lettered | Reading

I had a little run of "brief meetings with old hockey friends" in the last two weekends. A few words, a hug, sometimes just a wave in passing while we both briefly occupied the same ice rink. All of them put a smile on my face.

Saturday before last was the Varsity matchup between Oxford Vikings A and Cambridge Narwhals at Cambridge rink, before my Kodiaks 2 team played visiting team Invicta Dynamics. Three of my tournament buddies from Biarritz were on the Vikings team. The next day Kodiaks were away at Bristol. I had an expected brief chat with my friend C from Hull camp but also complete surprise appearances from M who coaches Hull camp and goalie J, both of whom are tournament buddies. M was there with the away team for the previous game, J now lives in Bristol, which I theoretically knew but had forgotten.

Saturday just gone I had an evening game in Peterborough with Warbirds. I arrived a bit early and saw the previous game in progress: Phantoms Dev women were playing Streatham Storm Dev (my first ever hockey team). I recognised the jerseys first, and then a bunch of the faces. I dumped my kit in the changing room and went to lurk next to their bench and cheer them on for their last ten minutes. The timing worked out for me to see the end of their game (they won!) and walk with them back to their changing room before I needed to join Warbirds in ours.

princessofgeeks

Current Mood: enthralled

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princessofgeeks

Current Mood: indescribable

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nomelon

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hannah

Current Mood: sick
Current Music: Boxes - Travis

It might've been the last snow of the season this morning. A light dusting, enough to make me think a coat would've been nice and not too much to make me need more than a sweatshirt. It was nice to feel the last bits of cold, especially since the sun was out a couple of hours later, so nothing much stuck around. Few people were at the market, which made it easier - I haven't been to the Sunday one in a while, and as anemic as this time of year is for produce, it's nice to see some depth of color when it comes to the root vegetables.

In other shopping news, from working in assorted doctor's offices, I found a good quality bandage brand, and online shopping being what it is, I had to resort to eBay for a couple boxes. Most medical supply places call for a minimum order of significantly more than a couple boxes of bandaids, which I understand, and convenience pushes me towards eBay because that's all I need right now. It was that or Amazon, and I'm slightly more trusting of eBay as a general institution.

princessofgeeks

Current Mood: happy

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snickfic

I went hunting for fic of these two a while back. Here are my two favorites.

Acts of Faith by

quietly_obsessed, 4k. "I don't believe in God, but I do believe in you". Jud and Blanc fall in love during the year after Wicks' murder. A bittersweet but lovely fic in which they find some healing in each other.

fair with her firstborn on bethlehem down by

hauntinghouses, 9k. Benoit Blanc comes back to Chimney Rock just in time for Christmas. In which Blanc sets out to seduce a priest and/or not have a miserable Christmas, and ends up talking a lot more theology than he wants (but no more than he ought to have reasonably expected). If you're like the religious debates in the movie were great but what if they had them while fucking, this is the fic for you.

firethesound

2026 GOALS

2026 Total Wordcount Goal : 40,925 / 150,000

2026 Total Writing Days : 52 / 365

FEBRUARY
So I had a few really good days at the end of last month, and was somehow able to keep that momentum rolling through almost the entire month of February. I had about a week in the middle there with houseguests and illness etc etc that my wordcount slipped, but I was hitting 1k+ most days last month, and even had a few days that were 2-3k which is awesome. I only had two days with no words at all. Partly it's due to finally hitting that glorious downhill momentum as we roll into the end of food truck au, and partly because I had no writing time during the day so I've been coming back to the keyboard after my shower instead of heading straight to bed. Turns out, at night with the house dark and quiet and me the only one awake, I can slam out like a twelve hundred words in an hour. Unfortunately it does cut into my sleeping time and it's really not sustainable long term, alas.

February Wrap-Up : I finished the month with 31,078 words which is nothing short of a fucking miracle. I am deliriously happy about how much I wrote this month. A total of 3 WIPs got words, with all words going into 3 Old Guard fics. Not only did I meet my goal of 15k, I basically doubled it.

