unamaga | Reading

questions from The Friday Five

1. Do you enjoy reading?

Great big YES on this one

2. What is the first book you remember reading?

I remember reading from The Book of Knowledge. I was fascinated by the stories based on myths and legends, and learned how to use the index pretty damn fast so I could pick out the sections I wanted to read. I was fairly young, and a lot of the words were over my head, but those stories kept me entertained for hours.

3. Who is your favourite author?

Unfair question. It shifts according to my reading appetite. I wish I could say That One! That's my favorite! But that's impossible.

4. What is your favourite book?

Another impossible-to-answer question. I have many many favorites. All well-loved. Picking just one is painful.

5. What is the last book you read and the first you'll read next?

I just finished Ode to the Half-Broken by Suzanne Palmer. As for next on my reading list, the world is wide open.

Book index

siria

Robby's Terrible Horrible No Good Actually Awesome Day
The Pitt | Jack/Robby | ~1500 words | Thanks to

sheafrotherdon for audiencing.

(Also on AO3)

( 'Your first declarations could do with a little more finesse,' Jack said. 'C'mon, do over.' )

runpunkrun

Photograph of a mix tape. Just Like Canon, A Fancake Mix 2026 is written on the cassette's label alongside some heart doodles.

fancake's theme for June is Just Like Canon! These fanworks are so close to canon even their progenitors can't tell the difference. This includes works that are strongly rooted in canon, feel like they could be new canon, or are even meant to be a replacement for canon, like virtual seasons or fanmade supercuts.

If you have any questions about this theme, or the comm, come talk to me!

melagan

Aw, crap. Gate World has announced they've axed the new Stargate series

Stargate fans can’t seem to catch a break

I really thought they had their act together this time.

runpunkrun

It's like Martha Wells heard me when I said the thing I like the least about this series is all the descriptions of walking and was like CHALLENGE ACCEPTED. This book is almost entirely one long walk. Even Murderbot was complaining about it.

A return to form, where, much like the first four books in the series, that form is a novella where Murderbot is in a situation and must get itself and its assigned humans out of it. This time the situation is an escort mission, only, unlike a video game, the people Murderbot is escorting can think for themselves and won't walk off a cliff if left alone for a second. They're interesting characters and, unlike many of the other humans Murderbot adopts, I had no trouble keeping them straight, but they're not Murderbot's main people, so despite Murderbot's increasing self-awareness of its emotional state, this book lacks a lot of the deep feels that, say, Exit Strategy or Network Effect provoke. Instead, I mainly found it interesting for the worldbuilding and the exploration of the different ways people live in the Corporate Rim.

I loved seeing Three again, but, of course, I wanted more Three, and really I missed Murderbot's interactions with the humans, augmented humans, and "bot pilot" who know it best. Because the thing I like the most about this series, and I said this too, is Murderbot and the way it's learning how to be a person and building relationships despite not knowing how to do either of those things.

Contains: child harm, the usual violence and swearing (though not as much as usual!), character using a mobility device.

siria

Chances Thrown
The Faculty | Stan/OMC, Casey | ~5000 words | Thanks to

sheafrotherdon for betaing.

(Also on AO3)

( Herrington, Ohio. 2023. The more things change, the more they stay the same. )

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

Quick note that post-by-email and comment-by-email is (sometimes?) failing silently without actually posting right now! I'm pretty sure this is related to last night's shenanigans and will be fixed once Mark can finish the full fix for it, which he's working on, but if you've posted or replied by email in the last 24 hours, fish it out of your sent folder to check if it posted!

EDIT: This should be fixed as of around 7AM EDT! We *believe* everything that was stuck in the plumbing has been sent along to your journal or the comment thread it was meant for; it's definitely not where it was stuck anymore, at least.

siria

shake this world off my shoulders
The Pitt | Jack/Robby | ~32,000 words | Thanks to

sheafrotherdon and

trinityofone for betaing, and thanks also to

kass for some research help.

"You... you took home Baby Jane Doe?"

Together, Robby and Jack grasp a new chance at family.

siria

Over at

robbyabbot, I went old school and posted a ship manifesto for Jack/Robby, aka the pairing that is currently eating my brain.

( Hap and Leonard, Season 1 )

( Josh Johnson: Symphony )

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

Robby has managed to put in a temporary fix for the site errors and things failing to refresh or not showing up where they should! The permanent fix is going to need Mark's experience, and unfortunately -- seriously, this literally never fails -- Mark has been on an international flight all day, because of course he has. (Never. Fails. He and I are not allowed to both take vacation at once.)

The site will work just fine with the temporary fix in place, things just might be a little slow here and there. We'll keep you updated.

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

We're aware of site traffic issues and are working to fix them for the people who are having problems! (The tactics the damn bot traffic uses are endlessly shifting, and they're really good at looking like real traffic, sigh.)

melagan

I finished!

Table #10 - Touch
01. first touch	02. touching your soulmate leaves fingerprints	03. touching your soulmate feels good	04. touching your soulmate lets them feel what you're feeling	05. you can only touch your soulmate

This challenge intrigued me from the start. I'm so glad I was able to finish it.

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

It's been a while since we've done a full code push rather than just hotfixes for bugs, so we are well overdue! Depending on availability, we're aiming to do one sometime soon; we'll let you know specifics once we've worked out good timing for everyone who needs to be available.

However! The reason it's been so long is we kept trying to get some of the stuff that's pending to "really finished" instead of just "mostly finished", and then we once again looked around and went "oh no, this is a really big code push with a lot of changes". Those make us nervous, because while we do a lot of testing ourselves, y'all are really creative in how you use the site and we inevitably find a bunch of edge cases when we let you loose on new code with your real-world data!

So, if folks have some spare time in the next few days, it would be a huge help if you could spend half an hour or so using the site the same way you normally do but with the "Site-Wide Canary" beta features flag turned on. Canary mode is a sort of "live testing" mode: it's your real data, but running the most up-to-date code.

Canary mode always does have a few glitches -- there may be missing text strings or errors about missing database properties, which is a limitation of how we run it. We don't need to know about those, but anything else weird that you run into, leave a comment with what you were trying to do and the error message you got.

I'll repeat that the "here be dragons" caution that's on the beta features page: some things may be broken, so don't use it for when you're doing something important. But a few more eyeballs on it before the push will help the push go more smoothly for everyone.

For folks who want to concentrate on what's changing, we haven't finished the second code tour of what's going to be in this push, but the ffirst one has a good chunk of what's going to be going live. (We'll get the second half done ASAP!)

runpunkrun

Amazon gave me a month of free Prime a while back and so I loaded up the app and saw what there was to see and discovered that Deadloch's second season was out, despite hearing literally nothing about it on the social medias. I started it and it had even more shouting than the first season somehow, but it also read the room and noticed that ACAB, actually, and really leans into it.

The mystery felt a little messy, but I'm there for Eddie and Dulcie (and Cath)(in that order) and it delivered on that, and on its commitment to queerness, introducing Leo, a stealth them (they are stealthy, the them part is explicit), and having Eddie explore their identity in the loudest she/they way possible.

I think the Kates did a reasonable job of spreading the ACAB around, showing how being a cop was eroding Dulcie's humanity, that Eddie's disdain for protocol isn't just a fun quirk of her personality but a real problem, and how Abby isn't able to do her job properly due to all the incompetence—some of it her own—and then just going the extra mile and making every cop in the show flat out lazy, racist, and/or corrupt. They did not do it with any subtlety either, which is either a plus or a minus, depending on your level of media literacy.

But I had to suffer through advertisements in the middle of my prestige streaming, and even for free that made me angry because no way am I paying to watch Amazon's programming and then also paying through watching ads. Also the closed captioning on Amazon's Roku app is just for shit. Tiny white letters with no background or outline and no way to change it. I missed a lot because I often couldn't even see the text. At one point, I'm pretty sure the closed captioning had Leo saying, "Slow down. I'm wearing flatforms." Which had me googling to see if there was a type of shoe I'd never heard of out there. There was not.

siria

Not my Circus
ER | Carter, Bob; Gen | ~1500 words | Episode coda for 1.10. Thanks to

sheafrotherdon for audiencing.

(Also on AO3)

( 'I'll help you with your English for the board exam.' Carter and Bob learn new ways to speak to one another. )

melagan

Music For Men Who Move in Silence (youtube link)

Why does this make me think of John Sheppard? OH.

runpunkrun

Cal has come to think of Ardnakelty as his home and thinks he finally sees it for what it is—all the tangled connections between the people who have lived on the land for decades, whose families have worked it for centuries, and the ways those connections influence what justice looks like, how it's meted out, and by whom—but being accepted by the locals as more than a blow-in means Cal's finally seeing the real depths of the machinations, and who's behind them.

These books are deep and chewy because as Cal learns about the village and the people who live in it, the layers of Ardnakelty are slowly peeled away, one by one, and there's always some intensely troubling shit between those layers. This book, like the others, was super tense and I was constantly bracing myself for what was going to happen next. But unlike the others, it took me two weeks to read. For some reason I felt like it didn't have quite the same sense of urgency as the others. This is more of a slow motion disaster, but I was still worried about the characters. Lena, in particular.

I highly recommend the series, but you have to read the first two books before picking this one up. Out of all three, The Hunter, the second, is still my favorite—this one did not have enough Trey—but like for good, normal teenaged reasons. She's not part of the problem this time.

Contains: Discussions of suicide and depression, fear of animal harm.

siria

( The Faculty )

( Mountain Rest )

( No One Saw a Thing )

melagan

Author Suzanne Palmer wrote one of my favorite short series Bot 9 **

I'm also ridiculously fond of Fergus Ferguson, interstellar repo man and professional finder, and following his adventures in the four-book series The Finder Chronicles.

In the first place, having the guts to name your hero Fergus Ferguson brings me joy. Now, she's started a new series which looks equally interesting.

Ode to the Half-Broken

Two more days until I can get my hands on it. *checks clock*

Now, for a spoiler-free Project Hail Mary question.

Did you think reading the book before seeing it had an impact on how you viewed the movie?

Conversely, if you read the book after seeing the movie, what did you think?

** rumor is there'll be a fourth Bot 9 coming🎉🤞

edited to use Rocky icon

melagan

A lot of us migrated from LJ to Dreamwidth. When this article link popped up on The Rec Center it gave me a piece of history I hadn't known and I wanted to share.

The Linux of social media—How LiveJournal pioneered (then lost) blogging

Like many eventual household names in tech, LiveJournal started as a one-man project on a lark, driven by a techy teenager with too much time on his hands.

this might be the place

i could get used to this lifestyle

The Friday Five - books

2629 / Fic - The Pitt

Fancake's Theme for June: Just Like Canon

Stargate News

Platform Decay (Murderbot #8), by Martha Wells

2628 / Fic - The Faculty

(no subject)

2627 / Fic - The Pitt

2626 / Hap and Leonard, S1; Josh Johnson: Symphony

(no subject)

(no subject)

Five soulmates table

Testing needed in advance of code push!

Deadloch (S2)

2625 / Fic - ER

Music

The Keeper, by Tana French

2624 / The Faculty; Mountain Rest; No One Saw a Thing

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