[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


Classic SF was chock-full of dubious ideas; Martin Gardner supplied the antidote.

One Way to Immunize Yourself Against Pseudoscience and Other Nonsense

reading wednesday

Wednesday, February 18th, 2026 02:50 pm
tozka: Dawn (from Buffy) reading a book with a starry background (buffy dawn with stars)
[personal profile] tozka
It's another rainy/drizzly/grey day here and that means I get to cuddle with the cat under a heated blanket and read books! Yay!

I'm currently 150-ish pages into Sailing Alone by Richard J. King which is a deep dive into the memoirs/adventures of people who sailed across oceans on their own.

It's more about the reasons why someone would do that than a how-to, and each chapter or so focuses on a single sailor but ALSO compares their experiences to other sailors and how they're all intertwined-- including how they've influenced the author's life. It's really well-written; I love travel memoirs/travel histories in general, but this book takes pains to highlight people besides the big names (aka mostly rich white men), so I'm even more interested! And now I have a huge pile of books added to my TBR, too.

I also recently put down George Sand's A Winter in Majorca, which is a travel book about her time spent in Mallorca in the 1800s. Despite a decent first chapter I found it fairly boring (it's one of those ones where the traveler hates nearly everything about the country/people who live there), and the physical book is a pain to read because of the extremely tight binding, so I decided to give up on it for now. Maybe I'll come back to it as an ebook, or maybe I'll just read one of her other books instead.
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


Only witches hunt demons, all witches are women, and Uroro cannot be defeated by any woman. Uroro feels entirely safe, right until the world's first male witch defeats him.

Ichi the Witch, volume 1 by Osamu NIchi & Shiro Usazaki (Translated by Adrienne Beck)

☁︎ February... + My abscense

Wednesday, February 18th, 2026 03:11 pm
sunnysunnyday: (faewish_curious)
[personal profile] sunnysunnyday
Hi Dreamwidth girlies! It's been a hot second since I posted. Nothing major really happened to cause this break of mine, just... February is not a very good month for my mental health, so I struggled doing even as much as turning on my laptop (can't really post much from my phone). I'm starting to do a little better, though I still admittedly struggle. Enough about that though, I have a lot of art to share, as well as some fic snippets maybe. And there's more...
My original project is happening! Me and my husband [personal profile] whimcollector are going to work on a game, if we can get our shit together enough, that is. I thought long and hard about my original projects, and I've decided to not abandon Follow the Power Lines. It does still carry a lot of weight to me, but...it doesn't have to be this way. As I grew up, this project took many shapes and forms, growing up alongside me, but I feel my perception of it got too stagnant. I was reminded that I can just...change it again. I don't have to stick to the vision of me from 10 years ago (it probably wasn't as great as I remember it being anyway; I have much better storytelling skill now).

I'm already working on some character redesigns for this, as well as perhaps some key art just to settle on an art style, but some things are clear: I want it to be an RPG Maker game, and I want it to be set in an abandoned power plant, and I want it to be scary.

I'm not abandoning fanworks though. My brain has a hard time multitasking like this, I'll admit, but the variety would be good for me I think. I have a few fanfics in the works (and yes, they're still about the Faewish Sprites), as well as some fan art to post on here which I will do in the few coming days!
I think I will be all right, I just need to survive February and March. In April my mental state usually starts getting a little better...so there is hope. Thank you for your patience whoever is reading this! Now to recall my tagging system on here...

Deadloch S2 Trailer

Wednesday, February 18th, 2026 12:41 pm
feurioo: (Default)
[personal profile] feurioo posting in [community profile] tv_talk

Release: March 20

SummaryDetectives Dulcie Collins and Eddie Redcliffe are in Darwin to investigate the death of Eddie’s former policing partner Bushy. However, their plans are soon diverted when a body part is discovered in a remote town called Barra Creek. With the Northern Territory police force focused on a large-scale search for two missing backpackers, Dulcie and a very reluctant Eddie are tasked with identifying the John Doe.

Sticky, sweaty and juggling comprehensive thrush infections, the detectives find themselves embroiled in a world of crocodile-fuelled tourism, overstretched Indigenous rangers, cagey locals, and seven-metre prehistoric predators – all of whom call Barra Creek’s stretch of land, and water, their home. As the humidity builds, and Eddie and Dulcie dig deeper, more questions arise for our duo – not only about the case, but the many secrets that lie beneath the surface of this small town.

For anyone who loves cabbage, try this out.

