eumelia | Vox Populi

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Hello, everyone; happy Dreamwidth Anniversary!

Today I come bearing some simple colored Dreamsheep icons, for your color-themed blogs. These are just some basic web-safe colors I grabbed, so it's not everything on the spectrum or color wheel, but I aimed for a decent variety. Also, if there's a color or color combination that you really want, I'm willing to take requests! It may take me a couple of days to get to them, though, just a heads up.

Anyway, ( Colorful Dreamsheep )

If you decide to use one, please credit soc_puppet or Socchan somewhere; other than that, no restrictions apply 👍

I hope you find one you like!

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a letter saying: we wanted to say we loved your fic! because just kudos isn't enough

ABOUT
The FESTA is an event focused on reading, sharing, and commenting on fics from all fandoms, as well as building community. We try to run this event twice a year and our current round is scheduled to start MAY 2026. We have bingo sheets, a stamp rally, and will have weekly chat sessions on Bluesky. ALL fic ratings and topics are welcome. No AI generated content will be promoted.

LANGUAGE
English and Spanish

Pueden encontrar esta información (y más) en nuestras páginas del evento.

THEME
Our May (Round 3) Themes are: SPRING & FLOWERS! We also have 30+ bingo prompts related to May Holidays, Mental Health Awareness, and Community Building.

MINIMUM COMMUNITY GOALS
We encourage everyone to leave at least 2 comments during the FESTA! And if you play our stamp rally, the more comments you leave, the more stamps you can collect.

SCHEDULE
5/1: The FESTA begins
5/9: Chat Session #1
5/16: Chat Session #2
5/23: Chat Session #3
5/30: Chat Session #4
5/31: Last day for fic submissions but the games continue
6/1: Spotlights begin
6/30: Last day of games & commenting sprees
7/4: Roundup of fics & community achievements LIVE

Chat sessions are scheduled for Saturdays, US CST evenings (6pm).

HOW TO PARTICIPATE
Readers are encouraged to join our commenting team!
Writers are encouraged to submit their fics!
Everyone is encouraged to read, share, and comment on fics!
Everyone is encouraged to grab a bingo sheet, join our stamp rally, and participate in our weekly games!

MORE INFORMATION
Bluesky | Tumblr | Dreamwidth

fanfictionfesta

HAVE QUESTIONS?
Ask away! You can also look at our August (R2) archive

---

The FESTA is mainly held on Bluesky, but you can participate via Tumblr & DW too.
Signups are not required but are encouraged.
Podfics are also allowed.

feeling determined

rizzy_rosie8 posting in

poetry

Autobiographical

Did u hear about the Rose that grew from a crack
in the concrete
Proving nature's laws wrong it learned 2 walk
without having feet
Funny it seems but by keeping its dreams
It learned 2 breathe fresh air
Long live the rose that grew from concrete
When no one else even cared!

- Tupac Shakur

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followfriday

Got any Follow Friday-related posts to share this week? Comment here with the link(s).

Here's the plan: every Friday, let's recommend some people and/or communities to follow on Dreamwidth. That's it. No complicated rules, no "pass this on to 7.328 friends or your cat will die".

feeling busy

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dw_maintenance

Happy Wednesday!

I'm taking search offline sometime today to upgrade the server to a new instance type. It should be down for a day or so -- sorry for the inconvenience. If you're curious, the existing search machine is over 10 years old and was starting to accumulate a decade of cruft...!

Also, apparently these older machines cost more than twice what the newer ones cost, on top of being slower. Trying to save a bit of maintenance and cost, and hopefully a Wednesday is okay!

Edited: The other cool thing is that this also means that the search index will be effectively realtime afterwards... no more waiting a few minutes for the indexer to catch new content.

sabotabby

Just finished: Nothing.

