rivkat | Reading

The new dryer is just fine, except the top is ever so slightly slanted in a way that makes it a bad place to set your dryer balls.

Have I mentioned that especially after Colonoscopy Week I've had more trouble than usual walking? I've been using my cane inside the house for the first time in quite a while, and I'm limited in how much I can carry without (more) pain. It sucks. Belovedest has set up the short ramp against the shortest outside stairs, and while going up it is Bad, going up the stairs without it is Worse. (Both outside doors have stairs.)

I wasn't available to assist with any of the Thanksgiving cooking. Belovedest did it themselves! Including: turkey, the epic tray of dressing, biscuits from the mix, and instant potatoes made the way that erases the taste of Box. (There was also salad available, but there's quite a bit of vegetable in the sausage-cornbread dressing.)

Today we had some roof inspectors. The inspection's free; the quote for fixing things up is *sigh* very much not free.

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✨ holiday love meme 2025 ✨
my thread here

Current Mood: hopeful
Current Music: A glorious burst of heavenly song

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love meme

Maybe 2.5x the length of the futon! The weft is various handspun yarns. :3 It has hideous Baby's First Floor Loom Attempt nature but fortunately, both Joe and the catten are very forgiving. Now I get to rewarp the loom... /o\

Morning's handspun single. :3

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✨ holiday love meme 2025 ✨
my thread here

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holidays

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2025: oh boy,
joy

I posted 10 drabbles to the Wanksgiving fest, which is currently anonymous. If you didn't get me to write for you, and you spot something in there that you think was me, leave me a comment with an "I think you wrote this!" and a request and I will follow up with you when I am not mid-giving-thanks.

Current Mood: productive
Current Music: Thankfully short -- like Marvin

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adventures in writing

Posted by an

https://www.transformativeworks.org/otw-signal-november-2025/

https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=273433

Every month in OTW Signal, we take a look at stories that connect to the OTW’s mission and projects, including issues related to legal matters, technology, academia, fannish history and preservation issues of fandom, fan culture, and transformative works.

In the News

A recent POP! feature highlights the growth of the “fan-art economy,” where fans are increasingly turning creative passion into sustainable work. The article delves into the music scene in the Philippines and the various ways in which fans are turning their love for music into art-fueled creative businesses that can sustain them. Fan communities are thus building their own systems of support—where illustrators, designers, and craft-makers create in dialogue with the fandoms they belong to. As the article notes, fan enthusiasm therefore grows to become the foundation for collaborative artistic communities.

These gatherings blur the boundary between commerce and community. Fans get to meet the artists behind the work, while creators get a firsthand witness to the excitement and appreciation their designs evoke. It’s a continuous loop of inspiration where music fuels fandom, fandom fuels art, and art fuels livelihood.

This shift also underscores how fandom frequently becomes an entry point into professional creative work. Concert photographer Cassilyn Anderson, profiled in SLUG Magazine, traces her artistic perspective back to her early experiences as a One Direction fan. Anderson stresses that her “eye” as a fan helps her center the emotional exchanges between bands and their fans as cultural snapshots worth preserving. The article highlights this saying:

In her work, Cassilyn says that she puts a deep emphasis on the experience of the fan. Capturing those moments of connection is what truly drives her to shoot the way she does.

Her story resonates strongly with ongoing conversations about the value of fan labor and the ways transformative creativity migrates between fandom and broader cultural spaces.

Another facet of the fan-art economy that is witnessing renewed interest is the zine—handmade, self-published magazines with long roots in counterculture and fan communities. A recent Times report notes that younger creators are embracing zines not just as a nostalgic medium but as a way to produce personal, expressive works outside traditional digital platforms. These small publications mix art, commentary, and identity in ways that are distinctly tied to one’s autonomy.

Their resurgence also speaks to a larger tenet central to the OTW’s work: the preservation of fan-made media in all its forms. While online archives play an essential role in safeguarding digital creations, zines remind us that physical artifacts remain a vital part of fannish memory. They carry the choices and contexts of the communities that produce them, becoming lasting records of how fans document their worlds.