MARCH
I would love to keep this pace going but we'll see how it shakes out. I don't want to push too hard and burn out, but I also don't want to slow down too much and lose this momentum I've got going. The second half of the month will also be a little challenging due to some anticipated Life Stuff, but we're all just going to do the best we can.

March Wordcount Goal : 25k and I'm aiming a little lower than I did this month because I'm hoping that this is all that food truck au needs to be finished. (Please for the love of god let that be all that food truck au needs to be finished.)

March Fics to Focus On
☆ food truck au : and where last we left, I thought that I would have it done in 75k. It's at 81,420 and I still have 7 chapters that need to be finished. I'm averaging 7-8k per chapter, going with 8k x 7 chapters is 56k, of which I've got 24.5k written already. So, that leaves me just under 25k and hopefully it should go fast because as I said, I've got it all half written already, including the ending, and a lot of what's left is smut which goes pretty quickly. So, I am optimistic that I am bumping the wordcount estimate for the very last time, and this thing will be done soon. Estimated wordcount, 105k.

snickfic

Themes of the month
1. Comfort music, by which I mean mostly the Gallaghers. This felt like a rough month, and I listened to my big Noel playlist a lot, as well as my 2025 and “most listened” playlists. About every six months I listen to the latter and discover it has a lot of great songs on it. Who could have guessed!

2. Also in the comfort music vein, a lot of Lord Huron, mostly the new album, which has earned the extremely rare distinction of skipping the seasonal playlist phase and going straight into my year-round rotation.

3. Wuthering Heights by Charli XCX. Neeeew album! Short, and with some filler of the kind you get in an album for a movie, but still a few new songs I was into. I appreciate how she used the melodramatic vibes of the movie as an excuse to go OTT.

4. Lana del Rey. Inspired by her new single, I went back and listened to Norman Fucking Rockwell again, which I haven't listened all the way through since 2020.

My top artists (by # of streams)
1. Oasis
2. Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds
3. Lord Huron
4. Liam Gallagher

...I told you. 🙈

Favorite songs:
1. White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter by Lana Del Rey. Weird Lana is back!! Some of this is kind of bad tbh and is definitely her operating in the vein of Taylor's "But Daddy I Love Him," ie pissed at her fans for having opinions about her love life, but also: it's so delightfully weird. I'm into it.

2. Dying For You by Charlie XCX, my favorite of the new tracks on her WH album. Again: really took the theme of OTT melodrama to heart. <3

princessofgeeks

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princessofgeeks

Current Mood: busy

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kalloway posting in

dw_community_promo

small_fandoms has finished up its annual Drabblethon, with more than 140 drabbles posted.

The community is open all year for any sort of creations for small, tiny, and dead fandoms. Post your stories, art, icons, meta, and everything else.

rmc28

Books on pre-order:

Platform Decay (Murderbot 8) by Martha Wells (5 May)
Radiant Star (Imperial Radch) by Ann Leckie (12 May)
Unrivaled (Game Changers 7) by Rachel Reid (1 Jun 2027)

The release of the third Heated Rivalry book - which was only announced in January after the TV adaptation got wildly popular - is pushed back by eight months. I'm assuming this is to allow Rachel Reid more time to finish it and/or engage with the adaptation of the second book, The Long Game.

