jazzfish | Others

I don't think I posted about this at the time, but there was an absolute odyssey involved in getting the original batch of B5 script books that I ordered.

The original process was this:

I'd known about the existence of the B5 script books vaguely for a while, but hadn't really thought of buying them before. In October, when I came back from traveling, I googled it and found a massive site called "B5 Books" that had authorized editions of all the B5-related books available, which was a lot of them, not just the script books but tons of other stuff as well.

They had closed yesterday.

But wait! They were staying open through the weekend (like 2 more days) because they'd had technical issues. So I splurged and ordered an absolute ton of books (about 2/3 of the total script books out there, mainly focused on episodes I especially wanted to read about). I would have preferred to order just one to find out a) what the books were like, and b) what their customer service was like, but ... closing in 2 days! So I gave them my credit card info for a quantity of books that I don't want to think too closely about.

A month went by.

I got a shipping notice and a tracking number, and and then a box arrived .... with 2 books in it.

I contacted customer service (a bit nervously, in the hopes they'd still actually answer). To their credit, they were very quick to respond; evidently there was a second tracking email I hadn't received for some reason, for the box with most of the rest of the books in it. (They sent me a free digital book to make up for the emotional distress, too - they were really nice.)

This was back in December, and I was leaving on the 13th, Saturday, so I periodically checked the tracking info for the box. It showed up in Fairbanks over the previous weekend, and showed that it was supposed to deliver on Monday.

Monday came and went. About mid-week, the tracking info showed that it had traveled out of Fairbanks again. (Why??) I had visions of the box going all the way back to the sender for some reason. Meanwhile, I had planned to spend the last couple of days before I left diving into my new books, but as the week ticked down and it continued to tease me ... I guess not. Finally, on Friday, I got an actual "out for delivery" notice, and then a notice that a "pick up at post office" slip had been left. Also, Friday was our last day of actual mail delivery (we'd put a hold on it until after Christmas that started on Saturday and went for 2 weeks, i.e. about the amount of time that the post office will hold a box - you know, this box with $100s of books in it). I was headed to the airport Saturday afternoon, but I figured it should be possible to stop by the post office on the way.

I picked up the mail.

No slip.

I thought, okay, maybe I picked up an early batch (yesterday's? our mailbox is on the highway and both the mail delivery and our collection of it is kind of haphazard) so when Orion got home a few hours later, I asked if there had been a slip in the mailbox.

Nope!

So now my package is on hold at the post office, I GUESS, with no ability to redeliver and our mail delivery not starting until after the approximate return to sender date. We hunted all around the mailbox just in case it had been dropped. No slip.

I ended up printing out the tracking number and taking that to the post office on our way to the airport, and that DID work and they DID have the box and I got it, YAY. (Orion said that the slip spontaneously showed up in the mailbox when he was headed home after dropping me off, so WHO KNOWS what was up with that.)

Anyway, all of that ended up working out in the end, and I enjoyed the books so much that I went on Amazon to see if I could find used copies of the ones I didn't have. I ordered a few more, and I just checked the shipping info and discovered that one of them - from a 3rd party Amazon seller - was sent via Fedex and supposedly delivered on Thursday afternoon, i.e. 2 days ago.

Guess what I don't seem to have!

Orion says that Fedex often leaves deliveries in random places around the yard - he's found them on piles of construction supplies, left at the door of the shop instead of the house, etc. Inauspiciously, it snowed a few inches last night, so everything is covered with fresh snow. Also, it was dark. Still, we took flashlights and went and hunted high and low in all the places that a package might be, ranging from likely (covered with snow beside the door) to unlikely but possible (at the doors of the various outbuildings like the greenhouse, on top of random vehicles in the yard) to the highly unlikely (at our road sign, in our mailbox). Not a single sign of it! I don't know if it was delivered to some other house, mistakenly marked as delivered when it's actually fallen under the delivery truck seat, or if a very soggy B5 book is going to turn up four months later when the snow melts, but seriously, WHAT EVEN. I've never had a book go missing like this in all the time I've been ordering used books off Amazon!