OTW Tips

Are you interested in exploring fanzines? Look no further! The AO3 Fanzine Scan Hosting Project (FSHP) is dedicated to the digital preservation of select fanzine works and other fannish artifacts, with permission from the creators and/or publishers.

If you are interested in helping Open Doors and Zinedom transcribe works from fanzines or if you have any other FSHP-related queries, please contact the Open Doors committee.

We’d also love it if fans could help us preserve the story of any fanzines in which they may have been published on Fanlore. If you’re new to wiki editing, no worries! Check out the visitor portal, or ask the Fanlore Gardeners for tips.

Thank you for your interest in preserving fannish history for future generations of readers!

We want your suggestions for the next OTW Signal post! If you know of an essay, video, article, podcast, or news story you think we should know about, send us a link. We are looking for content in all languages! Submitting a link doesn’t guarantee that it will be included in an OTW post, and inclusion of a link doesn’t mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.

https://www.transformativeworks.org/otw-signal-november-2025/

https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=273433

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It's my dad's birthday this Friday. It's my family's plan to have a small get-together about it. It's been my family's plan to do it in Brooklyn with bagels and cake. It's the assumption I'll make the cake. I'm good with making the cake. I'm happy with making the cake. I'm unhappy with being told I'd make the cake without being told I was invited to the get-together. That the invitation was implicit was lost on me. Nobody told me I was invited until I was told there was an expectation I'd provide a cake.

I'm going on a hike with my parents tomorrow, and having dinner alone with them on Friday. I'm presently on the fence about a Saturday get together on the grounds that I really don't know how I'll feel about spending three consecutive days with them. I know if I don't tell them that with those specific words, in more or less that specific way, there won't be any effect on their behavior. I know that and I'm also wondering about staying quiet and observing what they say and how they act in regards to my presence as a litmus test they're not aware of. I'm fairly certain that'd backfire just as much as telling them I want to feel comfortable around them. I might go with the "not saying anything until I have no choice" strategy, or I might go with the "talk about it with someone on Friday to get my feelings out" strategy. I worry I'll have to buy more bourbon and rum in any case.

Current Mood: distressed
Current Music: Don't Swallow the Cap - The National

Katabasis

3/5. The elevator pitch on this is two grad students go to hell to retrieve their dead advisor in order to get recommendation letters. As you might expect, there’s a bit more to it than that.

Congratulate me, I finally finished an RF Kuang book. This was my third attempt in five years.

Parts of this are great. Some really sharp and accurate observations of what you do inside your mind as a woman trying to succeed under the authority of an asshole man. My circumstances were different, but boy did she nail the compromises, the things you tell yourself, the ways you try to out-competent misogyny (it doesn’t work that way). This book is also constructed on paradoxes as a magic system, and it goes hard on the double-think you have to engage in to survive that sort of thing.

Unfortunately, I didn’t really like anything else: the characters, the whole hell set of nested metaphors, the romance (god help me, I really cannot with that). I’m being a bit unfair here because I think I’m irritated at this book in part because of how some people talk about it. For real though, some people think this book is like some super deep intellectual masterpiece. And my dudes. I am concerned for you. This is the wikipedia version of formal logic. I know extremely little about this field and I can still tell that. It is not deep. This is not an insult, it’s just, you gotta be able to recognize a spade when it’s in front of you.

This was not really for me, but maybe one of her other fantasies will be, someday.

Content notes: Misogyny, a lot of suicidal ideation, ableism, sexual coercion, murder, gore.

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Purrcy looks very *intent* but not necessarily *intelligent* because ... there was a MOTH! Flying much too high for him to even try grabbing, but a riveting prey item nonetheless. This was from a few weeks ago.

Turkey day is upon us!

E&P drove down from Boston yesterday during the day yesterday, though the last part had to be in the dark because the traffic got so heavy from Danbury on, and it was raining.

I'm feeling really good about having surrendered the spatula, because the fact is I'm going through a period where I'm in pain a lot. I guess I haven't mentioned this before, but in the past month or so I've developed tendonitis in my left shoulder, the one that works the cane, and also the one that controls the mouse--because I've got such long-standing pain and weakness in the *right* hand.