Books acquired in February: none (wow)

Borrowed books read in February:

The Hidden Oracle (Trials of Apollo 1) by Rick Riordan [3]
Camp Half-Blood Confidential by Rick Riordan [3]
The Dark Prophecy (Trials of Apollo 2) by Rick Riordan [3]
The Burning Maze (Trials of Apollo 3) by Rick Riordan [3]
The Tyrant's Tomb (Trials of Apollo 4) by Rick Riordan [3]
Camp Jupiter Confidential by Rick Riordan [3]
The Tower of Nero (Trials of Apollo 5) by Rick Riordan [3]
The Singer of Apollo (Percy Jackson and the Olympians 5.5) by Rick Riordan

It's been a really intense month, mostly with ice hockey commitments, so what reading I have managed has been entirely the ongoing Riordan read-through. Trials of Apollo successfully grows Apollo from intensely irritating in the first few chapters of the first book to someone I cried over in the last book. Plus I have now watched both seasons of the Disney+ adaptation of Percy Jackson and the Olympians and oh boy do I have Opinions, especially on the second season. They get a lot of details right, the casting is excellent, and yet they get the heart of the story so so wrong. (Will I still watch season 3 when it comes out? Probably! Maybe they won't mess it up as badly?)

Anyway. Onward into March.

[3] Physical book

silveradept

Current Mood: gloomy
Current Music: Darren Korb, featuring Louis Cole - The End of Time, Part II

I feel like we need to start with this, because I'm runnning into situations where people have clearly not internalized one of the most important things to remember about stochastic parrots that they are calling Avian Intelligence. It's all based on vector maths and probabilities. It does not know what is true, nor what is accurate, when it is constructing what word to select next. That it manages to get things correct is by accident, and by the providence of having training data that contains the correct information in it. When it constructs sentences and so on, it does so based only on what the training data and the vector math, with some fuzz factor built in, says the next word is, regardless of whether that's the right word or not. (Admittedly, being able to do the vector math is helpful, because it allows for a certain amount of synonym substitution and can make a search engine more robust at finding relevant answers if you don't hit the exact keywords. There's an aside here about how many engines are transforming your queries so that you search for things that will serve you ads or that will steer the results to prioritize those who have paid for top search engine ranking, such that even things that are good that come from machine learning are then transformed to evil purposes by capital and their priorities.)

Also up top, Dreamwidth is recruiting volunteers who would be willing to file documents in United States courts talking about the chilling effects on your speech and online activity that various state laws trying to curb social site use by teens would have, and especially from parents who would be willing to detail the way those laws would interfere with your parenting decisions. Comments screened, signing up is not committing to writing such declarations. Also, risks involve things like having to use your wallet name, and possibly having your wallet name and your Dreamwidth identity linked in publicly-available court materials or at least materials available to the state and the court.

(Because South Carolina is the latest entity to join the circus, South Carolina users are especially helpful right now, but all kinds of states have legislation that's looking to join the circus. Why South Carolina? Well, they're charging people with "contributing to the delinquency of a minor" by being an identified adult in a teen-focused anti-ICE school walkout planning chat and expressing support for the walkout. Among other things they're trying to do to supposedly protect teens from the corrupting influence of adults.)

The worry about the presence of new media is perennial and perpetual, but it's not the new medium, or the new screen, that is the issue, it's the way that content is designed and presented that's trying to fragment attention and deep thinking. Accessibility and multimodality are awesome things, but there's a lot of design work that's been put into keeping us scrolling and viewing ads rather than using our tools to think and engage deeply.

Dr. Gladys West, whose precise measurements of the planet made it possible for the Global Positioning System network to come into existence, and therefore commercial (and military) satellite navigation, has died at 95 years of age. Another contribution of painstaking measurment and mathematics that undergirds so very much of the technological world today.

The Reverend Jesse Jackson, civil rights activist and occasional punchline of a joke, has finished his ministry at 84 years of age.

( What Have the Fools, Grifters, and Bigots Been Up To This Time? )

Last for tonight, twenty-five years of a very popular early-Internet meme, matching visuals to the "Invasion of the Gabber Robots" by the Laziest Men on Mars, who would also give us the Pusher and Shover robots in a different viral video.

