nekare

In tonight's game, ( the rest under a cut for those who don't care. )

And that's where we left off.

Todd Zeile: Pete's been chasing breaking balls
My brain: don't go chasing breaking balls, stick to the sliders and the fastballs you're used to
*facepalm*

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In tonight's game, ( the rest under a cut for those who don't care. )

And that's where we left off and will be picking up next week for our in-person weekend.

Okay, I just have two more days of work to get through, and then I have an entire week off. Nine whole days. The first five of which will hopefully be spent not leaving the hotel if I can manage it, because I desperately need to recharge. I'm even going to try to wash clothes either tomorrow or Friday so that I won't have to leave my suite unless there's an emergency of some type. A complete removal from all human interaction will do me so much good.

I'm hoping to set aside at least a few days to curl up and properly lose myself in video games, probably Baldur's Gate 3 or Dragon Age: The Veilguard although I might try something new. Or maybe something old, like a new Mass Effect playthrough. There are a lots of options. Whatever I go with, I keep saying that I'm going to play video games on the weekend, and then I don't manage it, so I'm really going to try during this break.

I also want to attempt to do some fic writing just for myself. I've had a bad habit of only writing for exchanges lately, but I have a ton of WIPs so it would be nice if I could set aside at least a few hours here and there during the break to work on getting back in the writing habit.

My Wednesday night D&D group is going to be getting together in person to play next weekend. Everyone's flying in on Thursday afternoon and Friday morning, and then we're going to jump in around lunchtime on Friday as soon as the last person arrives. Then plan is that we're going to play pretty much the rest of the day on Friday, all day Saturday, and until mid-afternoon on Sunday.

In addition to various Spider-Man and Captain America-themed items, I ordered a Batman shirt and a Robin shirt for Baby Miss L and then I was like, but does she know who Batman and Robin even are??? So I went looking for toddler-friendly Bat-stuff, and lo and behold, there is a show called Batwheels on Cartoon Network (and HBO Max) about the Batmobile and other Bat vehicles (the Redbird, Batgirl's bike) coming to life like the toys in Toy Story! With DUKE as ROBIN and CASS as BATGIRL!!! I love this!!! (mainly because I was afraid it was going to be Damian as Robin and Babs as Batgirl and that's just weird.) I don't know if any of the other kids exist, but there is a Batplane they call Wing, so maybe Nightwing is around? I didn't watch it, just read the wiki, but I mentioned it to my niece, so maybe Baby Miss L can get started early on loving Robin, and she can enjoy Tiny Titans when she's a little bit older. (I am still sad and bitter that Tiny Titans was cancelled so unceremoniously because it was the best.)

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Normally I don't like to do these until the last day of the month they get posted in, but I'm about to go out of town and liable to forget, so I'll post a few days early instead!

( DMing is a Wild Time )

So this morning I updated the board chair on expected attendance at today's board meeting, and she replied, should we just switch the meeting to zoom entirely, due to the weather? So that is what we did! And as much as I would have liked to have had dinner with Friend L this evening, I was much happier not having to schlep into the city in 101°F heat. The meeting went well, and now I can relax for a few weeks.

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While we're waiting for h/c-ex to reveal in July, this just showed up on EAD ...

ANNOUNCING TERRIBLE TEMPERATURE TROUBLES FLASH FEST: a multifandom flash fest for all your terrible temperature troubles!

Nomination & Sign-ups: Now-June 30.
Assignments Out: July 2.
Works Due: July 10.
Work Reveals: July 11.
Creator Reveals: July 17.
All times at 11:59 PM Eastern.

https://archiveofourown.org/collections/temptroubles2025/profile
https://archiveofourown.org/tag_sets/23809

Hypothermia ... heatstroke ... etc ...

(And it's one of those 1-fandom minimum request/offer exchanges, I'M JUST POINTING THIS OUT, IN CASE IT IS RELEVANT TO ANYONE.)

I realize this would be a terrible time for me to sign up for anything because I'm leaving tomorrow and I'll be gone until July 4 (Mom stuff again), but there's still almost a week of writing time after that.

Okay, the previous post has the non-spoilery intro to the series, so this is the one with all the spoilers. I finished book 3 this evening (of seven books so far), and I'm still having a terrific time.

( Spoilers )

Mets just signed a guy named Dicky Lovelady! I am not making this up! Apparently he asked to be called Dicky instead of Richard. I am here for it! (Unless he's a truly terrible pitcher.)

In work news, after a while where I thought I might have to spend tonight baking cupcakes to bring to my board meeting tomorrow, I do not. Whew. I would have done it! But luckily someone else was like, "lol no, I'm buying a cake!" so whew. 😅 But this is the kind of last minute, half-assed nonsense our C suite does. If they had told me last week, I could have added a cake to our catering order, but nope! (Meanwhile, my boss: "Now I'm disappointed we don't get your cupcakes!" Me: "maybe next time I come to the office...")

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Thank you so much to everyone who left comments on my solstice/anniversary post. ♥ ♥ ♥ I don't know whether I'll manage to reply to you all individually, but I have been loving reading them!

In tonight's game, ( the rest under a cut for those who don't care. )

And that's where we left off.

I maybe should have rethought making chicken cutlets today, which was one of the hottest days we've had so far and it only looks like it's going to get hotter this week before it cools down, but I did not - they were on sale and I bought them, so I had to cook them as there is no room in my freezer to freeze them!

