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prisca posting in

It's Friday, and still about two days to go until the end of week 2. Posting for week two officially ends Sunday, September 21 17.00 UTC. There is a grace period until the week is finally called 'closed'.

We have four participants so far, and two completed bingo lines. In the team challenge, we already have four participants; Team Alpha has finished the first bingo line.

Check out the Google Sheet Scores here, but remember that the final points will get counted on Sunday. If you find a mistake, don't hesitate to contact me.

stonepicnicking_okapi posting in

sweetandshort

Title: things left unsaid
Fandom: BTS
Rating: Gen
Length: 100
Pairing: RM/Jin
Prompt: quiet
Summary: Unable to sleep in the barracks, Namjoon remembers Seokjin's gift.

( Read more... )

lightofdaye

I need a new chair cos the old one collapsed
I need a new computer because wins 10 support is ending
I need to write six more days of stuff for GYWO this month.

I was off last week, did I do any of these things? nope.

selenak

In which it's very useful to know the numbers of pi by heart. Or eye.

( What have you done? )

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: Bamberg

shipperslist

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cmk418 posting in

sweetandshort

Title: The Soundtrack of Freedom
Fandom: OZ (HBO)
Character: Tobias Beecher
Rating: Teen
Prompt: Quiet
Word Count: 230
Summary: Beecher, alone at night, shortly after parole

( The Soundtrack of Freedom )

mulhollands posting in

graphics

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mulhollands posting in

fandom_icons

Sherlock (mostly of Moriarty), Fleabag, Andrew Scott in Hamlet, Andrew Scott, Winona Ryder, Gillian Anderson, Little Mermaid, Moonstruck, Alice in Wonderland.

here

Current Mood: blank

bluedreaming

I wrote a random drabble today for

fan_flashworks and when I popped over to Ao3 to see what the book fandom is called there, I was SHOCKED (read this with full hyperbole) to discover that there are way more Anne/Gilbert fanworks than Anne/Diana. Gilbert! That whatever-you-call-a-love-interest-insert! That wet blanket! Puddleglum has him beat!

Gilbert may or may not have hidden depths and great character or whatever but the books (which I probably read over three times all through) did not really demonstrate that at all. I remember reading a great essay on Anne as well as the Emily of New Moon trilogy about how the interesting (male) love interests inevitably get shelved, and the MC ends up with the cardboard cutout. Wish I knew where that was; I’d like to read it again.

Anyway, I refuse to read the books anymore because they killed off my best beloved Walter, so maybe there are secret hidden depths that older-me could decipher. Whatever.

goddess47 posting in

sweetandshort

Title: Power to the People
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Pairing/Characters: Richard Woolsey, Rodney McKay
Word Count: 493
Content Notes: none
Prompt:

no_true_pair September 17 - Rodney McKay & Richard Woolsey - energy

Also for

sweetandshort September 2025 prompt - light

Link to fic: Power to the People (on AO3)

spikedluv posting in

fandom_on_dw

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pauraque

In this sequel to The Three-Body Problem, it's now out in the open that an alien invasion is coming. But the aliens' doomed planet is far away and this is hard SF, so they're not expected to reach Earth for 400 years. The book follows a mostly new set of characters and international organizations as they try to work out a long-term plan to somehow defend Earth against a force with vastly superior technology and no interest in negotiating.

This book is 500 pages long and I don't think it had to be. I found the first half a real slog, as it mostly focused on plot elements that I felt were not plausible (not for speculative reasons, but for No Real Person Would Ever Do This reasons) and, surprisingly, a romance. I don't know if Liu got the criticism that the first book didn't care about people so he decided to put in a love story, or what, but the way he handles it is extremely strange and unrealistic and made me question whether he had ever interacted with a woman in his entire life, so maybe he should have stuck with ideas over people.

It also suffers from a rather flat and awkward English translation that calls way more attention to the fact that it is a translation than the first book's did. (They had a different translator for this one, but brought back Ken Liu for book three.) That's not the book's fault, but it definitely affected my experience of it.