Currently reading: Here Where We Live Is Our Country by Molly Crabapple. This is a weirdly dense book—like, not in terms of content but in terms of typography where it turns out to be much longer than it looks. So it will take awhile and I'll no doubt have very scattered thoughts on it. I'm up to a weird point just before WWII where Piłsudski has done a coup in Poland and provided some kind of respite for the Bund there, while Molly's great-great grandfather Sam is in the US, trying to make it as an artist. The revolution in Russia has almost immediately turned sour. The Zionist movement is ascendant in Eastern Europe but still looked on as profoundly unserious by the Bundist majority, who are like, "you're going to be farmers in the desert? Good luck with that and also fuck you."

This is just such an important book, right now in our history with what was once the biggest current of socialist thought in Europe being whittled down to a few of us hobbyists in 2026. It's not just hereness, but a lineage that I think most Ashkenazi Jews are lacking, even ones like me who know a fair bit about the Bund. The majority of Jews in the West have accepted the Devil's bargain of whiteness: give up your culture for safety and assimilation into the power structure, sure celebrate your holidays but now you're part of the dominant culture. There have been times, watching the livestreamed genocide of Gaza, that I have thought, "well, can I just not be Jewish anymore? I want no part of it, I want to wash my hands of it, I cannot participate if this is what most of us feel is okay," but you can't, can you? I mean you can but not in any meaningful way that helps even a single person. It's better to have a history, to know why and how that history has been suppressed, not because of some nostalgia or historical LARPing but because of the whole "first as tragedy, then as farce" of it all.

Which is to say that this book is giving me a lot of feels. You should read it, probably.

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glinda

I need some help/advice. (I definitely still know at least a few fannish Canadians right?)

So I’ve been thinking about going on holiday later this year, maybe end of September, beginning of October. Originally I’d planned either coastal Spain or bimbling around the low countries on an inter-rail ticket. (My local airport flies directly to Schipol, trains from there around Europe are easy.) There is - as of like a week ago - an absolute shitshow going on with the new post-Brexit passport controls/biometrics for UK travellers with the current advice being to get to the airport at least 3 hours early. And look, this may all be sorted by September, but I got caught in the post covid/Brexit nonsense on a work trip to France a few years ago - fucking running with a giant rucksack of Camera kit through Charles De Galle airport from passport control to my gate with a gate agent - and I’m not keen to repeat the experience. So between programmes the other day I pulled up seat61 intending to look at fun inter-rail options via Eurostar because, so my internal monologue went if I need to be at the airport that early I better be flying transatlantic at least. And like fuck am I going to the states while Trump’s in office…

…Yeah.

So back in 2008, when I worked in a call centre and used to plan train adventures between calls to keep myself sane, one of my favourite ‘and while I’m dreaming I’d like a pony’ plans was to do the ‘Canadian’, through the Rockies, across the prairies, across a fair chunk of Canada really. I spent way too long looking at pictures taken out the domes of the viewing carriages along that route. It was out of my budget, and oh goodness, I could not cope with the logistical uncertainty - the train shares tracks with freight, which has priority, so when it’s late it’s not minutes it’s hours, even now with the adjusted compensatory timetable they still recommend you don’t book onward travel or flights for at least 24 hours after your expected arrival time. But all these years later, I can afford it - not the fancy ‘prestige’ option, but the tiny individual sleeper cabin? A couple of nights in Toronto and Vancouver at either end to explore those cities and act as a buffer zone? Totally do-able.

Given the state of the world right now, neither Japan or Australia feel entirely feasible right now - I was never going to be willing to fly via Dubai, it was always going to be via Singapore, nonetheless - the logistics are just beyond me right now. But Canada. I could do Canada. And I’ve wanted to do that specific train journey for a very long time. I’d half planned to get my other bathroom re-done, but the thought of taking that money and turning it into a new bathroom suite when there’s so many places I’ve never been and things I’ve never done, just feels so pointless. I want to knock a destination off my life-list.