I did nope out of the extra steps of making chicken parm, though. No need to put the oven on again - I did enough of that yesterday when I baked chocolate banana bread and then made bacon for lunch for several days during the week. I just need to get through Tuesday - our only in-person board meeting this year and gosh, I wish we had talked the CEO out of it since it's supposed to be 97°F on Tuesday, but we did not. Hopefully people show up! (if they don't, that can be the argument against doing it again, at least until we get a new CEO. Their poor showing last September let us convince everyone that we only needed to do it once this year.) And I am meeting Friend L for dinner afterwards, so that should be fun! Next week I have a 3-day work week and then 2 weeks after that, I'm off for a whole week for my birthday week, so really, it's just getting through Tuesday. *deep breaths*

I did not watch the Mets last night and they mashed, so I decided not to watch them again tonight (also ESPN is the worst), which seems like the right decision, since they are being soundly beaten, at least so far. Sigh. I know it's a long season, but couldn't they have saved some of those runs for tonight?

Sigh.

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This is a re-post with edits of my bluesky thread about the greatest Hong Kong movie I have seen to date, Into the Fire (1989), AKA Fire Street, AKA 烈火街頭, directed by Lo Kin and produced by the great Sammo Hung. It is extremely obscure, so see below for links, including the only version of it I've been able to find online (sadly dubbed in Mandarin rather than the original Cantonese).

MyDramaList | LetterBoxd | IMDb | YouTube

( Original Bluesky thread below the cut! )

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If this interests you at all, I highly encourage you to check out the version on YouTube! Word on the street is that it might also be available on the high seas, but I haven't been able to independently verify that. This movie is on my rarepairs list, and I've got it flagged as a potential nominee for Yuletide. It's truly got everything one could ever want in a tiny fandom: a central slash ship, potential for a M/M/F threesome, the above-mentioned fake-out make-out and handcuffed together scenarios, a desperate us-against-the-world dynamic, and endless potential for hurt/comfort.

Having spent far too long slogging through Private Rites by Julia Armfield grouchily going 'this should have been a novella' I decided to start off June with a couple of actual novellas.

Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite - Olivia Waite is someone I had previously encountered through her series of f/f historical romances, so when I heard that her next book was going to be a cozy mystery set in space I was intrigued. A Miss Marple type detective is taking a well earned sabbatical in the ship's memory core before being decanted into a new body, when she wakes in a young body that isn't hers. It's cute, but it is very...slight. But I do increasingly think that it's an admirable skill to know and accept when a one hundred page idea is a one hundred page idea and not dragging it out to novel length.

Navigational Entanglements by Aliette de Bodard - This was a little bit longer at one sixty odd pages, and there was a lot going on - navigators are people who can navigate unreality with the help of some sort of magical/sci-fi power called shadows, a monster escapes from unreality, there's a murder mystery, four expandable junior navigators all with their own traumas and neurodivergences have to learn to work together, there's an odd couple romance - and it's very interesting and all, but none of it gets enough room to breathe, so it doesn't really land.

The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses by Malka Older - I absolutely adore this series about awkward lesbians solving fairly low stakes myteries in a future where humanity has fled a dying earth to a system of interlinked platforms around the rings of Jupiter. They actually remind me a little bit of Murderbot, not so much content wise, but, like, vibes, and the way they go down so easy. If you haven't read them, there are three of them now, and you're in for a treat!

Cover Story by Celia Laskey - You know that feeling where you're reading something at a clip and having a great time, and then you get to the end and are like, I don't actually think that was that good? Yeah, it was one of those. So that the set-up is that it's 2005, the beginning of the smartphone and blogging era, and a neurotic publicist falls in love with the up and coming actress she's charged with keeping in the closet. It was pacey and frothy and I read it over a couple of days, and then I got to the end and the one (1) thing about it that had stuck with me was there's this line in one of the sex scenes "her vagina gulped for air", and, I'm sorry, but whoever let that line stay in the final draft hates you and wants your endeavours to fail.

The Heiress by Molly Greeley - Modern takes on Austen can be of, uh, variable quality, but this one, where Anne de Bourgh fights her way out of her laudanum induced haze to take control of Roslings, her destiny, her queerness, her desire not to be a mother is probably the best one I have ever read. Highly recommended!

In 2000, I was married on the summer solstice, and we decided at that time that the solstice would forever be our anniversary, no matter what day it fell on. This year is our 25th - silver! we made it to a valuable metal! - and we met at the place we were married (Pioneer Park aka Alaskaland, a local park with food concessions) to revisit the pavilion in which we were married, and have a takeout dinner (halibut/Thai/Brazilian fusion tacos; it was delicious). We took a number of terrible selfies, and completely by accident, especially given that it was taken on a timer with my phone which was propped up in a crack in a picnic table, we achieved what may be my favorite picture of us in all the time we've been together.



I never realized that I lift my heels off the ground when I kiss him, but apparently I do. That's what a foot of height difference will do for you.

We came home to ash and charred needles dropping on my car hood from a wildfire north of town.



Yesterday we had a fire evacuation scare, and still have the fully packed bags sitting in our living room. Today we're fine, despite a gentle rain of ash. I can't wait for the next 25 years.

Continuing, as in most new fandoms, to write All The Tropes for them ...

As Far As You Can Go (gen, 3000 words)
Also posted on AO3
Summary: Set a little after "No Surrender, No Retreat." Still trying to figure out how to navigate their new truce, G'Kar has the unpleasant experience of having to rescue Londo from a situation of his own making.

( As Far As You Can Go )

In tonight's game, ( the rest under a cut for those who don't care. )

And that's where we left off.