dw_accessibility | Member Posts

I left so many things out of the zoo post on Saturday (that I have still not gone back to add in) but the one I am telling you about today (aside from the dwarf mongeese, which I mention only in passing) is Snake, But What If Unicorn:

( Read more... )

This Creature is Gonyosoma boulengeri, the rhinoceros ratsnake. The accompanying distractions included, gloriously,

The function of their majestic nose-points is unknown as we still have a lot to learn about these beautiful animals.

ysobel

One thing I forgot to mention in my update yesterday is that yesterday's procedure was significantly more involved than I expected.

( details )

I can't wear my hearing aid, which is on that side. My glasses sit a bit askew for now. And my ear hurts.

sineala

What I Just Finished Reading

Nothing. Still have not attempted books. Currently getting over a migraine. I have to say, if I am now down to one migraine a week (which would be great, actually) I don't see why it has to be on Comics Wednesday two weeks in a row so that all my comics reviews are ass because I am clearly having difficulty comprehending comics.

Perhaps I could wait until Thursday to read them? No. It must be Wednesday. Otherwise the internet will spoil me.

What I'm Reading Now

Comics Wednesday!

( Captain America #8, Sorcerer Supreme #4, Ultimate Wolverine #15, Ultimates #22 )

What I'm Reading Next

Look, I'd be happy if I just got to read a book ever again.

Current Mood: tired

fayanora

Potentially controversial take: a lot of what gets called "necromancy" is actually the domain of life magic. Resurrection? Life magic cuz you're restoring life. Talking with the dead? If that's possible, that means there's life after death, it's just a different kind of life. So, life magic because you're speaking with those whose spirits live after they've died. About the only form of necromancy I can think of that doesn't fit life magic is where you're just puppeting corpses around, and that's just glorified telekinesis.

oceangrey

posted on

dw_community_promo:

warrington_runcorn_ntdp is a new fan-run community focused on the music of electronic project Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan.

Anyone is free to join, even those who have never listened before! Although if that is you, I'd recommend checking out the project's Soundcloud, Bandcamp, and Youtube to get acquainted :D

Discussion on the community will include, but is not limited to, avourite songs/albums/album artwork, physical media, how you discovered the music, recommendations for similar music, etc.

The current rules are pretty standard: no harassment/discrimination against any other Dreamwidth users; no NSFW/explicit content unless it's directly connected to the community's theme; and please keep any posts/comments on topic as much as possible. Anything else can be decided on in the future.

I (

oceangrey) am the current only moderator/admin, but if anyone else wants a similar role just message me or comment on the community's pinned post!

Current Mood: productive

oceangrey

posted on

dw_community_promo:

withnailandi is a community for everything related to Withnail & I (1987). Fanworks/recommendations, meta/discussions, whatever, all are welcome here! Another related community is

withnailandinsfw, for any more explicit fanworks/discussions.

Although not entirely new (made in October 2025) both communities are unused as of yet, due to most of the fandom being on other platforms. Feel free to join whether you're a casual fan, or if it's your favourite film of all time, or if you're somewhere in between!

withnailandi is open for anyone to join, and

withnailandinsfw is set to administrator-approved due to the community's content.

Current Mood: busy

ursamajor

One of these days, I will get around to making myself a bike icon or three. I've only been biking for transportation as an adult for 18 years now!

( recent bike rides: coffee ride, bike party, Kidical Mass, and biking to the library to get a Star Trek-themed library card )

Still, I did take this most recent Sunday off from running because of the higher-than-normal activity, and squeezed a quick jog in this morning before the heatwave really set in. It should not be this close to 90F in the Bay Area in March, but at least I still have otter pops in the freezer. Worth noting: I'm finally at a point in my fitness where I can consistently jog 20 minutes in a row. I'm still slow af, but one of my fitness goals this year is to be able to jog a 5k without a significant walk break. I've done races in the past with run-walk intervals, I just want to broaden my toolset. And the cardio is good for breath control, key to singing, so I'm trying to encourage this virtuous feedback loop :)

Despite the heat, I had already defrosted the corned beef for boiled dinner for St. Patrick's Day dinner tonight, and it's one of

hyounpark's faves from our Boston era, so tradition upheld. I also baked soda bread, or at least a slightly nontrad version that called for yogurt instead of the buttermilk we never have on hand. And of course I modded that; we do raisins or currants in ours, not nuts, and for once, I even had caraway seeds on hand thanks to a recent Buy Nothing spice exchange), and that came out so well we've already finished half the loaf. So I got that all on the stove as early as possible to not overheat the house.