So Canadians - or just folks who’ve spent time in Canada - what’s your advice? What am I missing/not taking into consideration? Which direction do I go: East to West (with a detour to Vancouver island) or West to East (with a detour to Montreal?) What time of year? (I was thinking Autumn colour but I’m persuadable. However, I remember Chicago in February, and my friend C’s other bridesmaid flew in to meet us from Manitoba, and nothing she said made me want to do Winnipeg in winter…Would Spring be a better choice?) Should I stop off along the way? If so, where? Have I, in fact, lost my damn mind?

feeling curious
hearing Alanis Morisette - Head Over Feet

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rocky41_7 posting in

books

Today while waiting for my car’s brake pads to be replaced, I finish The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw. This is a short (fewer than 100 pages) fairy tale-inspired horror story about a mermaid and a plague doctor who get wrapped up in the sick games of a village they pass through.

I liked the idea of this story a lot more than the execution. Have you ever had the sense a book really wanted to say something profound about human nature? This book felt like that constantly. It also felt like the author desperately wanted the reader to be impressed with her large and esoteric vocabulary. Things were phrased and rephrased in ways that felt keenly like they were only there so the author could use a specific word. Which, fair, we’ve all done it, but the scaffolding showed so plainly here it felt very clumsy. I’m not usually one to fuss too much about purple prose, but the language here often felt decorative enough that meaning was obscured rather than clarified.

I like the vibes in this book, and the two main characters were engaging (although I felt like the half-mermaid children were a pretty glaring dropped thread) and the plot interesting, and some of the writing was beautiful, but more often it was distracting. I never sank into the book, which was too bad, because there were some cool moments.

Can’t say I’m inclined to look into more of Khaw’s writing, because I think her style is just not for me. I don’t think I wasted my time with this book, but I don’t need to see more from her.

silveradept

Let's begin with this: Inequality produces worse health and mortality outcomes for everyone, but it hasn't been noticed until now because for several decades, advances in medicine managed to get close to balancing the ledger.

Sports betting, and prediction markets in general, aided by mobile apps and Internet betting, have made it very easy for people who are susceptible to problem gambling patterns, or those who don't have the money to gamble, to gamble far more than they want to.

Conversion "therapy" doesn't work to produce the results it claims to, or desires to. Instead, it continues to traumatize and blame, rather than help.

People who are impressed by buzzwords and corporate bullshit tend not to be as good at doing their jobs, according to some Cornell research. And the difficulty potentially is that those who are impressed by such BS tend to hire and promote people who are similarly so, which compounds the problem.

The insistence on seeing someone while chatting to them makes no sense to someone who can't see, and yet, their sighted friends seem to believe that if they can't see them, something is seriously wrong.

People are not ideologies. People have ideologies, and when you treat people as things, well, Esmerelda Weatherwax has things to say about that.

( Victories, setbacks, and other strange things )

Last for tonight, The Archive of Our Own officially ended its status as a beta piece of software. This doesn't change anything, not really, but it does mean that AO3 believes it's out of beta (but definitely not releasing on time.)

The collection of artifacts a billionaire put together and was good about making sure people could see and engage with has been broken up and sold to various other private collectors, because one of the truths of our world is that capitalism always likes to collect important things, and doesn't always share or allow access to them for people. And it's not just billionaires, of course, People who have amassed a collection of historic finds with their metal detectors sometimes sell their collections as well, rather than making them part of a national or regional collection. Or at least letting them have first crack at anything they want to have.

(Materials via

adrian_turtle,

azurelunatic,

boxofdelights,

cmcmck,

conuly,

cosmolinguist,

elf,

finch,

firecat,

jadelennox,

jenett,

jjhunter,

kaberett,

lilysea,

oursin,

rydra_wong,

snowynight,

sonia,

the_future_modernes,

thewayne,

umadoshi,

vass, the

meta_warehouse community,

little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)

feeling tired
hearing gorillaz - Clint Eastwood

rocky41_7 posting in

books

Wednesday night I plowed through most of The Unworthy by Augustina Baztericca, translated from Spanish by Sarah Moses. This is a horror novel about a woman living in an isolated cult after climate change has ravaged most of the planet.

