(no subject)

Jun. 13th, 2025 02:34 am
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly posting in [community profile] agonyaunt
Dear Carolyn: I made the horrible mistake of developing a relationship with a parent of one of my child’s friends that ultimately led to me cheating on my boyfriend of two years. The affair lasted about two months. My boyfriend found out and confronted me about two months ago, at which point I owned up to it, albeit after much resistance and hedging on my part.

The affair is over because my affair partner broke up with me upon finding out I had not broken up with my boyfriend as he had demanded. I want very much to repair things with my boyfriend. This whole experience has shown me how artificial the affair was and how I was willing to throw away my relationship for what was ultimately a facade.

The past two months have been hell — being insulted and called horrible names, constant sarcasm, throwing things I’ve said back in my face, refusal to hear my apologies, etc. My boyfriend has since started dating other people after telling me he’s going to do to me what I did to him: try other people out. How long do I keep fighting to fix this and make amends? At this point, I just agree with everything he says about the affair, even if it’s not true, just to avoid another daily argument. My hope is almost gone, I’m defeated, and he seems to take joy in being mean and hurtful toward me. Do I cut my losses? When I ask him if he even wants to try to repair this, he flips the question back on me.
— “I’m so sorry, but please stop beating me up”


Read more... )

Murderbot 1x06

Jun. 12th, 2025 09:08 pm
sholio: Made by <lj user=aesc> (Atlantis city)
[personal profile] sholio
Spoilers )

Edit: Also a spoilery thing about show vs trailer.

More spoilers )
mecurtin: WW2 We Can Do It! poster, showing white woman in red-and-white-spotted bandana, rolling up sleeve of blue work shirt and flexing arm, saying We Can Do It! (resistance)
[personal profile] mecurtin
Indivisible #WhatsThePlan meeting of May 12 2025
This is pretty much just C&P from my bluesky liveblog, plus links.

cut for length, US politics )
I really admire people who can write *most* of what happens in a meeting while they liveblog, Ezra & Leah both talk *really* fast & I just pull out highlights, really. whoosh.

Please reblog, signal boost. We are, as Leah says, in a time of autocratic breakthrough, and one way we fight back is to have as many people as possible, in as many places as possible, out peacefully on Saturday. We need to be *everywhere*, with *everyone*. Take American flags, they belong to *US*, not him.

US Politics: Transcending parody

Jun. 12th, 2025 08:35 pm
petra: A cartoon penguin standing in dandelions thinking, "Dandelion break." (Bloom County - Dandelion Break)
[personal profile] petra
After illegally ordering the National Guard and the Marines to violently end protests in California, 47 went to the theatre to see Les Misérables.

Can we please fire the people scripting this season of the United States of America? Some of these choices are so asinine I think they're consulting genAI for their scripts, and no one is editing them.

Oh, wait, that's what the politicians are doing to make fucking laws.

I'm going to go read amnesia fic now and think, "I wish that were me."
oursin: A cloud of words from my LJ (word cloud)
[personal profile] oursin

Okay, am v depressed by all the ongoing hoohah around AI and the people using it rather than their own brains, quite aside from Evil Exploitation aspect -

- but on intellectual pollution, having been moaning inwardly, banging the floor with my ebony cane and beating my head on my antimacassar for a considerable while over the awful errors that appear in prose because the word is correctly spelt but it is THE WRONG BLOODY WORD.

That the person who created that text has not picked up on, sigh, groan.

Insert here a lament for the decline in copy-editing and proof-reading, which might have spotted this sort of thing and corrected it.

I am a little worried that we are now have generations who do not know what words actually mean, because spell-check has not said anything .

This is brought to you by having encountered the term 'itinerary' deployed for something that is not, as far as I can see, a journey, but the programme/timetable for a meeting. Perhaps there is some sense of a progression to be made???

(The mermaids signing, each to each: that is why I cannot hear them.)

(no subject)

Jun. 12th, 2025 09:48 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] ase!

Contemplating July activities

Jun. 11th, 2025 11:57 pm
sholio: Carol Danvers glowing (Avengers-CM Carol glowing)
[personal profile] sholio
After a couple of years of really struggling with mood and creativity, between burnout and family issues and god knows what (and I know I've been hard to deal with in fandom, at times), things are suddenly ... good! I can write again, I'm signing up for exchanges, whatever has been blocking me has gotten a whole lot better.

July is my birthday month, therefore Best Month, obviously, and I would really like to try to do some kind of "post a short fic every day" thing if I can make it work. Unfortunately I'm suffering a dearth of appropriate challenges, because of course now that I want one and have the mental bandwidth to do something with one, daily month-long prompt challenges and/or bingo card challenges for July are nowhere in sight. The closest thing is July Break Bingo, but I've asked for cards for this before, and I just ... never really do anything with them; I appreciate that it exists, but I think I need more of a - I don't know, social element to it, I guess? Less open-ended, more directed? Their cards just don't really click with me somehow. And I can't find a Tumblr prompt/whump/whatever themed promptfest thing for July.

So I'm kicking around a few different ideas. Why not throw it out to a completely nonbinding poll?

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 30


What should I do for July?

