Beyond Selidor

There's a blackbird that's taken to standing on the kitchen roof (just below our bedroom window), singing its heart out every morning around 6am to greet the dawn. It's like a natural alarm clock, and it's such a gentle introduction to each new day that I can hardly begrudge it.

I didn't know I needed a four-day weekend so badly until I had one, with four days stretching gloriously ahead of me, every hour my own to do with as I chose. It ended up being the perfect balance and mixture of activities, planned in such a way that everything worked out seamlessly, with even the weather cooperating. I'm good at this — organising holidays at home — but I so rarely have the opportunity.

I've described everything below in words, but have a representative photoset, as well.

This extended weekend's events can be grouped under a series of subheadings, as follows:

Movement
I swam 1km at the pool, three times: on Friday, Sunday, and today, gliding back and forth through the water, which was blissfully empty today and Friday, but too crowded for my liking on Sunday morning. On Saturday, I went to my classes at the gym, and then Matthias and I walked 4km out to Little Downham (about which more below), through fields lined with verdant green trees and flowering fruit orchards, watched by sleepy clusters of cows and horses, and then returned home the same 4km way. I did yoga every day, stretchy and flowing in the sunshine, listening to the birdsong in the garden. Yesterday, Matthias and I walked along the sparkling river, and then back up through the market, which was full of the usual Sunday afternoon of cheerful small children and excitable dogs.

Wanderings
As is the correct way of things on long weekends, we roamed around on the first two days, and stuck closer and closer to home as the days wore on. On Friday night, we travelled out into the nearby village of Whittlesford (via train and rail replacement bus), and on Saturday we did the walk to Little Downham, but beyond that I went no further than the river, the market, and the gym, and I was glad of it.

Food and cooking
The Whittlesford trip was to attend a six-course seafood tasting menu with wine pairings, which was delicate, exquisite, and a lovely way to kick off the weekend. In Little Downham, we ate Thai food for lunch at the pub, cooked fresh, redolent with chili, basil and garlic. I made an amazing oliahercules fish soup for dinner on Saturday, filled with garlic and lemon juice and briny olives and pickles. Last night I spent close to three hours cooking a feast of Indonesian food: lamb curry, mixed vegetable stir fry, slow-cooked coconut rice, and handmade peanut sauce, and it was well worth the effort. We'll be eating the leftovers for much of the rest of the week. We ate hot cross buns for breakfast and with afternoon cups of tea. We grazed on fresh sourdough bread, and cheese, and sundried tomatoes, and olives.

Growing things
On Sunday, we picked up some seedlings from the market: two types of tomato, cucumber, chives, and thyme, and I weeded the vegetable patches, and planted them. I was delighted to see that the sweetpea plant from last year has self-seeded, with seedlings springing up in four places. The mint and chives have returned, as have the various strawberry plants. Wood pigeons descend to strip the leaves from the upper branches of the cherry trees, and the apple blossom buzzes with bumblebees.

Media
The fact that we picked Conclave as our Saturday film this week, and then the Pope died today seems almost too on the nose (JD Vance seems to have been to the Pope as Liz Truss was to Queen Elizabeth II: moronic culture warring conservatives seem to be lethal to the ageing heads of powerful institutions), but I enjoyed it at the time. It reminded me a lot of Death of Stalin: papal politics written with the cynicism and wit of Armando Ianucci, and at the end everyone got what they deserved, and no one was happy.

In terms of books, it's been a period of contrasts: the horror and brutality of Octavia Butler's post-apocalyptic Xenogenesis trilogy, in which aliens descend to extractively rake over the remains of an Earth ruined by Cold War-era nuclear catastrophe, in an unbelievably blunt metaphor for both the colonisation of the continents of America, and the way human beings treat livestock in factory farming, and then my annual Easter weekend reread of Susan Cooper's Greenwitch, about the implacable, inhospitable power of the sea, cut through with selfless human compassion. Both were excellent: the former viscerally horrifying to read, with aliens that feel truly inhuman in terms of biology, social organisation, and the values that stem from these, and unflinching in the sheer extractive exploitation of what we witness unfold. It's very of its time (for something that's so interested in exploring non-cis, non-straight expressions of gender and sexuality, it ends up feeling somewhat normative), and while the ideas are interesting and well expressed, I found the writing itself somewhat pedestrian. It makes me wonder how books like this would be received if they were published for the first time right now. Greenwitch, as always, was a delight. Women/bodies of water is basically my OTP, and women and the ocean having emotions at each other — especially if this has portentous implications for the consequences of an epic, supernatural quest — is my recipe for the perfect story, so to me, this book is pretty close to perfect.

