kingstoken: (Rowena with wings art)
[personal profile] kingstoken posting in [community profile] fancake
Fandom: Ghosts (US)
Pairings/Characters: Hetty & Flower
Rating: G
Length: 708 words
Creator Links: OpalEssence 
Theme: female relationships

Summary: Following Season 2, Episode 5, when Hetty meets Molly the maid, she must attempt to come to terms with the fact that Elias' betrayal was entirely of his own will and desire. Luckily, Flower is there to help her move forward.

Reccer's Notes: The author of this fic does a great job capturing how these characters speak, especially Flower.  It is a reflective, but wholesome scene, one that I could have very much seen playing out in the show.

Fanwork Links: AO3

[ SECRET POST #6724 ]

Jun. 3rd, 2025 07:29 pm
case: (Default)
[personal profile] case posting in [community profile] fandomsecrets

⌈ Secret Post #6724 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


01.


More! )


Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 21 secrets from Secret Submission Post #961..
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

travel-related books and war fiction

Jun. 3rd, 2025 05:38 pm
philomytha: image of an old-fashioned bookcase (Bookshelf)
[personal profile] philomytha
The Royal Navy: a history from 1900, Duncan Redford and Philip Grove
I read this in preparation for our Portsmouth trip, because I know nothing about naval history other than what can be gleaned from watching Hornblower and reading Alistair Maclean. This was a general overview of the 20th century, one book from a twelve-volume history of the Navy, very dense, but surprisingly readable for all that. I never lost interest even when deep in discussion of relations with the navy's one true enemy: Whitehall. Or the other great enemies, Churchill, and the RAF. It was quite clear that the French, Germans and so forth are all incidental to these long-lasting and deep emnities. To be fair, I'll give them Churchill, especially after Gallipoli.

As well as the details of battles and events and so forth, the book somewhat inadvertently told me a lot about the navy's biases and beliefs about itself: the Senior Service, it's known as, and they very much identify with that name. So much outrage at the RAF wanting to be in charge of airplanes, and getting funding that should really all go to the navy because the navy is the true defender of the realm. Which is not entirely false: anyone who wants to get here has to cross the sea, and anyone who wants to get here in large numbers has to cross the sea in boats, and stopping them is very much the navy's reason for existence. And they did it once, spectacularly, defeating the French invasion fleet at Trafalgar, with their great heroic admiral organising the battle brilliantly and dying at the moment of victory, and wow have they spent the next two centuries obsessed by this, clinging to it as a reason for their existence, and trying to find an opportunity to do it again to gain equal glory a second time around. And it was very clear that especially in WW1, this warped their thinking and their planning, which is why their attempt for a repeat at Jutland was, at best, a stalemate, and very far from the glorious triumph they thought was their due - but didn't have the training, strategy or skills to make happen, owing to being heavily mired in the past.

They did learn this lesson by WW2, where they did not attempt to replay Trafalgar, and instead they do their best to claim the triumph of the dog that didn't bark: the argument runs that the real reason the Nazis didn't invade is nothing to do with the RAF's Battle of Britain, but because the Germans didn't want to face the Royal Navy - and it's a fairly strong argument. But their main work in WW2 was grinding, difficult and focused on the economics of war rather than the drama, protecting shipping from U-boats across the Atlantic and in the Mediterranean so that food and the materiel of war could reach the UK at all. And they got pretty good at this after a while, due to throwing lots of effort at the technical and strategic ideas involved. Which was mostly convoy work. There's a whole rather dismaying thing about convoys in both wars: the navy hates convoy work because you sit around and wait to be attacked and it's not dashing and heroic and dramatic at all and you just go very slowly - for a warship - back and forth like a bus driver shepherding a lot of fractious cargo ships until someone attacks you. In WW1 the RN really didn't want to do it even though it was very clear that convoys work amazingly well at protecting merchant shipping compared to letting them go on their own and the navy just wandering around looking for trouble, and it took them a long time to agree to do it. In WW2 they did go straight to convoys, though they had an equally hard time persuading the Americans that they also needed to use convoys once they joined the war; there seems to have been a frustrating period after the US joined in when the RN would escort ships up to American waters and then leave them, and since the Americans didn't convoy them the rest of the way, the U-boats immediately sunk hundreds of merchant ships that had been safely convoyed across the rest of the Atlantic; eventually the US navy agreed to convoy the ships, though it wasn't clear whether they ever agreed to black out coastal settlements (this is important because otherwise the silhouettes of ships are clearly visible against the coastal lights). Anyway, there was that and then the business of getting everyone back into Europe for D-Day and onwards, but again, the navy are obviously a little frustrated that this was clearly the army's moment of glory rather than theirs.

