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May Monthly Post
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For May we had:
[new] Colors Bingo Fest hosted by
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Inspired by the kind of prompts in
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Posting will be from May 1-31.
For June we will have:
[new]
Pride Fest hosted by
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Celebrate ALL the orientations!
Posting will be June 1-30.
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Summer Reading Program!
When I was a kid, the library summer reading program was one of my favorite events of the year. First of all, there were the events at the library, which were not only a lot of fun but also ensured that I got taken to the library at least once a week. Secondly, being encouraged to read lots of books and keep a list of the books that I read was a great thing for a hyperlexic kid. I'm like "Yes! Please reward me for something I want to do anyway!"
I've seen a number of people on social media talking about they wished there were things like the library summer reading program and the Scholastic book fair for grown-ups, and now there is! The American Historical Association is holding a Summer Reading Challenge!
The challenge is to complete at least three tasks from this list between June 1 and Labor Day:
- Read a history of an event with a major anniversary in 2025.
- Read a history of a resistance movement.
- Read a history that uses material culture.
- Read an edited collection, journal forum, or other multi-author work.
- Read a history that's been sitting on your shelf too long.
- Read a piece of historical fiction (novel, story, poem, play)
Right now I'm mentally taking task 5 off the table, because unless I go out and buy a new book for the challenge (which I don't anticipate doing), all of the books I read will be histories that have been sitting on my shelf too long.
I got started today, starting to read Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, with a goal to finish it by the end of June.
You can read more about the AHA's 2025 Summer Reading Challenge here, and if you see the hashtag "#AHAReads" around your social media, now you know what it is.
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June the First.
I just went back to check to be sure, and somewhere between the washer and the dryer, it got misplaced without leaving the laundry room, because that's where I found it. Someone had tossed it into the garbage bin - not even hanging it over the sink, but tossing it out entirely, which has me irritated on the general principle of throwing out a good hand towel being a bad idea because hey, free towel.
It's also got me relieved because I again know where my towel is. I couldn't well go hitchhiking otherwise.
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May 2025 Reads!
I hope to come back some time in the near future and talk about things and stuff. But until then, here, have some book recs.

( May 2025 )
So, what is everyone reading for Pride? So far, I'm just set to finish:
*When The Tides Held the Moon by Venessa Vida Kelley
*Even Though I Knew the End by C.I. Polk
*Less is Lost by Andrew Sean Greer
*Missing Page by Cat Sebastian
*A Destiny of Dragons by TJ Klune
And then we'll see where the muse takes me. Recs, of course, always welcome. ❤️❤️
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Linkspam Is Working On Expanding Capacity
it is so important to understand that writing is a way of thinking and existing, and not just an act of doing
Kelly Hayes: From Aspiration to Action: Organizing Through Exhaustion, Grief, and Uncertainty
It’s easy to pass judgment on ourselves and each other for what we’re “already doing” or failing to do. But as an organizer, I’m concerned with what might motivate or allow people to act differently.
Sasha Chapin @ Sasha's Newsletter: How to like everything more: on the skill of enjoyment
In my experience, high-level enjoyment, like a sport, is composed of many interlocking micro-skills that must be trained individually, but which reinforce each other. This is not how enjoyment is taught—the only tip people typically receive re enjoyment is to “be mindful.” I think this is a suggestion to adopt what meditators call “one-pointed focus,” a form of concentrated, narrowed attention on a small portion of conscious experience. It’s a mediocre suggestion for a couple of reasons. First, this is hard to do well, even for seasoned meditators. Second, it is far from the only enjoyment-producing mental motion.
Liz Neeley @ Liminal: Week 19: What now & what’s next in science and higher ed
Everything is terrible, but I brought you some plums.
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A Tale in Two Headlines [pope, pols, US]
2025 May 30: AlterNet: "'Divine trolling': Pope schedules Chicago mass on the same day as Trump's military parade"
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Color Fest Banners
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Apparently the real deal
When I designed Rumkick's "Drinking Every Day" as a song of the day, silveradept asked if they were actually punk or if they were a manufactured group made to appear punk. I happened upon a couple of Rumkicks interviews yesterday, (here and here), and it appears that they are indeed actual punks!
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Fanfic, Sky High, Warren/Layla, Layla is Warren's sidekick
Author:
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Fandom: Sky High
Ship/Characters: Warren/Layla, (Layla & Will)
Rating/Category: T/Het
Prompt: Sky High, Warren/Layla, Layla is Warren's sidekick
(from
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Spoilers: the movie generally
Summary: Layla despises it, but she is already far too used to gentle concerns like this about her life and her choices . . . her oldest friend (and his honest care) can get a little bit of leeway, but she's still doubly happy to return to her partner, who has always accepted - and respected - her, no matter what.