I've slowly been gathering links, but I think this post is long enough, so I'll leave them for another time. I hope the weekend has been treating you well.

Today it's so windy that one of the sheets I have hanging out to dry has blown off the line repeatedly. Although this is somewhat frustrating, the combination of the heat and the wind suggests this laundry will be dry in several hours. Everything is sunlit and floral, and accompanied by a chorus of birdsong, which feels audibly more present than at other times of the year. Yesterday I got my first hot cross bun from the bakery down the road: a highlight of the year which (unlike supermarkets, which start selling hot cross buns practically on 26th December) is possible only for about two or three weeks in the lead-up to Easter.

It's been a low-key, low-energy weekend — other than the usual morning trips to the gym and grocery shopping at the market, I've barely left the house, which suits me fine, as work continues to absolutely flatten me, and I need a very undemanding weekend to recover. Matthias and I did watch a film last night (La Chimera, an Italian film which on the surface is about a group of rather hopeless people in a crumbling village eking out a living by stealing Etruscan archaeological relics from underground burial sites, but in reality just hurls every piece of of symbolism about descent to underworlds, otherworlds, labyrinths, death, sacrifice and harvest at the wall to see what sticks), and I did drag him out today for a wander around the market square in the sunshine, looping back home via what we jokingly termed the middle class trifecta of posh cheese shop, posh toiletries/homeware shop ('Don't let me buy any candles,' I said to Matthias before we left the house, and then returned with two new candles), and independent bookshop, but that's it for the weekend. I now plan to immerse myself in a mixture of reading (I bookmarked a bunch of stuff from peaked's recent fanfic exchange wrap-up post, and still haven't made a start on any of it), yoga, and lots of slow, fragrant, Iranian cooking. It should be good.

( This week's reading )

Yesterday, another annual event took place: a local farmer, and his young son arrived outside our house on a massive tractor, and cut all the grass in the vacant field over the road. That, along with the clocks changing over to daylight saving time last night, is a sure sign that spring is well and truly here.

Last night, it was so cold that we elected to put a bottle of wine outside the kitchen door in the garden, instead of in the fridge — and it chilled to a far cooler temperature than would have been achieved in the fridge. Everything is covered with a thick layer of spiky frost that doesn't melt away in the sunlight. I have been outdoors — to the gym and the market yesterday morning, and for a brief walk with Matthias today — but it's a bit too biting even for me. I like to look at the landscape, rather than be within it, if possible.

( Three books and a movie )

Beyond films and books, I've been keeping an eye on the prompts at threesentenceficathon, and have been sporadically adding my fills to this series on AO3; I'll try to add some prompts of my own once a new post opens up.

fandomtrees is close to opening — there are a handful of requests which need at least one more gift before the collection is ready to go. If you're able to fill any of the prompts here, I'm sure this would be very welcome by the remaining participants. You can see a list of all requests on this Google spreadsheet.

I hope everyone's been having cosy and nourishing weekends.

It's another long weekend here in the UK, although this time around I have to work on the Monday, so it's just a regular old weekend for me. We've managed to pack quite a bit into the two days nonetheless.