This was one of those books that had me going “okay just one more section and I’ll put it down” and then it was five sections later and I was still there. It just hooked me. I wanted to know more about the cult, I wanted to know more about the narrator’s past, I was so eager to see what was going to come next.

This book goes heavy on gore, mutilation, and cult abuse, so if those are not for you, you may want to give this one a pass. I found it fascinating; the world of the narrator is so grim and tightly controlled, but it’s all that’s left (as far as they know). The book also leans hard on things unspoken: things the narrator knows are so taboo she crosses them out of her own (secret) writings (such as when she wonders if maybe the earth has begun to heal); things she has forcefully blocked from her memory because they hurt so much to think of; the deep current of attraction she feels towards various other women in the cult which is easier to express through violence than sexuality.

In the claustrophobic world of the cult, it becomes so easy for the leadership to pit the women against each other, and they have grown shockingly cruel and violent towards one another in their quest for dominance (each of the “unworthy” dreams of ascending to the holier status of a “Chosen” or “Enlightened”). With virtually no control over their day-to-day, they fantasize about opportunities to punish each other, their only ability to enact their will on the world.

The hints from the beginning that the narrator questions her role in the cult create a delicious tension in the work. Her mere act of writing her experiences down is a violation of cult rules and she frequently keeps her journal pages bound to her chest under her clothes so no one will find them.

The translation was excellent, the writing flows well and Moses captures the descriptions and the narrator’s backtracking on her wording without anything becoming awkward.

The book isn’t long, but I was riveted, and I would like to read more of Baztericca’s work in the future. This was also the second Argentinian horror novel that surprised me with queerness, so another win for Argentinian horror.

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feeling 100%

sabotabby

This one was good by Law & Order standards, in that while the dialogue and acting were quite bad* and I called the murderer almost immediately, it actually performed a socially useful function.

However, it deals with infanticide and I'm putting everything under a cut.

( Uncertain Justice )

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Eumelia

January 2020

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V and Justice

V: Ah, I was forgetting that we are not properly introduced. I do not have a name. You can call me V. Madam Justice...this is V. V... this is Madam Justice. hello, Madam Justice.

Justice: Good evening, V.

V: There. Now we know each other. Actually, I've been a fan of yours for quite some time. Oh, I know what you're thinking...

Justice: The poor boy has a crush on me...an adolescent fatuation.

V: I beg your pardon, Madam. It isn't like that at all. I've long admired you...albeit only from a distance. I used to stare at you from the streets below when I was a child. I'd say to my father, "Who is that lady?" And he'd say "That's Madam Justice." And I'd say "Isn't she pretty."

V: Please don't think it was merely physical. I know you're not that sort of girl. No, I loved you as a person. As an ideal.

Justice: What? V! For shame! You have betrayed me for some harlot, some vain and pouting hussy with painted lips and a knowing smile!

V: I, Madam? I beg to differ! It was your infidelity that drove me to her arms!

V: Ah-ha! That surprised you, didn't it? You thought I didn't know about your little fling. But I do. I know everything! Frankly, I wasn't surprised when I found out. You always did have an eye for a man in uniform.

Justice: Uniform? Why I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about. It was always you, V. You were the only one...

V: Liar! Slut! Whore! Deny that you let him have his way with you, him with his armbands and jackboots!

V: Well? Cat got your tongue? I though as much.

V: Very well. So you stand revealed at last. you are no longer my justice. You are his justice now. You have bedded another.

Justice: Sob! Choke! Wh-who is she, V? What is her name?

V: Her name is Anarchy. And she has taught me more as a mistress than you ever did! She has taught me that justice is meaningless without freedom. She is honest. She makes no promises and breaks none. Unlike you, Jezebel. I used to wonder why you could never look me in the eye. Now I know. So good bye, dear lady. I would be saddened by our parting even now, save that you are no longer the woman I once loved.

*KABOOM!*

-"V for Vendetta"

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V and Justice

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