Anyway, further updates from the B5 script books are coming soon, and maybe I'll have this particular book eventually, or maybe not.

swingandswirl

Snowflake Challenge: A warmly light quaint street of shops at night with heavy snow falling.

RL got a little nuts, but I'm determined not to let this fall by the wayside, so have a belated Day 4 post.

Challenge #4: Rec The Contents Of Your Last Page

Any website that you like, be it fanfiction, art, social media, or something a bit more eccentric!

The instructions for this one confused me, and I don't really do social media, so instead, I thought it would be fun to link some of my favourite fic/art exchanges!

Despite my sometimes Cursed Exchange Luck, I really do love taking part in exchanges. They've gotten me some of my favourite fics ever, and pushed me to write things I never would have otherwise. Here's a list of all the exchanges I'm taking part in this year:

fffx

The Five Figure Fanwork Exchange! You get five months to write either 2 5k or 1 10k fic, or equivalent art. (Has the five month period ever stopped me from leaving it until the last minute? Nope. But we live dangerously 'round these parts.)

ficinabox

Possibly my favourite exchange ever. You commit to writing 10k, or doing an equivalent creative activity... but it can be split up into a mind-boggling variety of mediums, from AITA posts to CYOA games to literal knitted things. One year I'm going to lose my mind enough, recipient willing, to write 10k entirely in drabbles.

highadrenalineexchange

The converse of FFFX - you get two weeks to write 10k. I was somehow insane enough to do Pride and Prejudice fic my first go-around with HAX, and the two-week deadline was the only reason I managed to get out of my own head enough to do it, lol.

worldbuilding_exchange

I utterly adore worldbuilding, so it's no surprise that an exchange based on it is my catnip. If the exchange somehow allowed me to nominate JUST the first four Harry Potter books, I'd be in heaven, lol.

rule_63

Genderbends are another of my very favourite things, and the main fandoms I'm in - HP, Avengers, Superbat, Numb3rs, and Star Trek - have amazing potential when it comes to male-to-female genderbends. Plus, honestly, girls are just more interesting, lol.

idproquo

I am a firm believer in, and defender of, idfic. I also live in the AU where Marvel made no movies after the Avengers and Harry Potter is an unfinished four-book series with no movies, lol.

This year, I also want to take part in

seasonsofdrabbles ,

everywoman , if it's running, and

halfamoon . We'll see how things go.

apod_feed

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260110.html

Jupiter with the Great Red Spot

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260110.html

swingandswirl

So one of my friends has been bugging me to read Casey McQuiston's Red, White, and Royal Blue for years.

I resisted, partly because it felt a little too close to RPF for me to feel comfortable (I know posh British men have like five acceptable names but still) and partly because... well, I'm not a fan of the British monarchy, even a fictional version, for very obvious child-of-colonialism reasons.

And then this morning my buddy complained, once again, about the idiot sheltered Tamil Brahmin boy in the RWRB discord's latest terrible take, which was that India does not have racism. (As someone who remembers seeing a front-page ad in the newspaper of record offering a free whitening cream with purchase of soap that had the tagline 'We're sending some compliments your way', AHAHAHAHA.)

So I made a half-joking comment about that I should finally read RWRB so I could join the discord and back her up next time the idiot idioted. And lo and behold, I had a free afternoon and an available copy of the book, so... why the hell not?

And y'all, I feel like such a damn idiot. Because this book, once I let go of my grudge about the names? Was actually really good. The writing is top-notch, the characters are complex while still being fun, and the story balances escapism and realism really well, especially when it comes to the depiction of the monarchy. It's even making me want to see the movie, which is not a thing I say often.

So yeah. Five out of five stars to Casey McQuiston's Red White and Royal Blue, and a reminder to not judge books by their covers, lol.

canyonwalker

As people discuss competing ideas for why the US invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its sitting president last weekend, and even President Donald Trump and his various surrogates offer rotating justifications for it, I keep coming back to one sickening possibility that struck me when I first heard news of the invasion/abduction a week ago:

Trump did it to flush discussion of Jeffrey Epstein out of the news cycle.