From 1945 onwards, the navy's big enemy has been Whitehall, trying to persuade the government to disgorge enough money to build ships and crew them even though there is nobody particular they're intending to fight, and Redford and Grove make a lot of arguments that you can tell have been made in government offices about how if you want to do anything military anywhere what you need are ships, not airplanes or armies, and so please give the navy more money. Watching the story slowly approach to discussions I hear on the news now, about the point of aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines, was interesting: naturally the navy is always on the side of more ships and more money. An interesting read all around. The funniest bits were where the author interrupts his usual fairly dry style to explain that in this particular operation, everything the navy did was perfect but unfortunately the army/the RAF/Churchill/Whitehall/the Americans/someone else who was definitely not the navy fucked up their part of it so the operation wasn't a success. One of those I'll grant them, but apparently every time an operation involving the navy went wrong it was someone else's fault!


And I also reread The Cruel Sea, which remains THE book for the Battle of the Atlantic and also for adorable levels of shippiness between the captain and first officer of the ship. Every bit as good on a reread, and it was great fun to see models of the Flower class corvettes in the Navy museum after that.


Berlin: Imagine a City, Rory Maclean
I picked this up thinking it was an ordinary history book. It really wasn't, but once I got used to what it was, I enjoyed it a lot. It's a biography of Berlin as told through the fictionalised life stories of a couple of dozen Berliners over time. Unsurprisingly, it's very 20th-century heavy: the book is 400 pages and we get into the 1900s a little past page 100. The individuals who make up the book are mostly real people, though a couple are fictional or semi-fictional (ie people for whom history has left a name and not much else, or people invented as a stand-in to fill a particular category Maclean wants to explore).

The author's presence is quite strong in this book, there are parts that are fictionalised versions of his own Berlin experiences over the years, and the authorial voice and choices and decisions are all very prominent in the book - though oddly there were times when it felt like he was doing himself down. He includes Marlene Dietrich and David Bowie because in various capacities he worked with both of them and was evidently utterly starstruck by both, especially Bowie, and I was not so interested in his hero-worship, if that makes sense; if I'd wanted to find out about David Bowie I'd be somewhere else, I was here wanting this author's voice. His account of Kathe Kollewitz's life was particularly poignant and I am now looking forward very much to seeing her statues in Berlin - though I was moved to tears dozens of times in reading the book, the history of Berlin is the history of horror upon horror and people making their lives in the midst of that. The early chapters in particular did bring home to me just how war-ravaged central Europe was in relatively recent history, compared to the UK; I hadn't actually registered that Napoleon had occupied Berlin, and I also learned a lot about the Prussian kings and Frederick the Great. Absolutely a book to make me even more excited about our upcoming trip.


Olive Bright, Pigeoneer, by Stephanie Graves
The cover of this depicts a young woman, pigeons, a Lancaster and a Spitfire: there was no chance I wouldn't pick it up. It was a frustrating book, alternating between very good bits and rather weak bits and with a heroine whose essential personality was much less defined than any of the other characters'. But I enjoyed reading it anyway, because it had a WW2 setting, spies, a murder mystery and pigeons, so it was not hard to persuade me to like it. Our heroine runs a prize-winning pigeon loft and is hopeful that the National Pigeon Service is going to show up any day now to recruit their pigeons for war work. But instead her pigeons are recruited by the SOE who are training at a nearby stately home. spoilers for the plot )