Wednesday, February 18th, 2026 01:40 am
pattrose: (Default)
[personal profile] pattrose
Unstuffed cabbage rolls.


INGREDIENTS

2 lbs lean ground beef
1 large onion, diced
1 garlic clove, minced
1 small cabbage, chopped. (I use a large cabbage)
1 cup rice
2 (14 1/2 ounce) cans diced tomatoes
1 (8 ounce) cans tomato sauce
1/2 cup water
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 teaspoon sea salt

DIRECTIONS
In a large skillet or dutch oven, brown the ground beef and onions. Drain.
Add the garlic and cook an additional minute.
Add remaining ingredients.
Bring to a boil, cover, reduce the heat and simmer about 25 minutes or until the cabbage is tender.

Let me know if you tried it and liked it.
tags:

Topics for talk February

Tuesday, February 17th, 2026 11:07 pm
pattrose: (Beauty Beast1)
[personal profile] pattrose
Things I'm Grateful For:

Gosh, this could take all night. 😂 I'll list the first thing I'm grateful for. That would be my father, a chef who taught me to cook and bake every Sunday night from when I was 11 until I was 18. He gave me his first cookbook when I got married and moved out of our home. I still have it, and still use it for many things. Once we got a house we had Sunday dinners at our place, unless we took the meal to my mom and dad's house and cooked it there. My folks were thrilled to have Sundays off. But I had to really learn to make smaller meals for us alone. On Sundays, I made dinner for 11 of us. That's what happens when you have six brothers and a sister, plus your parents.


What are your most grateful for?

[Challenge #183: Stoic] Doctor Who: 'Undue Attention'

Tuesday, February 17th, 2026 10:12 pm
but_can_i_be_trusted: (Mom's Fudge)
[personal profile] but_can_i_be_trusted posting in [community profile] vocab_drabbles
Title: 'Undue Attention'
Fandom: Doctor Who
Author: [personal profile] but_can_i_be_trusted
Rating: G
Word Count: 100
Characters/Pairings: The Doctor, unspecified companion
Warnings: None
Notes: Crossposted to [community profile] anythingdrabble, [community profile] 100words, and [community profile] drabble_zone
Summary: "Why is everything so drab here," I asked.

Undue Attention )

Not quite 365 days questions February

Tuesday, February 17th, 2026 10:54 pm
pattrose: (Default)
[personal profile] pattrose
18. What is your favourite shellfish dish (if you have one)?

I love almost all, but I love lobster and shrimp. I make this wonderful Alfredo sauce that I use for both of these delicious items. I like them cold, hot, diced into a casserole, and any other way anyone cooks it. And this leads me to ask if anyone has a favorite shrimp or lobster recipe. If you do, please share with me. Thank you.

2026 60 questions meme

Tuesday, February 17th, 2026 10:44 pm
pattrose: (Default)
[personal profile] pattrose
What are you looking forward to this week?

I’m looking forward to having a day off. I’m helping a friend with her mom. Monday through Thursday from 11:30-1:30. So it’s just two hours a day. It’s not the end of the world but I get tired easily. That’s why it’s only two hours a day. And on Friday hubby and I are going out and celebrating. 56 years sounds like forever. And it has been. 😁🌹

as he hits the floor he sighs: 'what a morning'

Tuesday, February 17th, 2026 09:16 pm
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
[personal profile] jazzfish
I made English muffins ("or, as they say in the UK, muffins") yesterday, so I can make more frozen breakfast sammiches. Today I decided to have a proper Eggs Halifax, which is like a Benedict but with smoked salmon instead of back bacon. In the event the hollandaise broke. This has been the usual fate of my attempts at hollandaise for the last N years. It's frustrating because it -used- to work. Still tasted okay but the texture was way off.

Since making tricky food was going so well I decided to turn the egg whites from the hollandaise into divinity. (If you're not from the South, divinity is the answer to the question "what if meringues were candy?" It is somewhat nougat-like and somewhat fluffy and usually involves pecans, though I haven't had much in the way of pecans since the death of my great-uncle who had a pecan orchard.) This involves cooking a bunch of sugar to hard-ball / 260F and then adding it into a running mixer with whipped egg whites. After an hour my sugar was stubbornly refusing to go over 245F. I turned up the heat a little more and the sugar boiled over. Thankfully I grabbed the pot so it did not boil over onto the burner, just onto the stove top, but while I was salvaging that the sugar crystallized. I swore and tried again: added more water and some additional sugar and stuck it back on the burner to re-dissolve and re-cook. This time careful additions of heat got it up to 250F and more threatened boiling over, so I called it good and poured it into the mixer. Adding injury to insult: while scraping the last quarter or so of the sugar into the mixer I managed to splash some of it onto my hand. Molten sugar is a nasty business: it glues itself to your skin and keeps burning. Thankfully my mixer is right next to the sink. No permanent damage done but I ended up with several blisters, some of which had the tops ripped off when I tried to remove the sugar.