It's clear that Trump has getting hit hard by Epstein news up until a week ago. After campaigning on the issue for many months as a candidate, he and his seemingly crooked Attorney General, Pam Bondi, clammed up on releasing the files once they took office. Bondi went from saying, "The folders are on my desk," to saying that no folders ever existed. The controversy stayed in the news, as some of Trump's own supporters began wondering if he was hiding personal involvement with the now-deceased child sex trafficker. Enough Republicans in Congress crossed over to join Democrats in voting on a bill last month to compel the DOJ to release the files. Trump, always wanting to portray himself as the winner in any fight, suddenly switched from suppressing the files to signing Congress's bill into law.

But Trump has an even more powerful media play than switching sides at the last moment to align himself with the winning side. When he's getting too much negative coverage in the media he does something outrageous to flush it out of the news cycle.

Anyone who's earnestly watched Trump for the past 10 years has seen him do this countless times and knows it's true. But for those who are unconvinced by my saying it, the idea behind it was memorably articulated by Trump's first chief strategist and propagandist, Steve Bannon:

"The Democrats don't matter... The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit."

Flooding the zone takes two forms. One, Trump and his surrogates spin an issue in favorable terms. They outright lie about what actually happened. That's the "shit" part. The media will try to fact-check the lies, but if lies are repeated and added to frequently enough, it overwhelms the fact-checking and all the media can do is repeat it. That's the "flood" part. We're seeing a textbook example of this right now with the ICE shooting of an unarmed American citizen in Minneapolis.

Two, a new issue can be used to flood an older issue right off the page. News focuses on what's new. They'll stick with one issue, like the Epstein files, until something new and pressing demands attention. Trump has shown himself to be a master of media manipulation at flooding unwanted stories out of the news cycle by saying or doing something provocative. He's been doing this for 10 years as a candidate and president. And it seems like that's exactly what's going on here.

Comments will be screened because I don't care to deal with drive-by insults from internet randos.

torachan

1. As usual, the dry, windy weather is bringing warmer temps, but thankfully it's not getting super hot. High 70s, which is not the weather I want in January, but seems like it'll just be a few days. And it's still very chilly at night.

2. We had a nice morning at Disneyland. They've got a bunch of new menu items that started earlier this week and everything we tried was delicious. And we brought home a chocolate caramel apple to have for dessert, which we haven't done in a while.

3. Tuxie's new favorite spot is under the grill.

redbird

We went to the Boston anti-ICE demonstration today, one of many throughout the United States. Cattitude and I got there slightly after the nominal starting time, and managed about an hour before the cold got to me. Yes, it was above freezing and not windy, but standing still on a large open plaza is chillier than moving around. Adrian came to the demo with some of her comrades from Havurat Shalom, and arrived before we did. The crowd was large enough that we didn't try to find her until we were all preparing to leave.

It was a good-sized crowd, but the acoustics and sound system were abysmal; I could only make out a few scraps of what the speakers were saying.

I wore a winter coat, wool socks, and light-weight long underwear, which was too warm while we were on the trolley.

fred_mouse

hopefully this storygraph link goes to the public option, not the for me specifically option.

I'm choosing to not look at what was planned; I've already posted about my 5 star reads and some other thinking. This is me just reading through and having feelings.

The first (We Were Dreamers, Simu Liu, biography) and last (The House That Horror Built, Christina Henry, horror) sure are an interesting juxtaposition
The 'mood' graph seems weird and I wish it wasn't there
Going back to study had a noticeable effect on how much I was reading, which is not a surprise
I hate the way that storygraph does 'genre' because my top five are fantasy, science fiction, short stories, LGBTQIA+, and horror, only three of which I consider to be genres.
15 days per book as an average just shows how much my reading is an overlapping thing.
'top authors' - Katherine MacLean was 4 (that can't be right, there were 8 short stories, I must not have tracked them all), Premee Mohammed (3 stories, hmm, something odd there as well), and Dave Warner (3 books, that's a trilogy)
average rating 3.75 - probably because the DNF/0 don't get counted; I gave 11 2 star ratings, which seems more than I would have expected. Most frequent rating of 4 is also higher than I would have expected.
somehow there were 52 'new to me' authors, which is interesting because I felt like I was sticking to comfortable stuff.
DNF - 22 books; not sure if that feels high
read 24 of my books - I bet that this is an undercount, because I don't always mark books as owned, particularly if I only have them as ebook.
it is weird that my highest rated reads tend to be non-fiction, because I read so little of it

I clicked through to the more detail

most commonly applied tag is 'borrowed', applied to 21 books. 21 borrowed + 24 owned =/= the number read
I need to update the tags on some, because they don't have the -read suffix added

muccamukk

Yes, from me.

