Friday @ 8:00 am
Oct. 31st, 2025 08:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alisxME: Goth Christmas goth Christmas goth Christmas!!!
DAD: Never understood the appeal, myself.
ME: Well are you a goth?
DAD: No. Are you?
ME: (outraged) Yes!
DAD: Youโre not wearing enough black!
ME: (in grey wash Tripps, a black and grey flannel, and a Mad God t-shirt) I mean I guess now that Iโm older itโs more of an emo look. But my heart will always belong to 90s mall goth.
Book Review Mirage City
Oct. 30th, 2025 03:57 pmcornerofmadness posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
booknook
Mirage City by Lev A.C. RosenMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Somehow I missed there were two books between this and Lavender House because what is time even and that it's been 3 years since I read LH (no wonder I was slightly confused. I just thought I had forgotten stuff). Andy is back with a new case and one of the things I like about Rosen's work is that it's steeped in the real LGBT history and not some pretty fantasy land of it. (Which takes us to the Content Warnings, era typical homophobia and an early version of conversion camps inside mental hospitals which amount to torture).
A woman from the Mattachine Society, an actual early gay rights group, has approached Andy to find three members who have disappeared, one woman and a gay couple Hank and Edward. It's obvious she wants to find the woman more but honestly she's nearly forgotten for much of the narrative as Andy heads south to Hollywood after the two guys who might have been taken by a motorcycle gang.
Worse, this is where Andy grew up and his mother, a nurse, still lives. Their entire interactions any more are a few phone calls per year, basically birthdays and Christmas. This is post-war America so no one is exactly out, even to family (Most of Andy's friends, including his lover, Gene, back at The Ruby have lost their family due to their sexual orientation).
I figured out much faster than Andy some of the clues but I have the advantage of being seventy years down the line and I know the unfortunate, ugly history of how gay people were treated. That said, it did nothing to take away from my enjoyment of this. Andy is in a bad spot of course because naturally he runs into his mother and can't say no to her when she insists he comes home with her.
But will the case come between them forever? Read and find out. This was very good. Andy is a great character and now I need to go back and find the other two books I missed.
View all my reviews
[book review] A Village Lost and Found
Oct. 30th, 2025 01:41 pmvaloise posting in booknookMay begins by looking back on his childhood fascination on how each eye sees the world slightly differently. This lead to an interest in stereoscopic cards. When a student at Imperial College London he would visit Christies's auction viewing room. "As a poor undergraduate, I had no chance of actually buying any of these treasures . . . But. . . I accumulated a wealth of experience looking at stereoscopic photographs, which was to influence my life for ever."
Once he'd made financial success with his day job (guitarist in Queen) he began collecting. This led him to the 59-card set, Scenes in Our Village, (SIOV) by T. R. Williams. The cards were first published in 1856 and showed life in a rural English village.
May set out to acquire all the cards, then all the variant sets that were published. He researched the possible location of the village, eventually finding it to be Hinton Waldrist. He hired a curator, co-author Elena Vidal, to help him catalog his collection. They visited the village, took contemporary images of some of the buildings in the SIOV slides.
A Village Lost and found reproduces the complete set of slides and includes a folding stereoscopic viewer. The three-dimensional detail of these 175-year old images is stunning. When possible individuals in the photos are identified using census and other local records. Williams was a successful portrait photographer of upper classes, but through his SIOV set you get a glimpse into the lives of the ordinary working class people in rural villages.
The Difficult Letters in the Alphabetical Meme
Oct. 29th, 2025 02:26 pmkitarella_imaginesMost people seem to have missed out all or some of the letters Q, X, Y, Z (including me). So if we get inspired to write fics with titles beginning with those letters, what say we reply to this post and link to our fics?
It will be like encouraging each other.
Wednesday @ 5:58 pm
Oct. 29th, 2025 05:58 pmSmallweb Chatter Post and Give Me Cool Links!
Oct. 27th, 2025 09:27 amkalloway posting in smallwebsmallweb, how's it going? First, I'd like to thank
enchantedsleeper for running Small Web September. \o/ Thank you!Second, I want to apologize for my absence over the last couple of months. Lots of real life happening. ^^;;
Third, I want to update our Cool Links in our sticky post so please, please give me some resources! If I get a lot, I might be a bit slow to update because of lots of real life still going on.