View Answers

A custom bingo card/prompt list created (by me) from all my favorite tropes
17 (56.7%)

A personal challenge to finish older inbox prompts/unwritten prompts from past fests
8 (26.7%)

Find a prompt list from a previous (non-July) fest that I didn't do at the time, and use that
6 (20.0%)

Ask my flist for new prompts until I get 31 of them for fresh inspiration
11 (36.7%)

Run a comment fest over at the Biggles comm
7 (23.3%)

Something else that I will suggest in comments
0 (0.0%)

petra: CGI Obi-Wan Kenobi with his face smudged with dirt, wearing beige, visible from the chest up. A Clone Trooper is visible over one shoulder. (Obi-Wan - Clones ftw)
[personal profile] petra
Make an ass out of u and me (1431 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars - All Media Types
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker, Depa Billaba/Obi-Wan Kenobi/Shaak Ti/Quinlan Vos, Aayla Secura & Anakin Skywalker
Characters: Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Aayla Secura, Quinlan Vos, Shaak Ti, Depa Billaba
Additional Tags: A+ Jedi Pedagogy, Polyamory, POV Outsider
Summary:

Anakin has the most boringly perfect master in the entire Jedi Order. Some masters go on interesting missions; Obi-Wan does diplomatic missions where he sits at a table and says, "Hm, well…" a lot till he gets his way. Some masters have showy, dangerous lightsaber styles; Obi-Wan does Soresu, which is as purely defensive as anything anyone has ever devised. Some masters are fully-rounded people who drink and laugh and dance; Obi-Wan stays in with his three best friends and talks about philosophy all night, because he is a perfect Jedi, and so are they.

musesfool: being hung over is like winning the lottery, except they pay you in regret! (paid in regret)
[personal profile] musesfool
ZOMG what a day!!!

I was in a training this morning when around 10:30 am, my internet went out and didn't come back in 30 seconds the way it usually does. And my cable was out also. But Spectrum said there was no outage in my area, so it was a me problem. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And so I was in the middle of texting with a Spectrum chatbot (or maybe it was a real person?) when the cleaning ladies showed up but the bell wasn't working and then they called me and I didn't respond because I was in the middle of chatting with Spectrum (doing all the things I had already done, i.e., unplugging and re-plugging in the modem and router) with no success, but luckily I realized who was calling so I went and opened the door and they began their work and I went back to chatting with Spectrum.

The CSR/bot told me they would schedule the next open appointment and I was like sure, while thinking, "am I going to have to into the office for my meetings tomorrow? I need to be here when the tech comes but it probably won't be until Friday or Monday?" and then they texted me the appointment and it was for TODAY at NOON so of course I was like, YES, I WILL. TAKE IT. And then he showed up at 11:55 am!!! And told me there was a major outage in my area, so it was unlikely that he could do anything, but I was getting texts saying that the outage should be fixed by 1 pm. No, we mean 1:30 pm. No, we mean 2 pm. (It came back for me around 1 pm.) And finally at 4:05 pm a text saying the outage was over.

Meanwhile, yesterday, we were supposed to be sending materials out for a meeting tomorrow, but I hadn't received them by 5 pm yesterday, and I hadn't received them by 9 am this morning, and while I was in training and then offline, my boss was poking the CFO who was like, "we don't have them, should we cancel?" so my boss was texting me like, "We should cancel!!!" and I was like, that's fine but we can't reschedule for next week since the board members are not available, and then the board meeting is the week after, so we would need to get approval by unanimous written consent. But then the CFO is like, "I'm calling you!" and I'm like, "I have no internet, I can't get into any files, please don't!" But she was already calling, so I spoke with her and she was like, "We got the documents! I'm reviewing them! I will let you know when it's ok to send!" and I was like ok.

A little while after that, my service had returned and I discovered another committee member had sent out an invite to a meeting on Friday with incorrect information while trying to accept the correct invite for Friday's meeting? I don't even know, but it didn't replace the correct invite on anyone's calendars, so I just declined it. Then she emailed saying she was now getting all these RSVPs and I was like, "can you cancel it? It shouldn't affect the correct invitation, which I will then forward to you." So she cancelled it, but it looked to other people like the meeting was cancelled, even though the correct invitation remained on their calendars. So I had to send a teams message internally and an email externally to explain to everyone that the meeting was not cancelled, it was just a technological glitch of some sort. Idek.

I ate breakfast after the cable guy left, so I didn't eat lunch, and at around 3:30 I was like, "the CFO still hasn't given me the go-ahead to send this out - they are going to complain about getting a complicated set of documents less than 24 hours ahead of the meeting!" to my boss and then the email telling me the materials were good to go dropped into my inbox, so I was able to send them out.

Then while I was trying to catch up on email, a nasty looking bee (hornet? wasp?) started hovering around my window, and as you may recall, I had problems with them somehow getting into my apartment last summer, so I immediately slammed down the window and put the AC on, even though it was comfortable enough with the fan with the window open. I appreciate bees, but not in my living room! Especially not ones that look mean.