IDK if you can see

CBCSports in other countries, but they're currently playing my preferred type of figure skating (the recent nationals), which consists of:

Individual single short programs (long programs are usually too long for me to want to watch a single dance routine, and I also don't want to watch hours and hours of the stuff).

Of just the top competators (so I don't have to feel bad when they fall down or do poorly, also see above about attention span).

With the music directly onto the broadcast (rather than echoey rink music).

Without commentary, except maybe a few notes before the dance starts (because I neither know nor care what a triple toe loop or whatever is, and equally do not care if the skater did a double instead.)

Anyway, youtube has figured this out and is giving me random Canadian children gliding around the ice.

(Randomly my only sports icon relates to cricket.)

hannah

One of my favorite things about the local library's used book sales is that every so often, a "for your consideration" awards screener pops up in the DVD section. It speaks to the neighborhood having someone who gets them to begin with, and it's fun to grab a copy of something like The Queen's Gambit because it's there. So I did, and now I don't have to mess around with any piggybacking on my mom's account or other sites to watch it.

It's too bad FYC discs are something of a thing of the past - it's the only physical release some of these movies and TV shows ever get. I know the idea of owning the media's foreign to the companies because a physical sale is a single purchase and means you can't keep stringing someone along with a long-term lease. It doesn't mean I can't dislike how a company deciding to remove something makes piracy, or morally dubious used DVD sales, the only way to watch it.

Current Mood: ditzy
Current Music: nothing now

kalloway

Alas I did not post on either Weds or yesterday. ^^;;

Archiving is behind between being off-schedule, dead tired, the sprained ankle, and taking a chunk out of my right index finger while working on a car. But I did do a bit earlier and will keep gnawing at it. I even wrote a ficlet for

100fandoms and may try for a goal of finishing up that project this year. (As said every year.)

Finished up the HG Lfrith Pre-Production kit; it's nice looking but the backpack is a grenade and I suspect it'll go on a shelf never to be touched again or I'll bag-n-tag the backpack and let it be free. Unsure. Next is RG Justice who'll complete a ragtag order from November that I joked was actually a D&D party. (RG Justice, HG Calibarn, 30MF Priest, SD Dynames, 30MM Horse)

One of my other projects is a bingo card of lists. Most of these, I should have printed out already and just need to find them. The rest, ??? Things like

season_of_kink cards,

31_days lists, prompts from

100words and

anythingdrabble, and

drabblesoup... A lot of these have significant presence in my plotbunny book so it'd be good to kind of get myself level with them. (And, as above,

100fandoms!)

Boxen are on the way to

tainry and

torachan, and I caught up with

purplehellebore to exchange gifts so Xmas is officially over. Whew! (I may still have one or two notes for folks on holiday_wishes, but I'll take care of that as I can.)

I'm also going to need to find the full prompt list for an old multi-chapter KH2 fic (each chapter was vaguely themed) if I ever want to try to finish it. The list/comm it was for was on LJ but I don't know if it's still there and I haven't been able to consistently access LJ in years.

Well, I have a lot of notebooks to dig through...

fred_mouse

Yesterday, I was having a conversation with Youngest about (SF) con-running. The topic was international guests, and what the timelines are for inviting them.

I said something flippant about 'well, that timeline would be doable these days, because everyone has email, at least we don't have to write letters'. And there was that moment where I could see Youngest's world view shift in real time, so we talked in a bit more detail about my memories of the first con I was involved in running*. That in 1996, when we were approaching people to be guests, email addresses were not ubiquitous**. That our primary method of contact was letters. And then I talked about the fact that we had to assume a best case scenario of a month turn around on anything we sent.