And Fourth, this post is yours! What's going well, going not so well, going in general, etc.
Sunday @ 10:54 pm
Oct. 26th, 2025 10:54 pmalisxPrayers and apologies to the lady who dared run up to me when I was stumbling home late at night to try and find her Airbnb. Could I have helped you when I was sober? Almost certainly! Was I? Absolutely not. Deeply sorry. I hope you find your laneway. Thoughts and prayers.
[Review] What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher
Oct. 26th, 2025 01:19 amhexmix posting in booknook
Title: What Moves the Dead
Author: T. Kingfisher
Genre: horror
[Posting a lil early as I'll be out of town, hope that's okay!]
I'd been wanting to read What Moves the Dead for some time, having heard 1) that it was a retelling of Fall of the House of Usher and 2) it had a nonbinary protag, but kept backburnering it. Then my book club ended up reading Poe's House of Usher this month and I followed that up with watching The Bloodhound, a modern adaptation of the short story (it's REALLY BAD, would not recommend), so I decided this would be the month to (finally!) read it. It also shoehorns nicely with the horror theme I'd been going for with my reviews for this event :)
What Moves is indeed a retelling of Usher, but in the place of Poe's nameless narrator is veteran soldier Alex Easton, a character entirely of Kingfisher's creation, who comes hand-in-hand with a fictional European country and language to round out their background. Easton journeys to the Usher estate upon hearing that their childhood friend Madeline is gravely ill, only to encounter a house oppressive in its decay, with grounds populated by disturbingly strange wildlife. Easton finds that it's not just Madeline who has fallen ill; her brother Roderick too suffers from what seems some unknown malady that fills him with a debilitating fear.
Kingfisher sticks fairly close to the original story, but puts her own disquieting spin on the events which nonetheless manage to feel very much within the spirit of the original. Having reread the original recently I was struck with how much time Poe spends just describing the house and the tarn; building up the atmosphere. I very much appreciated Kingfisher playing to this (every mention of the tarn right there at the start had me cheering like a sportsball fan) and building off of it. I personally caught on to where Kingfisher was going very early, but as it was right up my alley, I had an absolute blast reading anyway.
(Also, side note to say that this book is aesthetically VERY NICE. The cover rocks, the end paper illustrations are gorgeous (and spooky!), and even the house detail beneath the dust jacket is a real nice touch. A++ on book design alone.)
What Moves is a quick read, easily managed in one sitting, that expands on the source material without being a simple retread. I also really enjoyed all the characters, even Madeline and Roderick (and the gross old house and the grosser tarn). Easton makes for a great protagonist, and the country of Gallacia is also fairly interesting, especially as its culture and language are described in contrast with the rest of Europe/Americaโ-I also just personally enjoyed that this was not a modern retelling, that Kingfisher works Gallacia into the broader history and time period of the original House of Usher.
What Moves maintains a nicely creepy atmosphere throughout, and while I wouldn't consider it outright scary, it's a fun read, especially if you're looking for a quick, not-too-spooky book to finish off spooky month.
Sunday @ 11:41 am
Oct. 26th, 2025 11:41 amalisxDoing my Least Favorite Maintenance Task, i.e., updating the relay, and think I’ve finally gotten enough of a process down that it should be easier in future. Maybe.
Did have to buy more disk space for the VPS, though, and I really need rustup not to take over a gigabye of disk space. Like, dude. Wut???
Review: Library Exension app
Oct. 26th, 2025 09:25 ammerrileemakes posting in booknookIt searches by title rather than ISBN so it picks up physical, ebook and audiobook editions of the title you're looking at. And links you straight to the page to borrow.
It currently has the catalogue of over 5000 libraries, including catalogues of subscription services like Kobo Plus, Scribd and Everand. And if they don't have your local library you can ask and they'll try to add it.