In between all the biking and baking, we managed to sneak in brunch on the patio at Oceanview Diner with CJ and Chung and their kids. I ordered the souffle pancake, knowing it was going to show up as dessert, and it was worth the wait (and the looks on everyone's faces 😁 ). Their souffle pancake is really more of a Dutch baby, which their predecessor called a Dutch bunny when I would order it as a kid decades ago, fluffy and just a bit eggy and perfect.

It's too hot to sleep; I think I'll have another otter pop.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: i'm shipping off to find my wooden leg

sineala

I have slightly more brain now and maybe enough energy to post more? Let's find out. I'm sure you've missed me posting about random video games.

Anyway, Slay the Spire 2, the sequel to my most favorite roguelike deckbuilder Slay the Spire came out in Early Access two weeks ago, and is apparently stunningly popular -- it had 500,000 concurrent players its first weekend, beating basically everything else on Steam at the time, which no one was really expecting from, you know, an indie card game.

I haven't played it enough to give a full review, because even in EA there is a lot more content -- there are five characters, two of which are brand new, all of which have new cards, and there are all sorts of new mechanics and events I haven't discovered yet. So far I have now beaten what exists of the game with four of the five characters and I know I haven't seen anywhere near everything yet. I think it's currently balanced harder than the original game, but the subreddit is full of people saying it is way too easy, so I guess we will see what happens when the balance patches start coming out.

But the really cool thing about this game is the multiplayer, which we only found out existed in a trailer that they released, like, two weeks before the actual game. It has co-op with up to four players! I only have one friend who plays this game, as far as I know --

gelishan, who actually introduced me to the original game -- and we played a game of it the other night, and I have to say that co-op is absolutely the most fun way to experience the game. It helps to be on voice chat, so you can coordinate things like 'who are we targeting first" or "if you have anything inflicting Vulnerable, please play that first" or "do you need this Strength Potion" or "do you want me to play Piercing Wail this turn so you don't take 35 damage straight to the face" or whatever, but I guess theoretically you could play it in silence and just deal with the fact that everyone is playing their turns simultaneously.

Anyway, that is clearly the way this game has always been meant to be played and I need to do this again at some point. The co-op multiplayer is absolutely amazing! I don't know that I would recommend the game in its current single-player state to people who haven't played the original, just because it is already a hard game and it helps to have some idea of how three of the five characters play, if you're going to play it by yourself. But if you are playing multiplayer, I think you can just go for it and you and your friends can take turns carrying each other through the game.

So, yeah, that's what I've been up to, as I slowly regain some brain. Slaying the Spire anew!

(Also it's really weird to actually talk to someone you have known on the internet for, like, 25 years, but you've never heard their voice before.)

Current Mood: nerdy

ysobel

Mohs procedure (making sure they remove all the skin cancer) done today. Had to get up hours earlier than normal, before sunrise, in order to get there at 7:45am ... and got back at like 1:50pm. Two hours of that was waiting for pathology.

The procedure was done with local anesthesia but that wore off mid afternoon. Things hurt now. They don't even give good drugs, just suggest alternating Tylenol and ibuprofen, both in otc form.

Am very tired right now.

kaberett

Allotment salad!
Got Things Into The Ground (as well as out of it); I am as ever running massively behind but the weather was lovely and touching soil remains very good.
It was warm enough to have the back door open for a bit.
I am really, really enjoying the self-indulgent Very Expensive Lebkuchen I got from SousChef in the January sale. They make an excellent supper.
Bloods taken today do include a full blood count; alas no ferritin (that's scheduled for... May? April?) but I do get a sneaky extra update on how my estimated haemoglobin is doing.
libgourou continues to Work. I remain very pleased about this.

rydra_wong

https://transrightsreadathon.carrd.co/

March 17-31, 2026

The Trans Rights Readathon is an annual call to action to readers and book lovers in support of Trans Day of Visibility (TDOV) on March 31st.

We are calling on the reader community to read and uplift books written by and/or featuring trans, nonbinary, 2Spirit, and gender-nonconforming authors and characters.

As before, I would like to request that people shout out their favourite eligible books in the comments!

oceangrey

I've been listening to a lot more electronic music recently, and I discovered a music (project? band? artist?) called Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan, whose name (with some relevance to my uni course, lol) immediately drew me in.