I used to hate and avoid dealing with candy-making / molten sugar. Now I seem to have reached a point where it is my nemesis, and I will conquer it or get really annoyed and minorly scorched trying. Anyway, the divinity is in its pan and setting; should be edible sometime tomorrow.



Twenty-seven and a half boxes of books (down one and a half from last time), and what looks to be about twenty-five boxes of games (down three or so from last time). Plus one box of CDs and two-plus of DVDs. My obsession with the Arrowverse means that DVDs no longer fit neatly into two boxes. Oh well.

Now to pack up all the random miscellaneous stuff that doesn't need to be out while the place is on the market, which will take probably less than ten boxes and probably twice the time. At least I have plenty of time: my preferred movers aren't available until early-mid March.

no gaming log today but ...

Tuesday, February 17th, 2026 10:58 pm
asuraid: Sylvie, an original character, squinting with a blush across their face. (squint)
[personal profile] asuraid
an oomf talked about maplestory private servers. i never grew up on maplestory, i did play it for a bit but not for a long time ... and i wanna at least give the older school servers a try bc many old MMOs to this day that are still alive are so overbloated with systems that it's atrocious (looking at YOU perfect world international) so ... trying it out of sheer curiosity!!!

... probably a terrible idea to install them when im exhausted from being sick but

Daily Check-In

Tuesday, February 17th, 2026 05:59 pm
starwatcher: Western windmill, clouds in background, trees around base. (Default)
[personal profile] starwatcher posting in [community profile] fandom_checkin
 
This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time) on Tuesday, February 17, to midnight on Wednesday, February 18. (8pm Eastern Time).

Poll #34236 Daily Check-in
Open to: Access List, detailed results viewable to: Access List, participants: 22

How are you doing?

I am OK.
12 (54.5%)

I am not OK, but don't need help right now.
10 (45.5%)

I could use some help.
0 (0.0%)

How many other humans live with you?

I am living single.
10 (45.5%)

One other person.
8 (36.4%)

More than one other person.
4 (18.2%)




Please, talk about how things are going for you in the comments, ask for advice or help if you need it, or just discuss whatever you feel like.
 
tags:
[personal profile] merryfortune posting in [community profile] 100femslash
Title: Bust Up to the Beat
Fandom: You and Idol Pretty Cure
Ship: Kai Chiyo/Shigure Kokoro
Prompt: 32. Music
Warnings: none
Rating: T
Length: 1,870
Synopsis: Kokoro attempts to teach Chiyo the choreography of Heart Revolution.

Ao3 // Dreamwidth // Tumblr

Prompt 2762: No Eyes

Tuesday, February 17th, 2026 10:21 pm
immortalje: Typwriter with hands typing (Default)
[personal profile] immortalje posting in [community profile] dailyicons

Today's prompt is: no eyes



• You have 2 days time to submit an icon for this prompt (in other words, until prompt 2764 gets posted)!
• Prompt 2760 has been closed.
• If you have any questions regarding the prompt, feel free to ask in a comment.
• To submit an icon you simply reply to this post with the following information:
Icon:
Claim: (only necessary if it's a specific claim)
Status: (e.g. #1/10 - number of icon completed/table size)

Pre-formatted
[personal profile] rionaleonhart
In the stage version of Christmas Carol Goes Wrong, Chris canonically refuses to keep the Cornley Playhouse heated, and everyone complains about how cold it is. It seemed like a great excuse to write self-indulgent fanfiction!

As this is based on the 2025 stage version of Christmas Carol Goes Wrong, be aware that some details may not match up with the original 2017 television version.

The title's not great, but the only other thing I could think of was Baby, It's Cold Inside, which would be considerably worse.


Title: Backup Heating
Fandom: The Goes Wrong Show (well, technically Christmas Carol Goes Wrong)
Rating: G
Pairing: slight everyone/everyone
Wordcount: 1,600
Summary: During rehearsals for A Christmas Carol, Chris won't allow anyone to use the heating. Clearly, the Cornley Drama Society is just going to have to huddle for warmth.

Backup Heating )