Notes/Warnings: N/A
Wordcount: 1,775
Read on AO3
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Summer of Giles 2025 is happening!
Summer of Giles is definitely happening again this year. I've decided to go with a free-for-all format rather than booked days. The doors will be opened on 1 July until 31st 2025.
Usual rules apply about not completely spamming the community. I'm also adding a ban on the use of AI generated content. If I see it, or am alerted to it, I will delete it immediately.
Thank you to everyone who has already expressed an interest for this year. I'm looking forward to reading and seeing everything. And, fingers crossed, I might even be able to write something myself. Who knows?
Let's make this summer the best Giles summer ever!
Cap
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Color Fest Coverall
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Please cut the lights.
Keeping to that tunnel vision of one word at a time, no matter how good the word happens to be or how much I like it, is where I'm at. I'm likely going to opt to stay in New York for most of the vacation my parents planned for upstate and that's only in part because I'm not sure how I feel about always automatically being included. It's a lot of complicated feelings, and what's not complicated is it's easier to keep writing when I'm in my apartment. All my stuff is here. My notes, my research materials. Also the practical momentum of sitting down and getting the words out.
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Color fest bingo - column
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Card Theme: color fest Bingo
Prompts: black and blue, all that glitters is not gold, green with envy, white as a sheet, strike me pink
Fandoms: Hazbin Hotel
My Card: My Card
( my fills under here )
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Arrival at the end of the month - Late May 02025
There's an entire trans-and-nonbinary cast production of Twelfth Night, with Sir Ian McKellen providing an opening for it, and they have livestream options (and access to the stream for up to two weeks after the performance) as well as the live performance one. July 25 is the day in question. Ticket tiers start at 10 GBP, so you may have to add in currency conversion and currency conversion fees to your ticket price.
One of the best parts of being a historian is when new evidence contributes more to a story thought finished. Sometimes people turn out to have evaded those who wanted them dead not just once, but twice. The history is there, often recorded somewhere, but it takes someone looking to find all of it.
What was believed to be a simple later copy of the Magna Carta has, after investigation and further scholarship, been verified as an original copy of the document. Which meant a lot of preservation, making things available, and then the scholars being able to use their technology and come to conclusions of originality. A lot of work, in other words, much of it done by people who may or may not receive any credit in the eventual paper written about it.
A list of "summer reads" produced for members of King Features Syndicate newspapers offered fifteen books by well-known offers, only five of which actually existed, and ten of which were clearly confabulated by a chatbot.
Fansplaining gives us a primer on the history and the significant rise in the Real Person Fanfiction corners of fandoms, and the often ugly collisions between those who are writing about fictional versions of celebrities, actors, musicians, and other figures on our screens regularly, and those who are looking for the secret truth that the people really are into each other more than they can let on. This is made more difficult in the Internet era, where there's a lot of access and behind-the-scenes material produced and released for the fans, and that makes it more difficult to find easy ways of knowing whether you're looking at someone who's working with a public persona and who's writing fic about the secret relationships they believe are right in front of us.
A paper of dubious scholarship and cherry-picked references gets a solid thrashing from members of the community in whose journal it was published, with questions for the publishers and organization about why they chose to accept and publish it in such a state, rather than reject or require strong revisions. Having read the offending paper, the thrashing is entirely deserved, and the questions for the editors who allowed it to be published in this state are also deserved.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that what books a public library carries in its collection are government speech, and therefore subject to being curated as any government employee likes without repercussions or First Amendment challenges. Which gives a massive amount of power to any library employee with collection responsibilities to shape the collection exactly as they desire, without having to worry about keeping collection balance or ensuring a diversity of viewpoint or any of those other things that are generally accepted principles of collection development. I look forward to the library that decides to remove every conservative author from their collection, the one that decides their collection will be composed sole of Black trans women, and the library that completely depopulates their religion section of everything that has to do with Christianity in it, and the courts siding with them based on this precedent, telling the people complaining that it's too bad they don't have a library whose values align with their own, but that book curation is government speech and they don't have standing to challenge it.
(This is a foolish ruling, and they should know better, but fascists and the fascist-friendly rarely believe that the tools they are building to enforce their will on others will be used equally as well to suppress them once they are no longer in power. Or once they're not sufficiently fascist to be in the in-group any more.)
Because they had been determined to be men by sex according to the UK Supreme Court ruling, and governments are going along with the farce, a group of topless trans women protested the decision outside the Scottish parliament building. Why topless? Well, men can't be sanctioned for being out in public topless. Only women. So when the protest also happened outside the English parliament building, the same logic applied. Mind, in the images of the protest, you can clearly see that the "female-presenting nipples" on the protesters have been blurred out, so the media coverage clearly believes they're women, even if the law does not.