That said, the second half did pick up a lot, and leaned much more heavily into Liu's strengths as a writer: the inventive worldbuilding and the show-stopping cinematic set pieces. I did enjoy that and it brought me back to what I liked about the first book. Liu has a distinctive knack for making even catastrophic and grisly events weirdly fun to read about because of how hard he commits to them and how intricately he constructs their details. Anybody can write about stuff blowing up in space, but not everybody can show exactly why and how it's blowing up, zoom into individual pieces of debris and out to massive chain reactions, and have a reader like me, who is often bored by action scenes, attentively following along every step of the way.

many spoilery thoughts

The main thing I thought was implausible was the concept of the Wallfacers. Basically, the UN chooses four people and gives them each unlimited resources to develop and enact a plan to defend against the aliens. There's no oversight and anything they do is legal and unquestioned. This is supposed to counter the aliens' ability to remotely surveil Earth; if the plan takes shape in one person's head, then the aliens, who are said to not understand secrets and deception, won't find out about it.

Many things about this concept invite skepticism, but my biggest issue is how the presentation glosses over the complexity of human societies. Liu assumes that essentially everyone in the world will tacitly support whatever the UN does, with no significant debate or objection, even when it directly affects people's lives. He has the Wallfacers using so many resources for their massive defense constructions that it's crushing the global economy, and people just twiddle their thumbs and let it happen. He often paints global reactions with an extremely broad brush, like "people felt/thought X" as though all of humanity were a monolith. I can't speak for countries other than my own, but in this situation I can confidently say that half the people in the US probably wouldn't even believe the aliens were real, and even if they did, they sure as hell wouldn't put their faith in four people arbitrarily selected by the UN to save us all.

Sometimes Liu seems to know there are problems with these ideas, as when the narrative flashes forward a couple of centuries and the Wallfacer project is seen as one of the many "silly" things attempted during the initial panic over the invasion. Then again, Wallfacer Luo Ji's plan does basically work in the end, so I wasn't really clear on what the book was trying to say here.

I did enjoy the future worldbuilding, where most humans live in underground cities of massive treelike skyscrapers that hold up the ceiling where a holographic sky is projected. He did a slightly better job here of showing that cultures aren't all the same; a lot of people in the future are "hibernators" who were put into stasis in the past at various times and reawoken later, and their attitudes often differ from people who are native to the future. This also helped build a believable friendship between Shi Qiang and Luo Ji, since they're the only two people they know from their time. (I think this is the only compelling human relationship in the book, certainly better than whatever the hell was supposed to be happening with Luo Ji and the imaginary woman he made up in his head who turned out to be real somehow... It's a long story.)

I was also interested in the concept of the accidental generation ships. Almost the entire Earth fleet is destroyed by an alien probe that they thought was harmless, and the few crews that barely escape believe (understandably) that returning to Earth is suicide and that continuing to flee is humanity's best hope for survival. This entire scenario plays out over the length of a chapter, but whole books could be written about it! The part where they realize that they have too many people to keep alive long-term and some will have to be sacrificed read like an homage to "The Cold Equations," though I don't know if that story is as well-known among Chinese SF readers.

Of course it's also consistent with the book's generally pessimistic outlook on space exploration. I did know before I started reading what the "dark forest" solution to the Fermi Paradox is, but I didn't know the hypothesis was named after the book!! The idea is that the reason we haven't found aliens is that the galaxy is fucking dangerous and any planetary civilizations that foolishly jump around waving their hands and flashing neon signs trying to make first contact only make themselves a target. Aliens are out there, but the ones who have survived are the quiet ones. As a person whose favorite SF canon is Star Trek, this obviously doesn't align with my preferred way of looking at things, but it's internally consistent and not implausible, so I can roll with it.

I am invested enough to read the third book, and looking forward to getting back to a translator who knows what he's doing at least.

spikedluv posting in

bigbangindex

Round Fifteen of

smallfandombang | Small Fandoms Bang, the big bang for small fandoms, is open for Author Sign-Ups!

All small fandoms (once they have been verified as small) qualify, and there is no requirement that you have to have written a long fic before you sign up. The minimum word count is only 10,000 words and we give you plenty of time to get your fic written. All ratings, pairings, and genres are welcome, as are AUs, and crossovers/fusions between small fandoms. Check out the Author Sign-Up post for more information.

A 10,000-word big bang for small fandoms!

FAQ | Rules | Author Sign-Up | Beta/Cheerleader Sign-Up | Affiliate

(Author sign-ups are open now through October 31; Artist sign-ups open November 1st.)

If you love small fandoms, come check us out!

