firethesound | Network

Title: One Foot In Front Of The Other
Fandom: The Long Walk
Music: One Foot In Front Of The Other by Walk The Moon
Characters/Pairing: Ray/Peter; ensemble
Summary: Taking this one step at a time.
Warnings: graphic violence

Here on AO3

conuly posting in

agonyaunt

Dear Carolyn: I know you love dogs, but in a reasonable way, so I figure you’re a good person to ask. Is there a “normal” amount of pets for someone to have? I never had dogs or cats growing up and didn’t want them in our home when our children were young.

All my children at times asked for a pet but grew to accept my aversion, except for my youngest daughter. When she used to insist she couldn’t wait to move out and get a pet, I took it with a grain of salt. She did get a dog in the house she shared with friends in college, and her obsession has only grown since then. The last time I saw her, she excitedly told me she’s a foster parent to a litter of puppies now. I’m not sure how that works, but it brings the number of dogs in her house from two to six, and she also has two cats.

I asked if she was going to get kicked out of her house, since her township can’t possibly allow that number of animals in a small home and yard, and she just laughed at me. She apparently doesn’t understand the law or care how this all must affect her neighbors.

Could this possibly be the start of some sort of mental illness? Should I try to intervene further?

( Read more... )

tjs_whatnot

...or...

I Want to Finish What I've Started: Author Edition

The first 3 authors are the ones were I've read *almost* everything they've written. The last 3 are authors were I've read one book but loved it so much that they *might* be an author I need to read all of their work. The rest are just authors I've loved and want to read more of.

( TJ Klune (of course) )

( Cat Sebastian )

( Alexis Hall )

( KJ Charles )

( Freya Marske )

( Nora Sakavic )

( Rachel Reid )

( Maggie Steifvater )

( Scarlett Drake )

( Taylor Jenkins Reid )

( Frederik Backman )

conuly posting in

agonyaunt

Dear Care and Feeding,

My wife, “Lourdes” and I have a 2-year-old daughter, “Mackenzie.” Mackenzie was a difficult baby (long crying spells, difficult to soothe, hypersensitive to sound, fussy about solid food, etc.), and my wife has a low threshold for frustration. So most of Mackenzie’s care fell to me since Lourdes said she “couldn’t deal with it.” The result has been that our daughter is closer to me than she is to her mother. Well, Lourdes said something disturbing regarding our daughter recently.

Mackenzie had a meltdown when my wife tried to get her dressed for daycare, so Lourdes told me I needed to do it because of her theory that our daughter “hates her” and “the feeling is mutual.” Mackenzie has a routine of putting her clothes on in a specific order. Lourdes is aware of it, but wanted to do it her way, which set her off. Mackenzie has her quirks, and if you work with her (her daycare providers follow them and have reported no issues), everything is fine. The trouble is that my wife is accustomed to people doing things her way, and she does not react well when her expectations are not met. I’m seriously concerned about her relationship with Mackenzie, especially because right after her mother tasked me with dressing her that day, she said, “Mommy is mean.” Lourdes balked when I suggested counseling. How am I supposed to resolve this?

—Daughter Division

( Read more... )

tinny posting in

icontalking

The idea for this challenge is to make icons that look like they're comic panels, lineart, maybe with a border, pop art style, or speech bubbles.

There's a great (20-year-old!) tutorial for making your icon look like a comic: https://icon-tutorial.livejournal.com/841509.html
(and the comments contain hints for how to transfer this tutorial from Photoshop to Paintshop)

Of course you can go about this completely differently, and iconing animated source materials is also fair game!

( I hope these additional resources inspire you )

* You can make as many icons as you like (if you need a goal, five is a good number :))
* There is no minimum, 1 icon is enough to enter this activity
* Please submit your icons (and URLs!) to this post, all in one comment (if possible)
* Everyone can participate, you don't have to be a member of this community

* I will collect all the icons from the comments and make a result post
* Everyone can leave comments on the inspiration and activity result posts
* There is no voting

Deadline: Saturday, March 14th, your end-of-day

rydra_wong

can, to some small degree, be simulated by a blindfolded person trying to push buttons while someone else shouts confused and panicked instructions at them:

Watch on YouTube

(Except that these guys mastered jumping WAY faster than I did.)