(Materials via

adrian_turtle,

azurelunatic,

boxofdelights,

cmcmck,

conuly,

cosmolinguist,

elf,

finch,

firecat,

jadelennox,

jenett,

jjhunter,

kaberett,

lilysea,

oursin,

rydra_wong,

snowynight,

sonia,

the_future_modernes,

thewayne,

umadoshi,

vass, the

meta_warehouse community,

little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)

hannah

Current Mood: discontent
Current Music: nothing now

Someone moving out of their apartment's always cause for investigation, and sometimes, I get lucky: a couple folding baskets for my closet that replace the cardboard boxes that had been there since I moved in. I'd never gotten around to replacing them with anything, and after a while, just adjusted to their presence and got attached to them.

I'm trying to ask myself why I'm unwilling to let go of certain things I'm not using, like old pajamas. It's an unpleasant inertia. They're not even particularly nostalgic. I think some of it's just me bristling at the idea of getting rid of things, even though I know better. At least a little is there not being good places for fabric to go. If there were some, knowing that would certainly help a bit with conceptualizing not having them anymore.

princessofgeeks

Current Mood: enthralled

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snickfic

Here are a couple of my favorite winter soup recipes. They're from cookbooks, so no handy online version to link to. So this is for you and also for me, so I can access these away from my cookbooks.

( Pork and hominy soup )

( Sausage, White Bean, and Kale Soup With Besar )

tally posting in

dw_community_promo

Current Mood: working

youtuberecs is a simple, casual community for posting Youtube recommendations! It's meant to be easy peasy—you can leave reviews or commentary about your recs or just drop the embed and go!

We also now also have a nice backlog of video recs to browse, all organized within our tag system. ♥

chestnut_pod posting in

thisfinecrew

The BLM has announced a plan to log to the "maximum" in some of the last old-growth forests on the West Coast. A period of public comment is open.

Here is a long explainer on why these lands are important, and why the proposal is ineffective in its stated aim of fire-prevention and destructive to human communities and the whole surrounding ecosystem.

This is the project number: DOI-BLM-ORWA-0000-2026-0001-RMP-EIS

Here is the notice of intent.

Public comment is open for 26 more days.

rmc28

Both finals ended up being USA-Canada. Both finals I expected USA were more likely to win, actually wanted Canada to win, felt it was possible Canada might actually win for a majority of the game, only to have USA win in 3v3 OT. I didn't manage to watch either game entirely conventionally.

The women's final was on at the same time as Women's Blues "strength and conditioning" at the university sports centre. (The team gets an hour a week in term time in the Team Training Room, supervised by a personal trainer who's developed a programme for us to follow that's tailored to the needs of ice hockey. I love it, it's such a great perk of playing for the university.) My friend C and I arrived early and asked Will the PT to get the game up on the big screen, so we could follow it while we trained, and it was very exciting. A hardcore of about six of us then watched the last five minutes or so of the second period on a laptop at the end of the room, and then scattered at speed to bike to our respective destinations before the third period started.

The men's final took place while I was driving a large vehicle full of Kodiaks to Bristol (nine people: eight players with kits, one coach). My phone was paired to the car sound system, and I had the iPlayer coverage playing through it from our last pickup point (because obviously I didn't want to be messing with my phone while on the motorway). We had about half an hour of curling commentary that we only half-listened to, and then I turned up the volume for the game itself. With excellent timing, the game-winning goal was scored when we were a few minutes away from arriving at Bristol ice rink. I would still like to watch back at least the highlights of the game and actually see the bits of skating that had the commentators get especially excited.

forget your Unified Theory of Everything

It's Howdy Doody all the way down!

Fleeting reunions

Heated Rivalry rec: Danger High Voltage

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

another very important question

March the First.

Storrie on SNL

fic recs: Father Jud/Benoit Blanc

February Wrap-Up / March Goals

February in music

headdesk

Heated Rivalry rec

Small Fandoms!

To-read pile, 2026, February

Shorter month, shorter posting, it seems - Late February 02026

Accumulations.

Heated Rivalry rec

yummy soups

Youtuberecs

Resist logging in Oregon's old-growth forests

Olympic ice hockey finals

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