All the albums and tracks are very... I'd hate to say "conceptual", although that probably applies. They're very tied to the idea of urban planning and the promises that were made through the New Town developments of the mid-late 20th century (although the artist would, perhaps rightly, argue whether those promises were actually delivered on or not). It's an interesting reflection on the importance of public consideration in planning in the UK, supported by eerie, ambient 70's synths, and with some eye-catching album covers to boot.

Needless to say, I used last Bandcamp Friday to get a CD of my favourite album, 'Public Works and Utilities'. It arrived today and it looks absolutely beautiful! Unfortunately I'm away from my CD player at the moment, but I just can't wait to listen to it :D

Another planning-related media I've looked into recently is the short film "I Love This Dirty Town", released in 1969 and narrated by the author Margaret Drabble. It's interesting to see people outside the architectural/planning fields weigh in on the social impacts of some of the less-thought-out planning decisions of the past, the ones where the public interest perhaps wasn't prioritised over the experts' own egos. A lot of the discussion in the film reminded me significantly of Jane Jacobs' social analyses of planning (such as with the "eyes on the street" concept), but I feel it did lack depth and nuance, possibly because most of the people being interviewed were all from very similar creative roles as Drabble herself (designers, scuptors, other authors, etc.) rather than just... people who live in London.

The main concerns made about planning were the lack of public consultation (and to be fair to the film, public participation as a requirement to the planning process wasn't law until the Town and Country Planning Act of the previous year, and so the after-effects of the previous technocratic focus were still being felt in new projects), but there was very little, if at all, discussion about what could be done to improve public input.

Overall, it does feel more like a letter of complaint rather than a manifesto. It that was its intention, then... fine. The best thing about it was a great deal of footage of London in the 1960s, which I found fascinating. It makes me want to binge-watch similar short films on BFI Player... which I unfortunately can't do because it seems to hate my laptop for some reason. Alas.

Current Mood: blah
Current Music: Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan - Water Treatment Works

jesse_the_k

While he was quite surprised to walk out for his morning on-leash ablutions into heavy snow above his knees, he's really starting to relax.

This morning I reached down to stroke his back and he didn't flinch.

Just now I was resting on the floor by his bed, petting his back. I started to scritch the scruff of his neck, and he relaxed even more, his dark eyes shining up at MyGuy behind the camera. (I'm reclining on my tripled-up exercise pad just behind him, shockingly without glasses.)

( Read more... )

Only 28 days of enforced rest to go!

althea_valara

communal_creators is a community of creative types doing all sorts of things. We have two challenges a year: a week-long challenge in the spring and a month-long challenge in the fall.

The spring mini-round is starting a week from today! ANYWAY who creates is welcome to join. It's going to be time-based, and there are three tiers to choose from for your daily time goal.

Here's the sign-up post!

I'm serious when I say "anybody who creates". Yes, many of us are writers, but we also have fiber artists (knitting, crochet, weaving, and kumihimo braid), cross-stitchers and other needleworkers, vidders, animators, music creation, bakers... and I'm probably leaving something out.

My goals:
* finish the first sleeve of my cardigan
* maybe work on the t-shirt
* do another section of Neocities work
* write some, hopefully finishing a fic

Which is plenty given that it's just a week long, but it should be a mostly free week for me, except for work. I've got nothing else planned during the week, so hope to make some good progress.

Also tooting my own horn: someone asked for a tracking spreadsheet, so I made one this morning. You can find it in the comments of the sign-up post.

Current Mood: creative

kaberett

Reading. I continue to work my way through the She's A Beast archives, to a degree that is not necessarily ... uh ... optimal, in terms of all the other things I want to do...

I slowed down on LIFTOFF, on account of resuming reading from the start with A, and then this evening I tripped and fell and am. More. of the way through it. again.

Finished What Is Queer Food? by John Birdsall. Ultimately the argument is that the queerness is a function of community -- the role that food plays in eating together -- though he also tries at various points for "enjoying food is queer" (among other things), which I do not think I am the target audience for. (Having said which I am now wondering what it would take to convince me of that line of reasoning, and Ideas Are Stirring. Hmm.) Overall a mixture of anecdotes from culinary history and fiction to fill in events that went unrecorded; he does hold space for people to be complex and flawed, and I appreciated the history that was actually history, but -- alas, this did not really work for me.

Writing. Words. Continue. To be. Eked out.

Watching. The 2026 Migraine World Summit is ongoing and eating a lot of my time and brain; thus far nothing has made me actually vibrate with fury and I've had a couple of useful joining-the-dots moments, so mustn't grumble there, really. And I have finally watched the talks from last year's Day 2 that I missed due to time changes, and have started transferring my digital notes from last year into my notebook...