( Still more to be seen inside, including the usual parade of US politics behaving badly )
Going out of this post, The Sesame Workshop has made a deal with Netflix to continue Sesame Street, allowing new episodes to premiere simultaneously on Netflix's streaming service and PBS stations (and the PBS Kids app.) The format of the show will be changing with the new season, but there's something fundamentally rotten at having had Sesame Street end up needing to make deals with a corporate partner for significant time, rather than being fully funded (including the research apparatus that helps keep Sesame Street educationally appropriate for the target audience) through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and other public dollars for all of their runtime. Surely there's some fighter jet or tank that could be not built and that money appropriated for keeping a quality educational program on the airwaves, and to pay the researchers that help keep it quality.
Also, a primer on various possible motivations for people to be engaged in power-exchange scenes and relationships, written in such a way as to be useful for people who might want to be practitioners and also for those who want to write power exchange in their fictional endeavours.
(Materials via
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Blackout Bingo Color Fest



For the completed card, visit my Icon Area.
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Finishing up a relisten of The Pasithea Powder
On a different note, I continue to hold the opinion that their deceased friend may have had strong convictions, and he died for his beliefs, and he might even have been as remarkable and amazing as the two protagonists seem to believe, but he also sounds like a lot. Like the sort of person who doesn't want to get a cat because of abstruse concepts of moral philosophy that nobody cares about but him, but who sure is willing to keep arguing about it until they cave from sheer exhaustion, and then presumably keep arguing because they ought to have caved due to agreeing with his position.
( Read more... )
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2025 Round Conclusion & Feedback
We wanted to bring up an issue for feedback while we're all still thinking about the exchange.
Once Upon a Fic is a "fairy-tale" focused exchange. We welcome a lot of texts - myths, lore, etc - that overlap with fairy tales in some way: they deal with archetypal figures, life lessons, fantastical creatures and/or the supernatural, they are often more closely associated with a culture and era than a specific author, and of course, as a goal of this event specifically, these texts are in the public domain.
Every year we get nominations that seek to expand that pool of text types in ways we hadn't thought of. Because more things enter the public domain every year, we've seen more and more longer texts, from closer in time, than the fairy tales the exchange started out with. These nominations are in good faith and we've enjoyed the stories that come from them, but we worry about scope creep and we aren't always sure where to draw the line. In order to keep the exchange focus narrower than "any kind of fantastical text in the public domain", we wanted to revisit what kinds of texts are in scope, with the hope that our rules are clearer before next round.
Some possible options:
- We give examples of the types of texts that we consider core to the exchange. All other texts are evaluated on a case-by-case basis. This is the status quo - but we haven't always decided consistently, from year to year. For example, sometimes we've included stories made freely available by their creators for more modern tales. But that makes it difficult for us to define a modern fairy tale vs any fantastical story.
- We give examples of the types of texts that we consider core to the exchange. We encourage you to make a case for anything that doesn't match the examples. The case could be based on factors such as similarity to types of canons we've previously approved; length; whether it was marketed as a fairy tale, etc.
- We set specific requirements for anything published after a specific date eg 1900 or 1925 (which may include a max length requirement).
- We set a strict date cut-off for certain types of nominations.
- Something else?
We welcome suggestions and would be interested to know what feels in scope to you, for a fairy tale exchange, and what doesn't. Approving a nomination into this exchange isn't a value judgment on that piece of media.
Thanks for your thoughts! Feedback on other parts of the exchange is welcome!
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Bingo

N1 (true colors) -- "Show My True Colors" (Polychrome Heroics: Farce)
N2 (all that glitters is not gold) -- "Liberosis" (A Poesy of Obscure Sorrows)
N3 (WILD CARD: deep blue sea) -- "Ruling from Beneath" (Polychrome Heroics: Kraken)
N4 (silver-tongued) -- "Heartspur" (A Poesy of Obscure Sorrows)
N5 (riot of color) -- "Cause a Riot of Color" (Polychrome Heroics: The Big One and Shiv)
B4 (the green stuff) -- Cookie Jar Terrarium Part 2: Planting
I5 (grey area) -- "A Lens of Ice" (Polychrome Heroics: Rutledge)
G3 (caught red-handed) -- "The Care and Feeding of Supervillains" (Polychrome Heroics: Dr. Infanta and Kraken)
G4 (pale imitation) -- "The More Bizarre It Gets" (Polychrome Heroics: Trichromatic Attachments)