And then I read that Brian Wilson died. And Sly Stone died earlier this week. And I thought that was sad. #legends only #RIP

*
oursin: Photograph of small impressionistic metal figurine seated reading a book (Reader)
[personal profile] oursin

What I read

Gail Godwin, Getting to Know Death: A Meditation (2024) - rather slight, one for the completist, which I suppose I am.

Robert Rodi, Bitch Goddess (2014): 'told entirely through interviews, e-mails, fan magazine puff pieces, film reviews, shooting scripts, greeting cards, extortion notes, and court depositions', the story of the star of a lot of dire B-movies who has a later-life move into soap-stardom. I hadn't read this one before and it was a lot of campy fun.

TC Parker, Tradwife (2024) - another of those mystery/thrillers which riffs off true-crime style investigation - somebody here I think mentioned it? - I thought it went a few narrative twists too far though was pretty readable up till then.

On the go

Apart from those, still ticking on with Upton Sinclair, Wide Is The Gate (Lanny Budd, #4), boy I am glad that I am reading these in e-form, because they must be monstrous great bricks otherwise. In this one he actually ventures back to Germany, his marriage starts to crumble, he continues his delicate dance between all the various opposed interests in his life while managing to get support to the anti-Nazi/Fascist cause, Spain is now in the picture, and I have just seen a passing mention to Earl Russell being sent down for his Reno divorce (that wasn't quite the story, but one can quite imagine that was what gossip might have made of it 30 years down the line).

Up next

New Literary Review.

The three books for the essay review.

I think more Robert Rodi might be a nice change of pace from Lanny's ordeals.

Wednesday reading

Jun. 11th, 2025 05:44 pm
queen_ypolita: A stack of leather-covered books next to an hourglass (ClioBooks by magic_art)
[personal profile] queen_ypolita
Finished since the last reading post
Heaven on Earth, with lots of beautiful photos and other illustrations, and a brief history of the construction process of each cathedral included. Short chapters made it easy to read one chapter at a time, but on the whole, it was a bit bulky and heavy to hold.

Embers by Sándor Márai in Carol Brown Janeway's English translation of the German translation (the translator's name not included in the English edition) of the Hungarian original. That was something of a surprise to me, for the English edition to be a translation of a translation rather than of the original text. For about the first half, I rather enjoyed what seemed to be a slow build-up to a significant moment, but for the second half, I was getting increasingly irritated by what seemed to be a life wasted on getting hung up on something he was pretty sure had happened but he wasn't going to discuss, until now, but not really even now. The title did seem rather appropriate.

Currently reading
Nothing, so I obviously need to pick up something new.

Reading next
As above, at least I've got a few options on my shelves. I'm not sure how much reading I'll do over the next few days as my mum and sister are coming to visit.

(no subject)

Jun. 11th, 2025 09:49 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] angevin and [personal profile] spaceoperadiva!

Whumpex reveals!

Jun. 10th, 2025 11:19 pm
sholio: (Cute cactus)
[personal profile] sholio
[community profile] whumpex revealed tonight! (And H/C-ex is supposed to in a few days, if it's not delayed. All the hurtcomfort all the time.)

I got:

Staying Power (Babylon 5, Londo & Vir, 4200 wds)

I asked for (among other things) Londo reacting to something bad happening to Vir, or Vir taking a hit for him, and my Mysterious Gifter took me up on it most delightfully!

As usual, there is a fic or two of mine running around loose in the collection as well.

(no subject)

Jun. 11th, 2025 01:09 am
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly posting in [community profile] agonyaunt
Dear Pay Dirt,

My brother and his wife recently bought a broken-down house. They asked my husband, who runs his own construction company, for a quote to fix it up. My sister-in-law brightly chimed in, “and we expect the friends and family rate.” Well, my husband immediately drew a hard line.

He responded that he would prefer not to engage in a business agreement with family, as it can lead to misunderstandings, and he recommended another company. Well, my sister-in-law completely lost her mind.

She screamed at him and said that they would never have bought the property if they knew he wasn’t going to help them. It seems that they, without any encouragement, expected him to offer his services at a significant discount and are now in a bind because they cannot afford the reconstruction and will make a huge loss if they sell.

Now my entire family is being drawn into a massively acrimonious discussion. My brother and sister-in-law are claiming we “betrayed them” and left them bankrupt. I get daily calls from my weeping mother begging my husband to reconsider, while my father has threatened to beat him up. It’s insane. I don’t want to lose my family, and I can’t ask my husband to change his mind, so what do I do?

—Built on Sand


Read more... )
lannamichaels: Astronaut Dale Gardner holds up For Sale sign after EVA. (Default)
[personal profile] lannamichaels


Title: And If You're Under Him, You Ain't Getting Over Him.
Author: [personal profile] lannamichaels
Fandom: Vorkosigan Saga
Pairing: Ges Vorrutyer/Aral Vorkosigan, Ges Vorrutyer/Serg Vorbarra
Rating: R
A/N: The title is from New Rules, sung by Dua Lipa, written by Caroline Ailin, Emily Warren, and Ian Kirkpatrick.
Archives: Archive Of Our Own, SquidgeWorld

Summary: Ges Vorrutyer has ex-boyfriend problems.


This has languished in Scrivener since 2019... )

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