Playing. Inkulinati: we continue Not Dead Yet in the Exploders run on Master difficulty.

The Ridiculous Colours Game.

Sudoku... appears to have let go of my brain for now?

Cooking. This evening I have been attempting to remember how to make Spätzle, and got there eventually (part of the difficulty being that this is the first time I've made them since acquiring a dedicated Spätzlebrett, and I needed to reestablish correct consistency of the dough...)

Eating. This morning we engaged in a Weekend Morning Ritual of going down to the local fancy bakery and getting brunch from them. We also got Treats for Afternoon Tea; I am delighted that they'll supply me with cardamom buns that I don't have to actually make myself.

I have also been Craving Brownies, but not enough to actually make them myself (and also The Oven Is Broken), and consequently have eaten them courtesy of both Wagamama (ritual Thursday night takeaway) and London Zoo (Saturday afternoon tea).

Exploring. London Zoo! Saw creatures! Maybe I will even go back and edit in more details about the creatures! Creatures: good.

Several bimbles around local front gardens (etc) to enjoy Spring Flowers.

Growing. Harvested (and consumed!) more salad. Transplanted some garlic. Wrangled some more weeding. Have yet to sow any more things but really want to have Actual Plants this growing season so, uh, maybe that can be a priority for Breaks From Migraine World Summit, not that that's worked so far...

Observing. THE BAT.

And then for brunch this morning we took our breakfast slightly further than usual to a different park bench, this one surrounded by daffodils, and then additionally wandered a little way down the New River (neither new, nor a river) to see if the coots were doing things yet (which I have also been checking every time I go to the pharmacy to pick up meds). The coots aren't, BUT there were TEN EGYPTIAN GOSLINGS peeping about the place!!! At least one of whom was Extremely keen on coming All the way down the bank and plapping along the edge of the bricks, presumably because they were warm and felt nice on feet? Certainly two very gentle attempts to chase it back towards its parents got them contemplating hissing at me, and only persuaded it to maybe do the thing for about thirty seconds at most, so I gave up on that and just stood back and watched them for a bit, and then was very relieved that the foolhardy baby did upon parents Alarm Calling (as best we can tell about A Passing Dog) go FWEEP FWEEP FWEEP all the way back up and into the bundle of its siblings. An unexpected and very welcome delight.

larissa

checking in, even though i haven't been very productive again...

websites: still nada. was hoping to get stuff done yesterday but then i got distracted by other things, woe. maybe sometime this week? i have less going on.
writing: has been middling. i mean i'm still writing my daily nonsense about my ocs, but not much in the way of new project stuff like i managed at the start of the month.
gaming: i think i'm 18-20 hours into trails from zero? i'm near the end of the second chapter. since i picked up a new raid commitment in ff14 i've had less time during the week to play, so i've been aiming for weekends. hopefully i can make more progress in the coming week.
- i did also get pokémon leafgreen for switch out of nostalgia. i keep forgetting when the rival battles are and have been woefully underprepared each time. this is just going to be a now-and-then game; it's nice to pick up when i have no brain for anything else.

that's all the updates for now... i really hate this time of year, i feel so blah.

Current Music: 鳥の詩 — Lia

fayanora

I just finished a book by T. Kingfisher called "Snake-Eater," which is a horror story in which Selena, the protagonist, runs away from her life after her mom's death to unwind in the American Southwest, and in the process runs afoul of Snake Eater, who is basically the god of roadrunners.

Now, if your only knowledge of roadrunners is from the Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons, well... apparently real roadrunners are fucking terrifying. They're basically evil little feathered dinosaurs that are wicked smart predators with enormous talons and a beak like a shiv. They apparently have zero fear of human beings, since they know they can outrun us (but cannot, IRL, outrun coyotes; real coyotes are twice as fast as real roadrunners). If one decides to attack you, they will fuck up your shit, leaving you with great talon gouges and pecking the back of your skull in an effort to kill you the same way they do to the rattlesnakes that are one of their favorite prey animals. (Yes, these feathered fuckers hunt venomous snakes!) And because they're so fast, they can attack you faster than your brain can process that they've started moving.

And she faces the GOD of these things. (Or a very powerful spirit. Either way...)