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yourlibrarian

1) Some interesting posts at Henry Jenkins blog about the Peabody Awards process and disruption in the entertainment industry. "So, Peabody meets 3 times face-to-face. And it is an award that is decided across genres and platforms: television, radio, podcasting, and interactive, which is games and VR, etc. And across genre: entertainment, news, documentary, etc. But in particular, it's decided by a unanimous vote of a board of 18...who represent lots of different facets. There's critics, which include academics and TV critics, media executives, writers, and showrunners. ..which is different from a campaign for 26,000 voting members, in which you have no control of what they've watched and what they've not watched...Aziz Ansari was famous for coming to our show and saying, “You know, this is pretty cool. It's like you watch all of our shit, and you just decided it was good, and we didn't have to go to a bunch of weird-ass parties and stuff"

Two other factors: "It's not just celebrating entertainment. It's trying to talk about the ways that popular culture and entertainment can deeply shape who we are and want to be as a people, as empathetic citizens in the world" and "also...is it a story that matters? So, sometimes the craft can be brilliant, but it may not be a story that matters." ( Read more... )

2) A few more notes about Silent Witness as I move into S26. S23 seemed a really unusual season, enough so that I wondered about its production dates. ( Read more... )

3) Watched a documentary on the BeeGees which, like a lot of documentaries, goes very light on the time after their popularity peaked. (That was one thing the Billy Joel and Bon Jovi ones avoided). ( Read more... )

4) A Spy Among Friends was well written and interesting to watch but I kept constantly thinking about the 2003 Cambridge Spies which I saw last year and suspect it's much closer to the truth. ( Read more... )

5) Just a few comments about the Emmys, mostly in how unsurprising it was that Stephen Colbert finally won an Emmy for Best Show more because voters were jolted into a show of support. Yet John Oliver won yet again, twice. (Particular irony given the broadcast was on CBS).

Otherwise can't say it was entertaining and I wish a lot of stuff not involved in handing out awards had been cut. The tribute to Gilmore Girls seemed to really exemplify "too little, too late" since it and so many shows from the WB had been overlooked through sheer snobbery decades ago, when the attention would have done more good.

Poll #33627 Kudos Footer-540

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Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 4

Want to leave a Kudos?

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Kudos!
4 (100.0%)

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lycomingst

Robert Redford died. I always thought he was a better actor than he was given credit for. Too much focusing on the pretty.

selenak

RIP Robert Redford. A fantastic run of movies especially in the 70s as an actor, later as a director never made an uninteresting movie, founded a film festival of several decades running, and to the best of my knowledge never abused his fame and status and instead used both to help others.

Watch on YouTube

Current Mood: sad

tarlanx posting in

sweetandshort

September: ONLY TWO
Prompt: BRIGHT
Fandom: Bright (2015)
Characters: Nick Jackoby, Daryl Ward, Kandomere, Leilah

Bright 01	Bright 02	Bright 03	Bright 04

prisca posting in

sweetandshort

For this challenge, you will have two options to participate.

You are a writer? Then the challenge Sentences might be for you.

I offer you two sentences:
1. Did you know that not all zombies eat brains?
2. I had thought telepathy would be a cool superpower, but that was before I knew of the chaos that lives in every person’s mind.

Your mission, if you want to accept the challenge, is to grab one of the sentences and use it as your story starter or your last line.
You are welcome to use both sentences in one story (as the starter and the last line).
Feel free to change personal pronouns.
Allowed are fics up to 500 words (+ the given sentence)

You are an icon lover? Then the challenge Themes might be for you.

I offer you two themes:
1. dark
2. bright

Your mission, if you want to accept the challenge, is to grab one of the themes and create a minimum of four icons for it.
Icons should fit DW standard (100 x 100 px).

For both challenges: all fandoms, genres, and ratings are welcome, as are original work and real-person work.

You want to mix up both challenges? Go ahead, but stay to the requirements of every challenge.

When posting directly to

sweetandshort, please use a header of your choice and put bigger works under a cut. You can also post your work at any other place, but please leave a header and a link here to keep the community running.

Please tag your work with any appropriate tag.

This challenge runs until September 30, midnight in your timezone.

:::

Challenge Reminder:
10 out of 20
This or That

Dani Rose

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ode to first world problems

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(10 out of 20) Power to the People - Stargate Atlantis (PG)

Small Fandoms Bang: A Small Fandoms Big Bang

The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin (2008)

Announcement: Small Fandoms Bang Open for Author Sign-Ups!

Reading Wednesday

Overlooked Again

Cthulhu fhtagn and other tentacles, part 11

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Raindrops keep falling on my head....

September: Only Two

September: Only Two

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