It's hilarious and delightful to me to watch people having an experience of Dark Souls which is not wholly unlike mine. In a weird way I feel kind of #represented.

In later vids, they have (like me) discovered the joys of the halberd as adaptive technology for people who are bad at spacing and aiming.

rfemod posting in

rarefemslashexchange

The collection is now open!

Please remember that commenting on your gift is mandatory for this exchange so please do so in good faith. :)

Of course, comments are encouraged on any works that you enjoy within the collection!

If you have any issues with your gift, please reach out as soon as possible via email at rarefemslashexchangemod@gmail.com.

Creator reveals will be on February 27th, 10PM PST. [Countdown] [In Your Timezone]

Any other questions/comments can be left on this post (anon is on, screening isn't) or you can email as well.

Enjoy! :D

mific posting in

fancake

Fandom: Heated Rivalry
Characters/Pairings: Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Rose Landry, numerous Reddit OCs.
Rating: Teen
Length: 20,175
Content Notes: No AO3 warnings apply. Some of the Reddit comments contain terrible advice!
Creator Links: OpalApparition on AO3
Themes: Inept in love, Canon LGBTQ+ characters, Humor, Unusual format & style, Epistolary, Outsider POV, Angst with a happy ending

Summary: I (26M) want to invite man I sleep with (26M) to my house to spend the weekend. Help me not ruin it.

Or: Ilya Rozanov goes to the internet for dating advice

Reccer's Notes: This is a long (9 chapters) social media epistolary fic based on Reddit, where Ilya asks the internet for advice before the tuna melt hookup. It's funny, very cleverly done, and the responses from Reddit users are often hilarious. We start with Ilya's post (he's orangespyder617 - his sports car name & Boston area code), and later, Shane (gingerale_MTL) also separately posts after he's bolted in panic and is dating Rose, and has realized he's really messed things up. There's some fun for the Reddit users in speculating about who these two rich, inept in love guys might be, and also later after Shane posts as Ilya has wiped his former thread by then but some users remember it and join the dots. Rose herself (kidnapped4times) also posts wanting advice about how to tactfully tell her boyfriend he's gay, and finally Ilya posts again. It reads exactly like Reddit, although I suspect with way fewer trolls, and the users often post memes and links to vids which work, and add to the realism. Throughout, Ilya and Shane amply demonstrate their ineptitude in love, starting with POSTING TO REDDIT ABOUT IT AT ALL! I grinned a lot.

Fanwork Links: Tuna Melts and Longitudinal Studies

mific posting in

fanart_recs

Fandom: Heated Rivalry
Characters/Pairing/Other Subject: Ilya Rozanov
Content Notes/Warnings: none
Medium: digital art
Artist on DW/LJ: n/a
Artist Website/Gallery: ilyasloon on tumblr. But there are more works on their Insta
Why this piece is awesome: As ever I like WIP vids, seeing how artists build the picture. This is a super-realistic portrait of Ilya/Connor looking very much too cool for school!
Link: Ilya portrait with WIP vid, backup link here

pauraque

Opening in the days of the Harlem Renaissance, the first page of this novel states the culmination of its story: A door-to-door cosmetics salesman shot his eighteen-year-old mistress, and then the salesman's wife crashed the funeral to try to stab the girl's corpse. Why? The reader wants to know, and so do many of the characters. The book offers answers only indirectly, taking a sprawling path into the characters' pasts, where their families came from, and the intergenerational trauma of the slavery era that's still in living memory at this time.

The prose style of this book really worked for me and did a lot of the heavy lifting of drawing me into the story. It's lyrical and artistic without ever sacrificing readability. If there's a bit you don't understand, you will understand it in time, but first we have to go back to the beginning of another character's story and circle back around to connect to the main plot—and it does always connect. I think this is the meaning of the title; the book is not about jazz music, but it has the shape of jazz in the way it can state a melody, wander off and explore for a while until you've almost forgotten what song it is, and then return very satisfyingly before passing it off to another player in the ensemble.

I found this book in a free box and then it sat on my shelf for years (shout-out to

lebateleur, my read-books-we-already-own accountability buddy!). It has a lot of underlining, highlighting, and marginal notes from whoever had it before, pointing out themes of dehumanization, rehumanization, and the necessity of deep context for understanding. They underlined "Something else you have to figure in before you figure it out" and also wrote it in pen on the title page. On multiple pages they wrote "Jazzonia" in the margin, by which I assume they meant the Langston Hughes poem.