On Saturday morning, Matthias and I headed off fairly early into Cambridge in order to see Furiosa in the IMAX cinema. I'm glad we did so from an audiovisual perspective, since it was a great spectacle, and was served well by the format, but my feelings about the film as a whole are quite mixed. When I first heard George Miller was making a prequel about Furiosa, my immediate reaction was one of Do Not Want — and all those misgivings were confirmed. Fury Road was pretty much close to flawless (it's my favourite film), precisely because it left so much about its world and its characters unexplained, operating in an almost mythic space in which viewers fill in the blanks according to their own experiences. I didn't need Furiosa's backstory, I didn't need to know every little detail about the social structure of the lives of the inhabitants of the wasteland — and in general I'm kind of fed up with this perception that fannishness of a particular fictional universe equates to a desire to see every blank spot fleshed out and every plot hole filled in. The chase scenes, as always, were incredible, visually it was beautiful, the world felt vivid, three-dimensional and lived-in, and Chris Hemsworth was clearly having the time of his life playing a character who was essentially Thor, but evil — but overall, this was not a film that I needed to exist.

We were out of the cinema in time for a late-ish lunch at a Korean restaurant, then sat for a while under the trees in a pub beer garden before heading back to Ely. It was warm and clear enough for us to eat dinner outside on the deck, which was wonderful.

I'm writing this post a bit earlier than I would usually do on a Sunday because we will be heading out after lunch for the monthly walk with our walking group. Unfortunately the lovely clear weather of Saturday has blown away, and it's been raining on and off all morning, with thunderstorms promised. We'll see how that goes. The walk itself will be flat and easy (there's no other kind of walk in this area, given the landscape), along the river and through fields in a loop of about 5-7km. An easy Sunday stroll, and hopefully without rain!

The other thing that happened this weekend was author reveals for once_upon_fic, so I'll stick my recs for the collection in this post, now that I'm able to give credit to the authors.

I must start, of course, with my lovely gift, which gave me exactly what I wanted in terms of character dynamics from Tochmarc Étaíne fanfic:

Carried by the Wind (1468 words) by Nelja-in-English
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Irish Mythology
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Étaíne/Fúamnach (Tochmarc Étaíne)
Characters: Fúamnach (Tochmarc Étaíne), Étaíne (Tochmarc Étaíne)
Additional Tags: Canon Rewrite, Love Potion/Spell, Metamorphosis, Dreams, Magic, Temporary Character Death, Mentions of Midir and Aengus
Summary:

Fúamnach tells the story, this time. And when it gets away from her, she gets help.

I also enjoyed these other fics in the collection:

Gold Tree by water_bby (I assume the user has archive-locked it so I can't embed it)

Blush-Rose (2893 words) by RussetFiredrake
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Craobh-Òir agus Craobh-Airgid | Gold Tree and Silver Tree (Fairy Tale)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Craobh-Òir | Gold Tree & An Darna Bean | The Second Wife (Craobh-Òir agus Craobh-Airgid), An Darna Bean | The Second Wife/Am Prionnsa | The Prince (Craobh-Òir agus Craobh-Airgid)
Characters: Original Female Character(s)
Additional Tags: Fairy Tale Retellings, First Kiss, Curiosity, Bisexual Female Character, implied threesome
Summary:

A prince's new bride fears she is in a story where her curiosity will be her downfall. She finds herself in a different tale altogether.

A Rose of a Different Form (1438 words) by BardicRaven
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: La Belle et la Bête | Beauty and the Beast (Fairy Tale)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Belle | Beauty & La Bête | Beast (La Belle et la Bête), La Bête | Beast & Belle | Beauty's Brothers(La Belle et la Bête), La Bête | Beast & Belle | Beauty's Sisters (La Belle et la Bête), La Bête | Beast & Le Marchand | Merchant (La Belle et la Bête)
Characters: Belle | Beauty (La Belle et la Bête), La Bête | The Beast (La Belle et la Bête), Le Marchand | The Merchant (La Belle et la Bête), Belle | Beauty's Brothers(La Belle et la Bête), Belle | Beauty's Sisters (La Belle et la Bête)
Additional Tags: Redemption
Summary:

As soon as sundown came on the day that the merchant was to have brought his daughter and no-one had darkened his doors, the Beast knew that the merchant had lied

Grant Me Clemency (4039 words) by silveradept
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Relationships: Bertilak de Hautdesert & Gawain
Characters: Bertilak de Hautdesert, Gawain (Arthurian), King Arthur - Character
Additional Tags: time loops, A Game of Questions, Rash Actions Lead to Rash Consequences, Ruminations
Summary:

Sir Gawain is trapped in an endless cycle of repetition, from Arthur's hall to the green chapel, attempting to find a way out of his predicament, but he has no earthly idea what he is supposed to change, or who is responsible for this cycle. So he plays the game again, hoping this time might be the one that finally breaks it.

when you return, go to the sea (14840 words) by celaenos
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Selkie Bride (Folk Tale)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Selkie's Children (The Selkie Bride), Selkie Wife (The Selkie Bride), Human Husband (The Selkie Bride), Original Characters
Additional Tags: Once Upon a Fic Exchange 2024, Sister-Sister Relationship, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Family Feels - Struggling To Be A Good Guardian, Family Feels - Fraught Sibling Relationship, Fairytales & Folklore, One Shot, Original Character(s), Fic Exchange, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Abuse
Summary:

She learns about her ma three days after her seventh birthday—but she doesn’t learn the whole of it until many years after that.

My own assignment was another fic for 'The Selkie Bride' folk tale. Women/the sea: my ultimate OTP.

Ripples (2035 words) by Dolorosa
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Selkie Bride (Folk Tale)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Selkie Wife (The Selkie Bride), Selkie's Children (The Selkie Bride)
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Selkies
Summary:

The sea takes, and the sea gives back its own unexpected gifts.

Two of the selkie's daughters try to find their way through uncharted waters in the wake of their mother's departure.

And now the sun has come out! Let's hope the weather holds during our walk.

Today is the first time this year that I have dared to hang my laundry out on the line in the garden — and I was delighted to discover (as I can see into the gardens of all the houses in our row of terraces) that almost every single neighbour had chosen to do the same. It's such a sign of the changing of the seasons, and it lifts my spirits every time.

After going to the gym on Saturday morning, and wrangling the landscapers who are continuing to work on our back garden, I spent the afternoon and evening in Cambridge with Matthias. The place was its usual chaotic weekend zoo; the centre of town was packed to the hilt both with tourists and with swarms of postgraduate students processing through the streets in gowns on their way to graduate, then spilling out into every restaurant, cafe and bar to celebrate with their families. Thankfully, Matthias and I had booked ahead in advance, and had an excellent dinner at the new high(ish)-end Japanese restaurant in town, enjoying sharing platters of sushi and sashimi, and cocktails.

We headed back to Ely fairly early on (hilariously, one shouty group of women on a hen party returning from London spilled off the train at Cambridge, to be replaced by another shouty group of women on a hen party returning from Cambridge, like some kind of one in-one out policy), and swung by our favourite cafe/bar for a nightcap, chatting to the women who run the place and slowly winding down.

Today, I've mostly been cooking, reading, doing laundry and so on, although I also managed to do quite a bit of work on my once_upon_fic assignment, and feel I've navigated my way through the thorns with which my recipient's prompts initially presented me. It should be much smoother going from now on.

It's been a good and varied reading week: some old favourites, this very good short story, which I saw recommended in a Dreamwidth friend's locked post as something doing something incredibly clever with the experience of being an immigrant (as an immigrant myself, I agree emphatically: this is exactly what it's like).

I also finished one new-to-me book, More Perfect (Temi Oh), a near-future dystopian novel which retells the Orpheus and Eurydice myth in a setting in which human beings are physically and mentally connected to the internet (and to each other) through neural implants, to the extent that no one with such implants is able to experience the mental privacy of their own minds. Obviously, this extreme surveillance state seems normal (and even desirable) to people who have never experienced anything different, and the book is in some ways the dawning realisation that their safe, interconnected utopia is a horrifying dystopia in which individual freedom is impossible and the sense of community which people's permanently connected minds promises is nothing but a sham.