What I didn't think to say, is that because of that, there is a reasonably high chance that there is a letter from Douglas Adams in the WASFF archive. The reasons there might not be is that it might be from their agent, or it may have been lost when various documents were transferred to the archives.

* I was Treasurer for SwanCon 23 in 1998; that committee then did a quick reshuffle and ran SwanCon 25 in 2000. I started my committee habit early -- I was on the UniSFA (UWA SF club) as Fresher rep ('92), President ('93) and IPP ('94).

**We got into a side discussion about how rare email addresses were in 1992, when I got my first email address, when the uni I studied at decided to do the somewhat radical thing of provide an email address to any student who requested one, regardless of faculty. I'd love to know what the thinking was and whether it was 'this is going to become essential knowledge' or if it was something more.

celli

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

tielan

Challenge #4: Rec The Contents Of Your Last Page

Any website that you like, be it fanfiction, art, social media, or something a bit more eccentric!

Okay, so it's really easiest to go to my AO3 works page, which currently has a broad variety of fandoms on it, including some of my very old ones.

( 20 recs from Keltiad, Discworld/DCCU, Bridgerton, MCU, Pern, Pacific Rim, BSG 2003, Stargate SG1/Stargate Atlantis, and Narnia )

--

So looking through the stories, there's a really broad variety of themes and characters, quite a lot of fandoms, but also some recurring concepts: "found family", "true love isn't just the once and never again", "working through the complexities of a situation when you don't have a guidebook", and so forth.

chazzbanner

Watch on YouTube

My first sighting of Ralph Fiennes: Quiz Show.

There was a nice Yahoo group called fiennes-fans; we always referred to him as OWO, for "our wonderful one." :-)

-

lovelyangel

Utage Kinoshita
Tamon’s B-side, Episode 1

The last couple of days I’ve been doing volunteer work for my church – and also working with medical clinics for evaluations. It’s not been a quiet week.

At times over the next two weeks I’ll be traveling and staying in cities on the West Coast to see concerts performed by TWICE. I love seeing TWICE – but generally hate to travel. Tomorrow I’ll be making checklists and itineraries, reviewing transportation and lodging logistics, preparing camera equipment, and packing for the first leg of the adventure. For a fair portion of mid-month I will be offline and unavailable.

Also, the new season of anime kicked off last week. I try to sample all the new shows within the first three weeks of the season – but I won’t be successful this quarter because of away time. Maybe I can post my assessment at the end of the month?

As of today, I’ve checked out 16 shows and have 13 yet to be reviewed (with additional shows premiering all the time). I’m not counting Jujutsu Kaisen and Fire Force and Oshi no Ko, which are known quantities – nor Frieren, which shows up in another week but without question is in my watchlist. I haven’t even started on HIDIVE. Anyway, there’s a lot to check out. Eventually.

yourlibrarian posting in

tv_talk

Assortment of black and white speech bubbles

Welcome to the weekly roundup post! What are you watching this week? What are you excited about?

torachan

We got down to the park right when they opened, so the crowds were very low. Unfortunately they recently reduced the number of restaurants that open when the park does, so we had time to kill before breakfast (even though we were both very hungry).

( Read more... )

loganberrybunny

Public

344/365: Bird mural, Worcester
Click for a larger, sharper image
Thanks in part to the icy weather of late meaning two people didn't feel able to risk the journey to Worcester, there were only five of us at the My Little Pony fan meetup today. It was still a very nice few hours, though, as it nearly always is. The mural I've posted here was awkward to photograph, since the road it's facing (Cherry Tree Walk) is rather narrow. I had to use the wide-angle setting on my phone, which is why the quality is a bit lower than sometimes. This striking piece is by Curtis Hylton, and was painted in 2021.

Current Mood: happy

rolanni

What went before:

Saturday. Sunny and warm. Snow is melting apace.

Breakfast was, as planned, the leftovers from yesterday's chef salad scrambled with two eggs, which made for a pretty big meal. Not sure what lunch is. Cheese and crackers? Could be cheese and crackers.