Jazzonia (1926)

Oh, silver tree!
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!

In a Harlem cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.
A dancing girl whose eyes are bold
Lifts high a dress of silken gold.

Oh, singing tree!
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!

Were Eve’s eyes
In the first garden
Just a bit too bold?
Was Cleopatra gorgeous
In a gown of gold?

Oh, shining tree!
Oh, silver rivers of the soul!

In a whirling cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.

slidemods posting in

fandomcalendar

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elisheva_m posting in

little_details

What would be involved in setting up a ~~fake~~ facsimile of a VPN service to gather intelligence on a criminal organisation?

~~Would this essentially be a VPN where the relay saves a copy of the traffic? Everything I've found to read on the internet assumes more knowledge of tech and jargon than I have.~~ Could a choice of servers in different countries be faked? A UI seems easy enough, but what about the ISP it connects to? If it was simply a gateway to a real VPN, would the real VPN notice? Could it at some point send a second copy elsewhere without being noticed?

This could be a scheme the character is pondering near the end, so it doesn't have to work - it could simply be trying to find solutions to some of the concerns. He has a habit of staring out the window late at night mulling over such things. He really wants to be able to build a phone case with a rechargeable listening device but we've gotten lost on the physics of discretely charging it from the phone.

There's the social infrastructure to make it appear legit, website & fake reviews and social engineering to get them to bite. I've already written this for a different operation, not in great detail but enough for my purposes. If faking a VPN is feasible, I'd probably replace the existing scheme in those scenes with this one. But the marketing email may be more along the lines of "Police and governments can't subpoena a service they don't know exists" with a link to the dark web.

Edit: It doesn't need to actually work as a VPN, the character won't care about hiding the users' info. It just needs to look like one from their side of things.

Please be careful with how much detail and tech-speak you throw at me, my health is poor and I am easily overwhelmed. If this is a rubbish idea, please be kind in putting it down.

Thank you for any help.

princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: content

princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: amused

mywitch

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kingstoken posting in

fanart_recs

Fandom: Merlin
Characters/Pairing/Other Subject: Merlin, Arthur, Unicorn
Content Notes/Warnings: None
Medium: Digital
Artist Website/Gallery: khmelisuneliart
Why this piece is awesome: Lovely art of Merlin and Arthur encountering a unicorn in a sunny glenn. If you don't know BBC's Merlin this piece still works as a pretty piece of fairy tale-esque art.
Link: tumblr

vriddy

I remembered an old fic snippet from yonks ago, a terrible BNHA fic called Plucking that I apparently already mentioned over 2 years ago hah. This used to be a stress relief fic in which Hawks endures a no good very bad time anytime I was having a rough time. In 2023 I was apparently staging a rescue for him since I felt better, but looking at the end it looks like that might have been an hallucination, whoops. I wrote "Post anon?" in the notes because I guess it is extremely heavy on whump and angst but heh.

Anyway, it didn't seem like it had been migrated when I moved to Scrivener so I went back hunting into my 4tw files. And wow I found some other stuff that also missed the migration. Mostly written 2022-2023 if I believe my tracking spreadsheet haha. See, when I started writing I had a directory per fandom which made sense in theory, except that then I wrote like 200 fics for BNHA including several multi-chapters, and 2-10 fics for other fandoms. Things got better organised in 2024, apparently (or more like I gave up and created a new directory called BNHA (2024)), and I was good at migrating existing WIPs into BNHA (2025) when the year changed but some stuff got lost in the pre-2024 reshuffle. Several seem like 60-90% finished :0

I checked other fandoms too and found maybe one or two mostly developed concepts for Mairimashita Iruma-kun which I haven't written for since 2021 and it's making me a bit nostalgic... I think I never ended up writing up a post about it, but this was a fandom I tried the "Save The Cat" outlining method for and it utterly broke my brain and the story. Beat sheets don't work well with how I think, it seems. BUT this also reminds me I should have handwritten notes for that full outline and I wonder if I could try to revive that story, too... Like it was a fake dating OT3 and I don't know how I tried to make fake dating work for 3 people!! Maybe I can salvage the heart of it and do something with it? I haven't watched the canon in years either, apparently I stopped watching the anime in the middle of season 2... but that also kinda makes me want to catch up!! Especially since the official Mafia AU also made me nostalgic for the original characters recently. Although I seem to have paused my manga reading for that as well. I think it might be common for me to kind of drift off with "episodic"-style series, but hey maybe that means it shouldn't be too hard to pick back up either.