The book does some things very well: Oh's depiction of the experiences of the children and grandchildren of immigrants (the immense pressure to succeed, the weight of expectation), and allusions to real-world British political events (there is a moment in which a group of people is watching the results of a contentious referedum be counted, with the slow realisation that their side has lost that is so visceral and painful to read as someone who lived through Brexit that I found it almost physically excruciating) are pitch perfect, as is the near-future technology and the logical societal consequences of its widespread adoption. However, some aspects of the worldbuilding didn't work for me: the constant references to present-day pop culture (the notion that teenagers in the 2040s and 2050s would all be familiar with Harry Potter or Beyonce struck me as unlikely), and the trope in which a public, worldwide revelation of the truth of people's oppression is enough to trigger a peaceful revolution and usher in a new dawn of civil liberties and democracy (beloved of 21st-century dystopian YA, naive at best in my opinion, especially given the current power of disinformation in our own times). I suppose in essence I recommend the book, with some serious reservations.

I'll close this post with a link I came across via vriddy: Cybersafety and Privacy (Particularly in Online Fandom) by thebiballerina, with lots of sensible tips. It's a good reminder that we owe no one in any context (whether online, in person at work, or in person in social settings) full access to every facet of our lives, and keeping some of those boundaries intact is a good idea from a practial, personal safety perspective.

It feels as if Sunday is almost over, but there are still a few more hours of daylight (and laundry-drying), and time to finish my current book, eat a quick dinner, and then head off with Matthias to watch The Holdovers at the community cinema, which will be a nice, cosy way in which to close the weekend. I hope you've all also been having an enjoyable couple of days.

I can feel myself tumbling unstoppably towards a really bad downswing of the mood, but there's still swimming, and cooking, and coffee, and chatting with the people in the bakery down the road, and wandering along the river, and I suppose that will have to be enough. Above all things, I suppose, there are books.

I've read three new-to-me books since last week:

( Here they are behind the cut )



Onward to snowflake_challenge: Make a list of fannish and/or creative resources.

I was going to link to the usual fandom resources I always highlight on these things — fandomcalendar for keeping track of exchanges and other events, recthething for an active recs community, fffriday for a comm focused on f/f relationships in fiction, and so on, but then I had another idea. One of my favourite works of fiction of all time is Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series, but I struggle to summarise coherently what it's all about in a way that both encompasses everything, and lets potential readers know what they're in for. Luckily for me, though, hamsterwoman has done a brilliant job of this in a recent post, which I thought I'd recommend here for anyone who is interested in checking out this exquisite series. There are even fanfic recs and icons!

Speaking of icons, that's another thing I thought I'd highlight here: I've recently seen a number of people asking about good sources of Dreamwidth icons, so I thought I'd list the main places I go for such things. There are two fairly active comms: icons (fandom icons, but also stock icons for stuff like food, drinks, seasonal, holidays, flowers, colours etc), and fandom_icons (mainly specific fandoms). I also know several people who are fairly active icon makers, and over the years I've ended up with a fair few icons by peaked, svgurl, and misbegotten, so you may be interested in looking at their icon posts as well.

Feel free to add your own icon-related suggestions in the comments!

It's time for another snowflake_challenge prompt.



Search in your current space, whether brick-and-mortar or digital. Post a picture (a link to a picture will be fine!) or description of something that is or represents:

( Answers behind the cut )

This has been the first weekend in quite a while spent at home, without visitors, and without various time-consuming and exhausting household tasks to get done — and it has been wonderful. I've got a fairly full-on weeek coming up in terms of work, and having this brief, relaxing pause has been incredibly helpful.

It poured with rain all day yesterday, and Matthias and I got thoroughly soaked when heading out to the market, but we're now well stocked up on fresh fruit and vegetables, have picked up and returned various library books, and we were able to spend most of the remainder of the day hanging around inside, listening to the rain pour down around us. I felt bad for the stall-holders — not just at the market, but also at some kind of food festival taking place around the cathedral, since they would have been sodden, and would not have got much in the way of footfall.

Yesterday was also our wedding anniversary, and Matthias and I celebrated by going out for dinner and eating a ridiculous amount of sushi, which was delicious and cozy in the rain. We've also been revelling in all the various major works that have been done in our house over the past few weeks and are now finally complete: landscaping of the front garden, replacing the carpet on the stairs (the new stuff feels so soft and squishy underfoot), and having the tatty carpet in the living room, study and upstairs landing replaced with laminate. It all looks fantastic, and it's just such a relief to have it completed at last — what was there before was bothering me a lot, it was depressing to look at, and now it looks fresh, and clean, and new.