The pain often (usually?) wakes me up after not-quite-enough sleep, and it really drags me down.

elayna just mentioned Essentrics, which I can stream on NJ-PBS, and I'm going to try doing that 3 times a week and see if it helps. Otherwise I feel as though I'm gradually accumulating chronic pain vampires that are gradually sapping my ability to function. And I've got to find a way to beat them back other than "lie in bed for hours a day, under a heating blanket & cat, reading".

Menu this year, as last:

- roast spatchcocked chicken, plus turkey legs & thighs
- roasted garlic gravy
- Our Stuffing Recipe™
- roast veg, asst.
- "Indian Pudding"
- Our Cranberry Sauce™
- salad
- pumpkin pie, apple pie, whipped cream

Alas, my brother has a bad cold and won't be joining us. It's not COVID & not the flu, so there's that, but he's too snotty to travel. Since he won't be around I think I won't make turkey gumbo tomorrow, I'll just make stock, do the gumbo on Saturday.

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books
still reading: A Companion to Women in the Ancient World by Sharon L. James (Editor), Sheila Dillon (Editor). I did not expect this book to be so fucking triggery, so it's slow going.

Yuletide
I've reviewed canon a million times, inflicted canon on my beta (bless them), and now I'm rereading fic I wrote back in the day...trying to lure the muses back, I guess? IDK. I am blocked. I am stymied. I am in awe of my past self as a writer. I used to be so good! Now all that energy is going into crochet, or so it seems. I'm so frustrated. I mean, I should be able to do two things well, right? Creativity isn't a zero sum game. And yet. I'm really considering defaulting, even though I don't want to. I just can't seem to get my brain working. (I've never defaulted. I think this is my 20th? Yuletide & I don't want to break my streak, and yet. And YET.) :(((

yarning
Rockstar Lestat in the gold pants looks so GOOD! I'm so pleased. I've made him a little microphone out of wire and painted glitter onto his face. Not sure how much glitter to put on his chest, yet; the screencaps are inconsistent there. Could be the gold necklace is enough.

Yesterday I added wire rings to his index fingers, such as he has fingers, but this pic is from before that. Point is, I'm really happy with him so far. Maybe I'll keep him and make others to sell. Also, I went to yarn group Sunday and had a good time. Another new person came, and I worked on a gold and yellow kickbunny to replace the one that sold. A lot have sold in the last few weeks, which is great, as I need the $. And I just got a commission to make an orange fish cat kicker, so that'll be fun to work on over Thanksgiving.

etsy sale!
My Black Friday sale is here! Most things are 25% off, which is a deeper cut than is entirely reasonable, since I try to keep my prices as low as possible, but I really want some things to find their forever homes. Go to Sage's Handmade to have a look around. Also, commissions are open!

healthcrap
I've got to have yet another doc appt to fill out medical transportation forms, drat it all. ION my scale said that I'd lost 4 pounds last week alone, but! It turned out the ten year old scale was BROKEN. New scale came Sunday & proved the ridiculous weight drop was false, whew!

#resist
#50501 We (the People) Dissent Protests: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1f-30Rsg6N_ONQAulO-yVXTKpZxXchRRB2kD3Zhkpe_A/preview
#50501: Thanksgiving/Black Friday Boycott of Amazon, Target, and Home Depot

I hope all of y'all are doing wonderfully! Have a safe and happy holiday if you're in the US & a lovely week if you're elsewhere. <333

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Last month I had 4 external hard drives and my husband convinced me to buy a new hard drive to replace my two oldest drives. So I did what most people do and I went to Amazon and bought a Seagate Expansion 22TB hard drive. It arrived in the retail box on my front porch, which was kind of weird, and I'm glad I was home because it required zero effort to figure out what was delivered.

My concern then became is this a safe way to transport external hard drives? So I started down the internet research rabbit hole to figure out if this was a safe way to transport these types of drives and how to verify that the hard drive wasn't physically damaged in transport.