Anyway I find myself with more ongoing WIPs than I expected!! I think it'd be cool to slap an ending on the ones that have a good chunk written already. There's a couple that are so nearly there for BNHA that I had to check if I didn't somehow post them without remembering, despite the unfinished sentences and couple of bits with brackets lol. [ first kiss description here ].

Current Mood: surprised

brokenframe posting in

vidding

Title: Animus Vox
Characters: Ensemble
Movie: Bullet Train (2022)
Summary: Good Luck, Bad Luck, Chance, Karma, Faith, Revenge, Redemption, Wrath, Love, Justice, Fate...
Music: Animus Vox by The Glitch Mob
Length: 3:59
Warnings: Blood and violence
Streaming/download at: DW | Tumblr

rfemod posting in

rarefemslashexchange

The collection will open on February 20th, 10PM PST (UTC-8). [Countdown] [In Your Timezone]

Thank you to our wonderful pinch hitters! If you are a pinch hitter who didn't sign up for the exchange or someone who would like to treat a pinch hitter, there is a Pinch Hitter's Prompts Post.

To all the participants: please make sure any and all edits are completed and if you're an artist that your embedded image links are still working.

The exchange welcomes and encourages treats, even after the collection is open. You can check out the AO3 app to find the fandoms and ships that have been requested for this round.

If you have any other questions/comments, you can leave them here (anon is on, screening isn't) or email at rarefemslashexchangemod@gmail.com.

Looking forward to revealing the collection and these amazing works! :D

musesfool

In what is likely the only time I will be all "USA USA" about these Olympics (or basically anything these days), the US Women's hockey team won gold in OT over Canada! 🏅🏅🏅🏅🏅

Hilary Knight with the game-tying goal with 2 minutes left and the goalie pulled - she became the all time leading US scorer at the Olympics! GOATed! (She also got engaged yeserday{? I think it was yesterday? to a lady speed-skater} so she's having a time in Milan!) And then Megan Keller won it in OT - right through the 5-hole on Desbiens (who I do feel bad for - she had herself a game today after getting pulled in the previous US-Canada game)! What a sick goal!

(I don't think the overtime in a GOLD MEDAL GAME should be 3-on-3, but at least they were scheduled to play a full period - no shootout in the gold medal game.)

Of course, I was supposed to be working so people kept emailing me and calling me and I couldn't be like, "Don't you know the US women's hockey team is in OT against Canada in the gold medal game!??!" so ugh. work.

In other news, last night I was struck with a mighty strong craving for an Orange Julius, and i had an unopened 11 oz bottle of OJ in the fridge so I stuck it in the freezer, and then this morning I pulled out the blender to make it, and I think the part that defrosted enough to get scraped into the blender was all water, because it had only the vaguest of orangey taste. But I have the other half of the bottle left, so I will try again tomorrow. I'm sure nostalgia is playing a part, but there was something so amazingly good about an Orange Julius at the mall when I was in high school.

*

Current Mood: excited

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cunning as a weevil

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Style: Night Sea for Tranquility III by branchandroot

Nay, you may proceed, Minstrel

Network

New Vid: The Long Walk "One Foot In Front Of The Other"

(no subject)

Actual. Legit. To. Be. Read. 2026

(no subject)

Activity #103 - Comic

My motor cortex learning to play Dark Souls

Collection revealed!

Heated Rivalry: Tuna Melts and Longitudinal Studies by OpalApparition

Ilya portrait with a WIP vid by ilyasloon (SFW)

Jazz by Toni Morrison (1992)

Tokusatsu: Girls Remix Exchange Signups Open

Faking a VPN

First draft: Dancing (Shane/Ilya)

Heated Rivalry rec

BroNumber1

Merlin: Untitled Unicon Art by khmelisuneliart (SFW)

Finding old fic snippets

New Vid: Bullet Train Fan Video - Animus Vox

All works are in!

the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat

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February 2026

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