In Love and War, Liz Trenow
A sweet read about three women heading to Ypres in 1919 to find the graves of their loved ones. This was also a bit on the sentimental and predictable side, but fairly well-researched and did a decent job evoking the return to the battlefields and the start of battlefield tourism. The author clearly did her homework about Toc H - complete with an extended cameo from Rev Tubby Clayton - and also about some of the process of identifying graves. And I liked all the main characters and the way their experiences of travel to the battlefields changes them. Workmanlike and well done.
runpunkrun: combat boot, pizza, camo pants = punk  (punk rock girl)
[personal profile] runpunkrun posting in [community profile] fandomcalendar
Photograph with added text: Female Relationships, at Fancake. Four old Nepalese women sit together on a low brick wall, their feet dangling, most of them barefoot, their shoes kicked off below them. They're dressed in loose patterned fabrics in various shades of red and the mood is relaxed.
[community profile] fancake is a thematic recommendation community where all members are welcome to post recs, and fanworks of all shapes and sizes are accepted. Check out the community guidelines for the full set of rules.

This theme runs for the entire month. If you have any questions, just ask!

TV Talk: On the Sly

Jun. 3rd, 2025 09:23 am
yourlibrarian: Sneaky-misty_writes (SPN-Sneaky-misty_writes)
[personal profile] yourlibrarian posting in [community profile] tv_talk

Laptop-TV combo with DVDs on top and smartphone on the desk



Do you regularly watch any shows you wouldn't like to admit to other people? If so, no need to specify what the show(s) is, but what makes you reluctant to have that known? And if you don't, have you encountered this with anyone else?
spikedluv: (summer: sunflowers by candi)
[personal profile] spikedluv
I hit Walmart and the Feed Bag while I was downtown and got in a short walk around the park. I stopped by the vet (to pick up Ti's special dog food) and the library (to return a book) on the way home. I got in another short walk with Pip and the puppers in the afternoon.

I did a load of laundry, emptied the dishwasher and ran another load, then emptied ~that load (I hate emptying the dishwasher, but I was on a roll!), did the usual amount of hand-washing dishes, scooped kitty litter, and mowed the lawn.

I read more in Network Effect, watched an HGTV program, and talked to mom on the phone. Also, while I haven’t seen any fawns yet, Pip saw some deer running around frantically when he got close to the orchard to mow (so he left), which means there are probably more than one fawn hidden up there in the tall grass!

Pip had leftovers for supper (thanks to the BBQ chicken quarters, we had plenty, lol) so I didn’t have to cook. I made myself a ham sandwich. I’m not generally a fan of ham sandwiches, but they’re tasting really good to me lately.

Temps started out at 48.7(F) and reached 72.2. We had sun all day, with a slight breeze. I didn’t need a sweatshirt when I mowed, but I did retain my long-sleeved t-shirt. It was really a beautiful day.

i should be packing

Jun. 3rd, 2025 12:42 am
tsuki_no_bara: (Default)
[personal profile] tsuki_no_bara
first, happy slightly late birthday to [personal profile] amberdreams! fabulous artist and generally nifty person. (and i was lucky enough to get her as my bigbang artist twice. it was very exciting.)

dancing boys: *tango*

and yes, one of them does have a rose between his teeth. :D

in other news my laptop desperately needs to be cleaned. oy.

in other other news i should be packing.

anyway. i know it was a week ago but i hope the americans in the audience had a nice long memorial day weekend and that the non-americans in the audience had a very chill monday. my sister and i went to new york to see a show (the outsiders which i'm mixed about) and eat a lot and see cousins and go on a walking tour of surviving gilded age mansions and check out the metropolitan museum (superfine: tailoring black style which was educational and fascinating and had some really cool clothes) (zoot suits!). fun was had, pictures were taken, seeing cousins is always fun. we met cousin n and his girlfriend s for dinner sunday night and sat in the restaurant for three hours and yes we kind of kept ordering food but at no point did anyone try to rush us out. (cousin n is the brother of cousin j who had the birthday party the weekend before so we'd just seen him and s but because they live in north new jersey and they're fun to hang out with we saw them again.) and for breakfast on monday we met cousin m who's the daughter of cousin s who lives in arizona. (there will be a quiz later. :D ) cousin m is getting her master's at columbia where the academic situation is a little tense, let's say. cousin m is not down with the way columbia basically rolled over and showed its belly to mango mussolini - the only thing capitulation gets you is more demands from the maladministration and a school full of anxious, unhappy students and faculty - she's thinking about going for a phd but her mom would like her to go somewhere slightly less fraught. but she wants to stay in the city. so we'll see. she looks like her mom, talks like her mom, gestures like her mom - it's kind of adorable but mostly uncanny. we get to see her once a year so it's always nice when it happens.