( cut for the rest of the post )

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random:life

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I have Forth (programming language - see e.g. Leo Brodie's Starting Forth) running on this smol M5stack Cardputer v.1.1 (ESP32-S3) courtesy of ryu10's M5CardForth, which is also faster than my spending the next decade teaching myself ESP32-S3 assembler. :)

Next step: write a very smol choose-your-own-adventure-style text adventure in Forth.

Next step after that: ???

Next step after that: Considering porting either the Shuos Academy text adventure WIP [1] or Winterstrike (originally written for Failbetter Games for StoryNexus, which will be sunsetted by Jan 2026) to M5CardForth for the CardPuter because I am a TROLL. It could be a dumbass household game experience. :) :)

Heck, I could port some version of turnabout's fair prey or The Amiable Planet (Twine) to this! I love the thought of making TINY parser IF / text adventures for this smol device.

(All of these are my games. I give myself permission?!)

[1] I was writing/coding this for Choice of Games but we mutually agreed to cancel the contract because I was flooded out that year and it was no longer a doable workload alongside...finding new housing etc. I still have like 60% of the codebase already written in ChoiceScript and outline, though! I'd have to refactor but hell, I'd have to refactor anything. I can pretend it's pseudocode. :)

(I need a break from the current schoolwork, what can I say.)

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A post-Earth society ruled by giant corporations called Concerns whose only goal is to spread vat-grown wage slaves out across the galaxy to exploit resources for profit.

A frozen moon shrouded in eternal darkness and heavy gravity populated by sightless creatures who evolved to live in both.

Like many of Tchaikovsky's novels, this is a story told from two perspectives: the humans whose pod has crashed on a hostile alien planet they can barely make sense of, and the locals who encounter a seemingly idiotic Stranger (a "savant clown beast") that bumbles around, communicates in grunts, and doesn't know enough to come out of the ammonia-methane rain.

The world building and the alien design are, of course, meticulous. The interaction and cobbled together understanding between the humans and the aliens was my favorite part because only the reader knows the full story. Unfortunately the humans, in their duress, aren't all that interesting. The middle sections that focus on them in their pod feel the weakest and, because of that, overlong, but the story picks up again in the last third.

I spent most of the middle in mild agony, thinking there was only one way this story could end, but then I remembered this is Adrian Tchaikovsky, and he doesn't write those kind of stories.

Contains: blood, violence, threat of genocide; no work-life balance.

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book report

In folding laundry, I found I'd lost a wash cloth. In going down to the laundry room to check, I found the woman who only had bills, no quarters, hadn't seen it either. In talking her through my decision making process and to not waste an elevator trip, I take her up to my apartment with me to trade her a roll of quarters for the appropriate amount in small bills.

In checking what I'd already put away, I found the missing wash cloth.

One of those strings of events where I can't find it in myself to be upset about the inciting inconvenience.

Current Mood: chipper
Current Music: nothing now

I'm informed this is a 1981 Ashford Traditional. I pounced on the secondhand listing as spinning wheels in working order (especially modern-ish wheels) are very scarce in my region, especially at a low price point. She's in incredibly good condition and spins beautifully! She's my first Saxony wheel, to go with the Ashford Traveller. I'm also told the bobbins ought to be inter-compatible (I have bobbins for both the larger and smaller flyers).

The pink-magenta is IxChel's North Ronaldsay blend (North Ronaldsay Sheep 40%, Blue Faced Leicester 30%, Silver infused Seaweed 10%, Mulberry Silk 10%, Cashmere 10%).

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crafts: spinning

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Current Mood: tired

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Gardening Tools and Immoral Pleasure-Seekers

Post-Turkey (well, there are leftovers...)

Holiday love meme

emotional support fiber

Holiday Love Meme!

Heard on a podcast today:

it's that time!

Happy Wanksgiving!

OTW Signal, November 2025

In the News

OTW Tips

Rec: The Untamed

Only two emotions.

Katabasis by R.F. Kuang

Purrcy; Turkey Day

What I'm Doing Wednesday

External Hard Drive Rabbit Hole

words!

emotional support coding

Shroud, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Narrative.

emotional support spinning

you kids get off my lawn

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November 2025