had apparently inherited this tradition after their conquests in the ANE.
In the early medieval era, the old Chinese heartlands were conquered by various nomadic groups, culminating in the final domination of the Tuoba Northern dynasties and attracting a large number of “assistant conquerors,” mostly Iranian-speaking, from Central Asia and beyond. The new masters of northern China were quick to pick up birthday celebration in their royal cult. Meanwhile, the Chinese nomenclature underwent a process of “Iranization,” introducing heavy religious elements to an originally secular onomasticon. An important component of this transformation was the calendarization of personal names, which in the pre-Islamic, largely Zoroastrian, Iranian cultural world symbolized the religious importance of one’s birthday. These calendric onomastic data help reveal how the general Chinese population adopted the arguably ANE institution of birthday celebration. The Taoist notion of benming 本命, “natal destiny,” roughly the equivalent of the ancient Greek daemon and the Roman genius, was an associated outcome. The whole process was facilitated in no small scale by the loss of cultural dominance of the traditional Confucian elite under the Tuoba and their Sui and Tang heirs.
PSA: The Donald Strachey movie, On the Other Hand, Death, is currently available for purchase from Amazon for $4.99 (I think the SD version is $2.99). They are also available to those who have Here TV.
I bought Ice Blues on sale a year ago, and I was thinking about the movies tonight, so I thought I'd check. They are so good! If you like film noir style, detective stories, with LGBTQ+ characters and themes, and an adorable ship, these will not disappoint!
It was especially amusing as I was getting some Sonny/Rico vibes from Don and Tim. LOL. Just a couple of little things (they aren't really anything alike). I think it was the 'married couple' vibes, and how well they know each other. I don't know why. Maybe extrapolation. I think this is very much how Sonny and Rico will be together in my future fic where they are an established couple.
But Don and Tim are so wonderful together. You shouldn't miss them!
One of these days, I'm going to give the books a try...
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