the outsiders won a tony for best musical last year, and some of the actors were nominated for best actor/best supporting but none of them won and honestly my sister and i were not surprised. i loved the music and the sound effects and the lighting design, and the choreography was good, and the set design was inventive (in one scene the socs drive an actual car out from offstage), but i think i imprinted too hard on the movie - and i've seen it too many times - to really appreciate a stage adaptation. and i still think it was a weird choice to turn into a musical. they added some character stuff (which i'm also mixed about) and changed a thing about the ending and while i did like it and i'm glad we saw it i'm not 100% sure i'd unreservedly recommend it. maybe if you didn't know the source material. i wonder if se hinton has seen it and if she has what does she think.

and then we came home and my roommate was gone to visit a friend of hers in idaho so i had the place to myself all last week and it was soooo nice. i signed the lease to the new apartment and am currently collecting estimates for movers and i really should be packing but ugh. there's a tiny part of me that wants to wait for my roommate to move out at which point i'll have more space but she's moving the 19th and i'm moving the 28th and i'm going to need more than nine days. so i can't do that. i've filled four boxes so far, yay, altho to be fair one of those boxes was never actually unpacked when i moved in here. ahem.

this past saturday i went to my sister's to eat chinese food (better this time) and (re)watch mission: impossible - dead reckoning part one in preparation for mission: impossible - the final reckoning. i'm excited for the last one and am having a hard time believing it really is the last one. maybe i should watch some of the earlier ones.

and last week was commencement week at the u which meant a. no one was around because b. it was all graduations all the time and thus c. it was VERY QUIET. i may or may not have left early on friday. i like seeing all the kids in their gowns and mortarboards and graduate hoods and everything. i don't go to any of the graduations because there's no reason to but i like the glimpse of pageantry.

and tuesday a week ago i got a haircut and it's short and i'm pleased.

speaking of graduations, kermit the frog gave the commencement speech at the university of maryland. imagine having kermit speak at your graduation. no word on whether or not miss piggy was there to cheer him on.

and this is slightly old news, but enjoy some photos of the annual cheese rolling in gloucester (the uk gloucester, not the north-of-boston gloucester). whoever gets to the bottom of the hill first wins the rolling cheese (because of course) and the winner of the men's race was a german guy who said "i risked my life for this. it's my cheese." i'm not going to argue with him. that hill is steep.
full_metal_ox: Escher’s “Print Gallery” as a rotating TV image. (TV)
[personal profile] full_metal_ox posting in [community profile] fancake
Fandom: “Dark Lady” (Cher song), Barbie
Pairings/Characters: F/M; F vs. F; Narrator/Narrator’s Partner, Narrator & Madame Fifi (with Madame Fifi/Narrator UST?), Madame Fifi/Narrator’s Partner
Rating: Teen and Up
Length: 3:24
Content Notes: Major Character Death, anti-Romani stereotyping (including the bad word), (toy) Clothing Porn, corny boomer music, dominance-jockeying, infidelity, hootchy-kootch dancing, love triangle, murder, occultism, psychic malpractice, (toy) Scenery Porn, please tell us the cat survived?
Creator Tags: cher, darklady, barbiestopmotion, stopmotion, animation, megotoys, barbie

Creator Links: (YouTube): [youtube.com profile] 74renren; (Instagram): [instagram.com profile] Warrencito

Theme: Female Relationships, Fanvid, Old Fandoms, Non-AO3 Works, Unconventional Format & Style

Summary: A stop motion tribute to the Cher hit “Dark Lady” done with vintage Barbie and Cher dolls with other special guests.