Other than all that, it's been a fairly quiet weekend. The weather today was nicer, so Matthias and I went out for a brief looping walk along the river, picking up takeaway coffee on the way home. Once I've finished catching up on Dreamwidth I'll go upstairs and do a slow, stretchy, calming yoga class.

Beyond all that, I've been doing my semi-annual reread of one of my favourite book series of all time, Sophia McDougall's Romanitas trilogy. I've already written so much about these books, in my two tags for the series; my default icon on Dreamwidth is a drawing by the author of one of the characters with a quote from the books about her, for many years I was the series' sole online fandom, trying to generate fannish enthusiasm through sheer force of will, to the extent that I got to know the author and she thanked me in the acknowledgements of the third book 'for being generally wonderful.' In other words, my feelings about these books are deep, and just a lot in general. It's not so much what the books are about, although obviously I like that too (alt-history contemporary Roman empire political conspiracy thriller in which a ragtag band of dispossessed and devalued people — some of whom have supernatural abilities — try to take on the might of an empire), it's also the way the books are written, and the way the point-of-view characters think about themselves and carry themselves through the world. Of the four main point-of-view characters, three have this intense interiority — they're in their own heads so much, with this instense, obsessive focus on their own thoughts and actions, and how they are perceived by the people around them — and the fourth point-of-view character is basically the opposite of that, and the other three are constantly baffled and astonished as to how he can be so comfortable and easy in his own skin, in the company of any other people, everywhere. All this, shall we say, resonates a lot.

And that, in essence, has been my weekend so far.

Today's post is going to be a quick one — just answering the current snowflake_challenge prompt, which is: In your own space, rec three fanworks that you did not create.



I'm going to use this post to rec three of my favourite fanvids of all time. By way of preamble, I'll clarify a couple of things relating to how I define 'favourite.' Firstly, I'm not an avid consumer of fanvids, and far less a creator (as I said in a previous post, any kind of fanwork involving graphics is basically like witchcraft to me) — I tend to engage with fanvids when someone I know has either a) created or recced a fanvid and b) it's in a fandom with which I'm familiar, so my engagement is somewhat haphazard. I have pretty clear things that I look for in a fanvid: I have to like the music, I have to feel that it fits well with the focal character(s) and the story being told in the vid (or is so outrageously incongruous that that's basically the point), and the editing has to be smooth enough that errors are unnoticable to my untrained eye. I also personally dislike fanvids that have dialogue from the source spliced into the video — I want it to tell a complete story with music and images, without needing source dialogue as a scaffold.

There are some well-known, beloved fanvids that get recced to everyone wanting to know the greatest hits of the medium, and I like them a lot, but I've steered clear of them here as most people will have had them recced before.

With that in mind, here is my totally biased, subjective, created-from-a-place-of-complete-ignorance list of favourite three fanvids:

( Vid recs )

Do you have any particular things you like in fanvids? Do you have any particular favourites?

Today's snowflake_challenge had me scratching my head for a few minutes:

In your own space, create a fanwork.



It's hard for me to write fic spontaneously (I tend to write almost exclusively for exchanges, and thus in response to prompts), I don't have any meta or reviews I'm burning to write this very minute, and as for anything involving graphics, that's basically witchcraft for me.

But then I decided to interpret 'a fanwork' as 'a recs post' and kill three birds with one stone: fulfill today's challenge prompt, make some recs that can be posted on recthething's Thursday community recs post, and do the 'Community Thursday' challenge of interacting with a Dreamwidth comm on a Thursday.

All my fandoms are small book fandoms — the sorts of things that people only write for during exchanges and fests, if at all — and so they don't have a huge amount of continuous activity on AO3. What I tend to do is periodically sweep the archive for all these fandoms, and read everything new that has been posted that takes my fancy. As a result of this reading, I have three new things to rec.

( Fic recs behind the cut )

This challenge was a good reminder that I should do these kinds of sweeps of AO3 more frequently, and post the results, even if they're likely just to be of interest to me.