Unfortunately it works on desktop browsers. And the title search does occasionally give you a random title and not the one you're looking at. But overall 9/10 will make my TBR list groan until it dies no regrets
Book Review: Ikigai
Oct. 25th, 2025 05:50 pmhuxleyenne posting in booknookAuthor: Yukari Mitsuhashi
First Published: In Great Britain by Kyle Books, an Imprint of Octopus Publishing Group LtD, 2018
"The Japanese word ikigai is formed of two Japanese characters, or kanji: 'iki' [็ใ], meaning life, and 'gai' [็ฒๆ], meaning value or worth. Ikigai, then, is the value of life, or happiness in life. Put simply, it's the reason you get up in the morning." - That's the summary on the back of the book.
This is a quick and thoughtful read. I'm a distractable person with a wandering mind, and it still only took me about an hour to reread this cover to cover. Here are some thoughts.
Call it morbid curiosity or a guilty pleasure, but I read self-help books sometimes, including bad ones. It's a good idea to take life advice books with a grain of salt, and perhaps Ikigai is no different. Even so, I like this book. Nothing felt out of place or without meaning. There are no religious undertones that I noticed, nor does the author have the attitude that your purpose in life is to make money. She does her best to show the reader what the "value of life" means to her, and the anecdotes she used from others are brief, but effective.
I think perhaps my favorite thing the author said was toward the end, on page 89: "I think having ikigai ensures that I will never be bored until the day I die. Maybe that's happiness. You keep chasing your ikigai and one day you just die." This made me think of hobbies we passionately engage with and why we have them. If I had to call anything my ikigai, it would probably be writing fanfiction.
A book like this has its place if you need a quick boost, or moment to think deeply about what you love and why it gets you out of bed in the morning. It doesn't have to be a job or family, though it can be those things. It just has to be true, and yours. Reading this feels meditative, in a way.
Database maintenance
Oct. 25th, 2025 08:42 am![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png){kind=small}
mark posting in ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png){kind=small}
dw_maintenanceGood morning, afternoon, and evening!
We're doing some database and other light server maintenance this weekend (upgrading the version of MySQL we use in particular, but also probably doing some CDN work.)
I expect all of this to be pretty invisible except for some small "couple of minute" blips as we switch between machines, but there's a chance you will notice something untoward. I'll keep an eye on comments as per usual.
Ta for now!
Running well on bended knee.
Oct. 25th, 2025 10:27 amalisxThis article is an incredibly frustrating look at the current state of the US tech industry’s support for fascism. Not for the whole “spoiled manchildren chucking a tantrum because Uncle Joe told them no” angle, which has been covered before, so much as it’s extremely fucking revealing about the tech press’s complicity in the culture in a way I don’t think its author at all intended . . .
presenting: my first book!
Oct. 25th, 2025 01:16 amquillpunk(the anon period is over and so i, with pride and befuddlement, present my first published book!)
Desiccated Empire
Once, there was a vast Empire, capable of controlling nature itself.
Josvarh’s first cargo run goes catastrophically wrong when giant tentacles tear their airship right out of the sky, sending it crashing into the desert. He and Captain are forced aground, where they’re found by a mysterious stranger speaking an unknown language. ‘Chad’ is from no place Jos knows, but inordinately pleased to meet them—even with the language barrier.
Now, there is only sand.
The town at the edge of the desert lies abandoned, with no clues as to its fate. Their ship is lost, dragged into the desert by the mysterious tentacles. And in the night comes another monster: a spear-wielder of great skill and relentless attacks. Driven into the sands, they’re forced to fight for their lives as they seek shelter underground, dogged by unnatural monsters.
And what once was lost shall be found.
- no romance
- 111 page novella
- ebook on amazon/available in kindle unlimited
- part of a multi-author writing/publishing challenge
๐ purchase link ๐ storygraph ๐ฅฐ goodreads
(please note that it was automatically attributed to another Devin Moore on goodreads)
Edit: i forgot! i scheduled Desiccated Empire as a kindle countdown deal between nov 1-8 (i think)
fully slipped my mind, i was very sleepy when i did that orz
Friday @ 4:27 pm
Oct. 24th, 2025 04:27 pmalisxFind it kind of ironic that early web directories used to be manual lists that people had to submit their sites to one-by-one. Which were then replaced by automated, bot-crawled directories when the web got too big. And have now once again reverted to user-submitted directories because the number of independent websites run by actual humans is once again small enough to list manually.