Reccer's Notes: The list of Content Notes should suffice to explain why this song was embraced by a particular sort of overwrought 70’s kid (1); Wright reimagines the cartoon music video that aired on The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour.

(1) Me, for example. Disclaimer: the song has become a guilty pleasure in retrospect not because of its melodramatic nature, but because of the realization that Romani probably caught a lot of grief over it.)


Fanwork Links: Dark Lady by Cher Dollmation, by Warren Wright.

[ SECRET POST #6723 ]

Jun. 2nd, 2025 04:21 pm
case: (Default)
[personal profile] case posting in [community profile] fandomsecrets

⌈ Secret Post #6723 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


01.


More! )


Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 28 secrets from Secret Submission Post #961..
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
xinger: (Default)
[personal profile] xinger posting in [community profile] chenqing_100
Title: 从泥到天|from earth to heaven
Author: [personal profile] xinger
Word Count/Drabble Type: 100
Character(s)/Ship(s): Lan Wangji, Wei Wuxian
Rating/Warnings: T (major character death, but he gets better)
Summary: 人们就是这么说的,但蓝湛却相信,所有的心灵都会重生。|This is what people say, but Lan Zhan believes every heart can live again.

drabble )
full_metal_ox: A National Geographic cover mock-up, with three marigolds in an analogous orange-yellow color harmony. (Nature)
[personal profile] full_metal_ox posting in [community profile] common_nature
Taken on 21 June 2024 at 20:33 US Eastern Daylight Savings Time, as I hurried up the street through the break in the rain.





My limited equipment does the scene nothing even remotely resembling justice: neither the gauzy rainbow-sherbet luminosity nor the grand theatricality of the skyscape, with the air of a vintage book illustration or a meticulously painted film backdrop. A detail I particularly like is the small dark cumulus cloud at bottom center that suggests a person astride a charging (pig? bear? huge dog?)
spikedluv: jessica at typewriter (msw: jessica at typewriter by sarajayech)
[personal profile] spikedluv
I have rewatched the next few MSW episodes and I wanted to share some thoughts with you. The eps in question are: 2.10 Sticks and Stones, 2.11 Murder Digs Deep, 2.12 Murder by Appointment Only and 2.13 Trial by Error.


all comments back here )


What are your thoughts on these eps?
spikedluv: (summer: sunflowers by candi)
[personal profile] spikedluv
I took the dogs for a short walk, did a load of laundry and the usual amount of hand-washing dishes, and scooped kitty litter. I paid a couple bills online and placed a puzzle order for mom.

I started Network Effect, watched some HGTV programs, and attended a group birthday party at my sister’s house (including for my niece Leandra and nephew Ian). That’s what I made the cabbage salad for; mom made pulled pork.

Temps started out at 43.1(F) (it was cool enough in the house that I turned the furnace on to take the chill off; it was definitely a hot tea morning) and reached 59.9. On one end of the spectrum we had some sprinkles, on the other, the sun tried to peek out a few times. (The next three days are supposed to have temps of 66, 76, and 86! Talk about a quick turn around.)



Mom Update: My mom had a visit with her oncologist on Friday. She liked him. He told her that the cancer was Stage 1, so she'll need a less aggressive treatment of chemo. They're going to wait until after the surgery (coming up on Monday, June 9) to set it up, but he's thinking two weeks on, one week off for six weeks. (Does that mean only four weeks of chemo total? Or six weeks of chemo around the one week off?) Also, half the usual dose. Hopefully the side effects won't be as bad. (He also said that, no matter what, he'd recommend chemo because this is her third cancer diagnosis.)

My mom's next appointment with him is July 14, so I'm guessing the chemo won't start until after that? Do they normally wait 4 weeks post-surgery to begin? Do they need her to be drain-free?

He also told her that the procedure would be a long one. I joked with mom that we ~do want the surgeon to put everything back together correctly.

Photos: House Yard

Jun. 2nd, 2025 12:17 am
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith posting in [community profile] common_nature
These pictures are from Sunday, but it's after midnight, so the post says Monday.

Walk with me ... )

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