Anyway, that's not my review of the book. This is my review, from Goodreads:

This book is in a sub-genre I would call "cozy horror," because it's mostly a sedate book about a neurotic (and possibly autistic) woman and the series of toxic relationships she gets away from, and how she grows a spine to stand up for herself with the help of some friends she makes at the tiny town her aunt lived in. Most of the book is a slow burn, with a few sprinkles of foreshadowing here and there, and a couple bursts of supernatural action before reaching the very satisfying ending. It took like 70 pages to get to the first burst of action, and another hundred for the second burst. But it's the rest of the story that's the star of the novel: the characters, their connections with each other, Selena's thoughts as she disentangles her mind from her toxic relationships, and the new bonds of friendship and community she makes. The horror elements serve mostly to move the character development along.

Over the course of this book, I fell so in love with the setting, the characters, and the vibe of the book that I could easily read a sequel that had even less supernatural or horror elements. Which is saying a lot, for me, because I very rarely read anything that could be considered conventional fiction.

My only remaining question is why it seems to take place in the year 2051 or later. It was very subtle, little odd things here and there that finally came together with a single sentence spoken before the second major burst of action. It was extremely subtle until that point, though I did learn a new word ("arcology") and then saw that word show up like five times in the book. I got the impression maybe humanity was finally wising up and fixing climate change somehow, but honestly I'm still not sure why that was included. It doesn't take anything away from the story, it's just a minor mystery that was never really given a satisfying resolution because at no point in the book (not even the afterword) was this directly addressed. It's like we were just dropped into the story and left to pick up on those subtle clues on our own and draw our own conclusions. Again, not complaining exactly, just... I'd like to know what that was all about. Nothing about the story struck me as needing to be set in any particular year. I thought it took place in 2025 or so until I started picking up on those occasional breadcrumbs.

Anyway, excellent book, and I would give it seven stars if I could.

kaberett

highlights included:

the lion ROARING
glasswing (Greta oto) pupae: tiny, bright leaf green, with sparkly metallic bits (gold and silver)
the rhinoceros ratsnake (Gonyosoma boulengeri): has a NOSE. why is its NOSE pointy? no(se) idea!
turquoise gecko (Lygodactylus williamsi)

otherwise everything is still Migraine World Summit (though I have once again learned a useful thing today! neck pain can be a prodrome symptom!) and Special Interest.

kaberett

In apparent celebration of Migraine World Summit, I have spent this evening having an unscheduled migraine attack for no obvious reason. I disapprove. (Because I've been doing a lot of audiovisual processing, captions notwithstanding? Because I had my screen much brighter than usual for a while playing a colours game?* Because oven't?)

Nonetheless I have watched and made digital notes on all of 2026 Day 2, watched and made digital notes on 3/4 talks from 2025 Day 2 (which I missed at the time), and made physical notes for 2025 Day 1 and 1/4 of Day 2. I am... sort of catching up.

I am really enjoying my pens. I also find myself with the problem of wanting lots of different notebooks and, also, to keep everything in One Single Solitary Notebook, For Convenience...

* NB I am a rocks nerd. My colour discrimination is ludicrously good. I am sorry that that link is weird and competitive about my ridiculous score, but not sorry enough to provide you with the bare link.

kaberett

I currently have a bit of a special interest happening, right. So I spent a bit of today's therapy session talking about it, as one does, and then meandered around to one of my current Big Topics[1], and made it all the way through to the wrapping-up stage of proceedings!

... when My Favourite Metaphor About Therapy abruptly suggested itself to me and I had. A Moment.

Which is how I found myself explaining that, in a thematically appropriate coincidence, said favourite metaphor is "emotional heavy lifting, with trained spotter".

To which came the response: "... can I. borrow that."

And thus: A Good Grade In Therapy.

[1] social anxiety. it's the social anxiety.

Profile

The DW Accessibility Project Team

October 2017

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30	31

Page Summary

Style Credit

Base style: Modish by branchandroot
Theme: Greyscale by twtd

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Mar. 19th, 2026 05:48 pm

The DW Accessibility Project Team

Member Posts

pointy animals

(no subject)

Wednesday Reading Meme

Necromancy is actually life magic

Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan Community Promo

Withnail & I Community Promo

four rides make a post

Slay the Spire 2

(no subject)

some good things

Oh hey it's Trans Rights Readathon time again!

16.03.2026: Music and Planning

Day 21: Shadow Continues to Mellow

PSA: communal_creators spring mini-round is soon!

vital functions

the ides of march count as the mid march update

"Snake-Eater" by T. Kingfisher

zoo!

miscellany

A good grade in therapy, something that--

Profile

October 2017

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags