isabellerecs | Reading

Holdin' on so tight to this status
It's not real, but I'll try to grab it
Keep myself in beautiful places
Paradise is in my hands🎤
Lady Gaga - 911

Current Mood: hungry

scripsi

I haven’t read that much in September, or rather, not finished much. I don’t even want to know how many books I have started…

The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno Garcia. I’ve enjoyed everything I have read by this author, and I enjoyed this one as well. It has three timelines, but I found those easy to keep apart, and the three protagonists each with their own voice. There is a young Mexican woman, Minerva, who in the 1990 studies at an old New England university. She writes her thesis on a mostly forgotten horror author, Beatrice Tremblay who attended the same university in the 1930s. The second timeline is her diary Minerva gets access to, where Beatrice describes the disappearance of her best friend. And last there is the story Minerva’s great grandmother Alba told her about what happened on the family farm in the 1910s. All the stories are linked, and like all of Moreno Gracia’s books I have read there is something supernatural in action. Here it is witches. Even though I guessed from the start who the antagonists were, i still found this a very interesting read.

The Five by Hallie Rubenhold. I’m not a big fan of true crime, and I’m not especially interested in Jack the Ripper. But The Five isn’t about him, but about the five women he killed. Rubenhold is a historian and she has made a thorough research into their life. The only thing she doesn’t describe is their murders, she cuts away at the last sighting, and returns to talk about their families reaction. Because most of them had families who cared deeply for them. And what I found very interesting was that she could find no proof any of them, apart from the last victim, was a prostitute at the time they were killed. Most of them were homeless, and all of them poor and alcoholic. Evidently Rubenhold has received a lot of flack, even outright hate, for daring to claim Jack the Ripper didn’t kill prostitutes. She has also received critique for not describing the actual murders, but personally I liked that. I thought it was a good book, and I found her descriptions of the five women thoughtful and interesting.

Story of A Murder by Hallie Rubenhold. Because I liked The Five, I went on to read her book about the Crippen murder. I knew the basic fact about it, mostly because Agatha Christie was inspired by it in Mrs. McGinty Is Dead. Again I thought Rubehold did a good job describing Belle Elmore, the victim, Crippen and his mistress Ethel Le Never, and she has clearly done her research. But I just can’t find this murder interesting, even if it was deeply tragic, so I can't say I enjoyed this book much. But if you are interested in true crime, I think you might like it.

ysabetwordsmith

Today is cloudy and mild.

I fed the birds. I've seen a few sparrows and house finches.

I put out water for the birds.

.

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

Starting now, the Poetry Fishbowl is open! Today's theme is "Witches and Wizards." I will be checking this page periodically throughout the day. When people make suggestions, I'll pick some and weave them together into a poem ... and then another ... and so on. I'm hoping to get a lot of ideas and a lot of poems.

I'll be soliciting ideas for witches, wizards, other magic users, mentors, elders, teachers, students, adventurers, explorers, damsels/gentlemen in distress, historians, partners, leaders, dark lords, the Chosen One(s), superheroes, supervillains, teammates, fantasy species, ethicists, activists, queerfolk, other unusual fantasy folk, studying magic, doing magic, enchanting artifacts, breaking curses, breaking rules, exploring new territory, meeting new species, upsetting predictions, twisting tropes, flipping stereotypes, expecting the unexpected, researching, revising theories, parenting, teaching, adventuring, leaving your comfort zone, discovering things, conducting experiments, observation changing experiments, experiments changing paradigms, adapting, improvising, troubleshooting, cleaning up messes, cooperating, taking over in an emergency, saving the day, discovering yourself, studying others, testing boundaries, coming of age, coming out, running away from home, going off the rails, subverting fate, learning what you can (and can't) do, sharing, preparing for the worst, fixing what's broke, upsetting the status quo, changing the world, accomplishing the impossible, recovering from setbacks, returning home, other fantastic activities, witch's huts, wizard's towers, magical schools, castles, ruins, stone circles, dungeons, dragon lairs, Underhill, the forest primeval, underwater, underground, liminal zones, kitchens, campfires, libraries, laboratories, apothecary shops, supervillain lairs, makerspaces, nonhuman accommodations and adaptations, farmer's markets, magical lands, foreign dimensions, other phantasmagoric settings, unusual magical systems, pointy hats, robes, wands or staves, cauldrons, herbs, crystals, potions, magical artifacts, quests, time periods other than medieval, governments other than monarchy, dragons, unicorns, enchantments, reversals, contradictions, conundrums, puzzling discoveries, sudden surprises, inventions that change everything, time travel, travel mishaps, the buck stops here, trial and error, polarity, weird food, secret ingredients, supplements that turn out to be metagenic, intercultural entanglements, asking for help and getting it, enemies to friends/lovers, interdimensional travel, lab conditions are not field conditions, superpower manifestation, the end of where your framework actually applies, ethics, innovation, problems that can't be solved by hitting, teamwork, found family, complementary strengths and weaknesses, personal growth, and poetic forms in particular.

Currently eligible bingo card(s) for donors wishing to sponsor a square:

Fall Festival Bingo Card 10-1-25

Among my more relevant series for the main theme:

The Adventures of Aldornia and Zenobia is about live happy lesbians in a quirky fantasy world.

Clay of Life is Jewish fantasy about a blacksmith and a golem.

A Conflagration of Dragons has unforseen disasters and cultural upheavals.

Gloryroad Crossing is the weird village where adventurers go to restock.

Kande's Quest is sword & soul with caucasian-inspired demons.

Monster House is suburban fantasy with a diverse household, where the line between truth and fantasy isn't always clear.

Not Quite Kansas has a helpful demon.

The Ocracies features all the political systems other than monarchy.

One God's Story of Mid-Life Crisis follows Shaeth as he works on becoming the God of Drunks.

Path of the Paladins is low fantasy about paladins trying to restore a world gone to ruins.

P.I.E. is urban fantasy about paranormal investigations.

Polychrome Heroics has primarily superpowers, but magic is described as "sorcery" there. Antimatter & Stalwart Stan are a cross-cape couple, and Antimatter essentially does science-based magic. Aubrey the Alabaster is another sorcerer. Eric the Elven King has interdimensional refugees.

Practical Magics is low fantasy with a prosaic focus.

Quixotic Ideas is contemporary fantasy where magic integrates with modern life in positive ways.

The Ursulan Cycle is genderbent King Arthur.

Yellow Unicorns is a quirky fantasy setting where the only yellow things people can see are the unicorns.

Or you can ask for something new.

Boost the signal to reveal a verse in any open linkback poem.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: creative

james

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reeby10

It’s that time of year again! :D

If you’d like a card from me, just go to the form below to leave me your physical mailing address and answer a few optional questions about what kind of card you’d like and what I should put in the card. You can decide whether or not you want stickers, glitter, and/or a personalized ficlet. Feel free to request a card even if we don’t talk or follow each other. The more the merrier!! The form will close on December 9th.

Reeby’s Holiday Cards

finch

Remember when I said my nibling was getting here in four weekends?

Well, yeah, now it's this weekend.

I have not gotten remotely everything I wanted done, but there's a place for him to sleep and a mattress and we can figure everything else out I guess.

At some point I started clearing out the vanity in our room because Bug wants to get a tree frog and that seemed like the best surface to put a vivarium on, and then I also cleaned out the secretary dresser because we were considering moving it into the other room for Nibling to use, and a few months ago I switched to floor sitting so I had emptied out my desk and....

...well the takeaway is there's a lot of stuff in our bedroom, unsurprisingly, and I'm trying to actually sort/declutter it instead of just... popping it all away again.

I've been categorizing and binning things in useful ways but I just hit the realization that I need a bigger bin for notebooks unless I want to put the larger ones somewhere else, which I don't. And that I have painting stuff stored in multiple bins right now, and also I have sewing stuff in multiple bins. Both of those started because I had loose stuff wherever and I was trying to corral it, but I don't have enough space in the current storage to put it away, so those both also need to be re-sorted into different bins.

(And the ephemera/junk journal stuff is in a temporary box but I don't have a good larger category to put them in, and zines keep ending up in with it Because Paper and that's Not Correct, and then I realize my memory bin could probably stand to be switched out too, but if I'm doing that I should figure out how to solve the problem where Moth's memory box doesn't close correctly, and and and...)

And I know there are other things I should be spending my time on, and I also wish that I had a more "aesthetic" alternative to the sturdy, stackable plastic bins I end up using (they come in multiple sizes that work together, though!) except that more aesthetic ones are generally not clear and not matching and I don't have the space to properly store things aesthetically yet and I need to accecpt that.

But regardless my brain is stuck on "I cAN't PuT tHe ThInGS Aw4Y c0rREcTLy!!!11!" and it is profoundly unhelpful.

Hope y'all are doing better than I am in this department! And honestly I'm not that bad off, I promise. This is just the thing driving me crazy this morning.

muccamukk

So I've got "Paint the Town Red" by Doja Cat stuck in my head. What about y'all?

tozka

Hello! Once again I found tabs and links I’d saved for way too long without sharing (this time since MAY), so here, for you:

Misc. Interesting Bits

I really liked this story of attempting to bicycle from Bangkok to Chiang Mai with a cat.

World Encyclopedia of Puppetry Arts fulfills my love of very detailed, very intensely documented weird subject matter, and now I share it with you all.

Opinion: Put Your Magic Where Your Mouth Is, activism from a witchcraft/pagan POV.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

Crossposted from Pixietails Club Blog.

tarlanx

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princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: distressed

spikedluv

We were woken up by coyotes again. Twice; coming and going. When the noise died down the second time, there must've still been something out there because Ti did the high-pitched warning call.

I did not go downtown today because of mom’s doctor appointments.

I did a load of laundry, hand-washed dishes and ran a load in the dishwasher, went on several walks with Pip and the dogs, cut up chicken for the dogs' meals, and scooped kitty litter.

I watched some HGTV programs.

Temps started out at 48.9(F) and reached 85 (according to Pip). It was very warm out. Temps are going to drop in the coming days, first day 70s, then 60s, then 50s, then back up into the 60s for several days before it’s all 50s all the time. Not great, but at least it’s not 30s. Yet.

Mom Update:

Mom was so-so today. ( more back here )

shipperslist

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sholio

Continuing to use the Whumptober prompts basically as general prompts ... (I already wrote Algy & EvS in an elevator a while back for a different prompt fest.)

No. 7: “Tell me that you’re okay, and I’m fine.”
Trapped with the Enemy | Elevator | Pushed Beyond Breaking Point

Biggles & EvS, 1950s era, gen (570 wds)

( 570 wds of elevators under the cut )

ysabetwordsmith

More LLM fun! Miserable fail at running a vending machine business simulation

This is quite interesting. Researchers set up multiple LLMs and configured them to run a vending machine simulator, described as "Agents must balance inventories, place orders, set prices, and handle daily fees – tasks that are each simple but collectively, over long horizons." Basic business process.
[---8<---]
Basically it was a demonstration of how such large-language models are terrible for long-term runs and shows their ability to hallucinate and make poor decisions.

It is obviously a bad idea to replace intelligent human employees with sloppy programs.

Current Mood: busy

chocolatefrogs posting in

fandom_icons

You bewitched me. I proposed that very night

scintilla10

Two current spooky season fandom events!

Hotties Haunting the Narrative: a festive femslash ficathon, hosted by

elasticella
Leave prompts and create fills for femslash pairings, featuring literal and/or figurative ghosts!

At

ficortreat, you can offer treats (fic, doodles, recs, cat photos, or anything you like!) to visitors (or a selection of visitors, such as your followers). You can also wander around the neighbourhood to see what others are offering. You can participate however you feel comfortable.

vaporwaving posting in

dwrp_icons

CANON: League of Legends
CHARACTERS: Ekko, Ahri
ADDITIONAL INFO: Taken from the Ties That Bind 2KX0 cinematic
CREDIT TO:

vaporwaving

here @

vaporwaving

ysabetwordsmith

Saxicolous -- living or growing among rocks.

What a useful word! It can apply to mosses, lichens, most alpine plants, and some animals such as pikas, ibex, or snow leopards who also favor rocky terrain.

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

Today I'm making caramel apple crisp in a muffin tin. I diced up a Jonathan apple with a little lemon juice, then divided it among 4 cups, then added a spoonful of apple cider caramel sauce to each. The crumble topping is quick oats, flour, brown sugar, pumpkin pie spice, and butter cut together until crumbly. It's in the oven baking now. :D

EDIT 10/6/25 -- Well, that turned out super awesome. It's like a warm, diced caramel apple in a bowl. (Note that if you prefer your caramel apples with nuts, the crumble topping will accommodate sliced or chopped nuts.) Happily there are 2 more Jonathans and a whole carton of caramel sauce in case we want more.