Got to work early despite having to stop and fix the toilet in Steve's bathroom. I should say, mostly fix. It's stopped the constant running, but the float seems to have sprung a leak, so there's still a little water running out of it. I've been resisting calling a plumber, becau$e, but that may be a false economy.

Wrote about 700 words, and taking a break because that last scene reduced me to, um, tears.

It occurred to me that there ought to be heated mats to go under desks, and there are, byerlady! So -- retail therapy FTW -- a mat for Steve's office, a mat for the studio -- a mat for my office? Oh, why not?

After shopping, I'll go back to write some more until lunch time, after which it's track changes, which, with the application of a bit of elbow grease, I may finish today, and wouldn't that be nice?

Also? Despite having been doing nothing for days, the desk in my office is once again overflowing with stuff. I hope the goblins haven't found another way in.

I bought a very nice "beginner" demonstrator pen from JetPens -- it arrived yesterday. My only beef is that it's a cartridge pen, but there's getting to be some days when I oughtn't be left alone with a bottle of ink, so there is that.

I can't really tell you much about this pen, since the packaging is completely in Japanese. I can say it's a Pilot pen, and it's name appears to be kaküno. Writes nice and smooth; very light in the hand. I haven't dropped it yet, so can't report on its durability. Cheap, too. Under $15US. I got the medium nib, because that's the way I roll. If you've been thinking about trying a fountain pen, this might be worth your time to explore.

Thanks to everyone who suggested anime worthy of watching. I remember I was looking for Spy Family the day Steve died... This is not to lay blame or to invoke the Sad, but to say that I had apparently thought we'd enjoy it, and while I have Crunchyroll, I might as well have a look-in.

And, yes, I am talking about trivialities while the world is on fire. The only thing I can do at this point, is what I always do, and be a witness for civilized behavior.

deep breath

How's everybody doing today?
#
So, yeah -- cheese and crackers and an orange. That's lunch, innit? Am drinking "figgy pudding" tea from my Christmas teas. I had not been sanguine, going in, but it's quite tasty and delivers the warmth that the rest of the meal lacked.

On the writing front, that's +/- 1,340 new words. WIP stands at +/-124,785.

As soon as I've finished my tea, I will do my duty the cats, then clear a space on my desk so I can track me some changes.

The cats think I ought to take a nap, and they're probably not wrong...
#
Toe bean break:

#
Yeah, I should've taken a nap. OTOH, the track changes are done and returned, and! I managed to turn off the water running into the toilet, go me.

I had made a comment the other day in my rant about the cost of Sssses and the prevailing wisdom of adding a "third" S to perfectly good words. Sometimes, in fact, the prevailing wisdom only adds one extra S.

Example: Chaos's

That? Is an ugly something or other.

In my day, believe it or don't, when you had a situation where you needed to show that Chaos was being possessive, you indicated that by this: Chaos'

Which looks much better to me than all these random Sssses wriggling all over the page.

All that said? I'm tired, and Rookie is insisting that it's Happy Hour, so it must be time for me to wash the pots 'n pans.

Everybody have a good evening. Stay safe.

I'll check in tomorrow.

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Tucker McKinnon

Words are inadequate

Adventures in Mamboland

"Jazz Fish, a saxophone playing wanderer, finds himself in Mamboland at a critical phase in his life." --Howie Green, on his book Jazz Fish Zen

Yeah. That sounds about right.

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Indeed do many things come to pass

Others

I am rapidly concluding that the B5 books are CURSED

Snowflake Challenge Day 4

Jupiter with the Great Red Spot

Never underestimate the power of spite, y'all.

Is Venezuela Really About Epstein?

Daily Happiness

anti-ICE demonstration this afternoon

2025 reading wrap up

Random Sports Stuff

Acquisitions.

A Reckoning of Swords 6-10

(no subject)

aunt celli nights are the best nights

snowflake challenge 2026 - day 4

GQ: Ralph

Too Much At Once

Speak Up Saturday

2026 Disneyland Trip #2 (1/10/26)

A small ponymeet

Long day

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