Posting these separately (and out of order) so that my Wednesday post isn't super long.


Book 66 of 2025: S'more Murder (Camping Girl Mysteries) (Josephine Beintema)

I enjoyed this book. ( spoilers )

I liked this book enough to read more, but not urgently. I’m giving it four hearts.

♥♥♥♥

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Book 67 of 2025: Raspberry Chocolate Murder (Dolphin Bay Cozy Mysteries) (Leena Clover)

I enjoyed this book. ( spoilers )

This book came in an box set of three, so I’ll probably read the rest of the set, then decide whether to continue. I’m giving this book four hearts.

♥♥♥♥

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Book 68 of 2025: Mozzarella Murder (A Rolling Dough Pizza Truck Mystery) (R.M. Murphy)

This book was pretty good. ( spoilers )

I enjoyed this book well enough, but I don’t think I’ll be continuing the series. I’m giving this book four hearts.

♥♥♥♥

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Book 69 of 2025: Riddle in the Review (The Inn at Holiday Bay) (Kathi Daley)

Good book. ( spoilers )

I enjoyed this book and am giving it five hearts.

♥♥♥♥♥


I DNF’d on cozy about 1/3 of the way through: Caramel Conspiracy (A Molly Sweetwater Mystery) (Sophie Love)

I did a load of laundry (washed, dried AND hung up!), hand-washed dishes, and scooped kitty litter before heading to mom’s ~10am. I stayed until my usual time of ~3pm. I washed, dried and folded (I can’t emphasize enough how big a deal it is that I managed to get a load dried and folded!) another load of laundry, hand-washed more dishes, and showered after I got home.

Supper was *drum roll* BBQ chicken quarters!! When I stopped to get the pulled pork yesterday, I had asked about the chicken bbq they held pretty regularly and was told next Friday, so Pip and I decided that's what we'd have for supper next Friday. Somehow I must have jinxed us, because Pip's buddy showed up with more BBQ chicken quarters yesterday, lol! So we're having chicken this weekend. Not sure if that means it's off the table for next Friday. o_O

I watched the second ep of Strange New Worlds and an HGTV program, and finished the Rivers of London book.

Temps started out at 69.8(F) and reached 92 (according to Pip; it was already over 80 when I left the house mid-morning, so it’s very possible). We had some very short bursts of rain; not enough to do more than wet things pretty good.


Mom Update:

Mom was feeling better today. ( more back here )

Welcome to the 15th anniversary of Cap-IM Rec Week! We’re kicking off with CANONIZE THAT: fanart you think should be canon.  :

This week is all about SteveTony fanart that is so gripping, inspiring, and amazing that it SHOULD be canon – share your favorites that capture the essential magic of their relationship. 

To rec, simply REPLY to this or any other daily Themed post on any platform, or make your own reclist or post:

    DISCORD - use the #look-what-I-found channel
    TUMBLR - tag @cap-ironman in you rec post and use #capimrecweek
    BLUESKY - tag @cap-ironman in your post and use #capimrecweek
    DREAMWIDTH - the perfect option if you want to rec anonymously! 

Don’t forget to let us know why you’re reccing a work and please mark any major warnings. HAVE FUN curating. 

Title: The Unlikability Curse
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Gen
Content Notes: AU (Harry was cursed in first year), loner Harry, angst, violence, bullying, discussions of past torture and character death, drama, Hogwarts “eighth year”
Rating: PG-13
Summary: AU. Something happened the morning after Harry’s Sorting, something that made everyone he met react to him with dislike, distrust, or hate. After seven years of being on his own, figuring out how to defend himself, and finally defeating Voldemort, Harry returns to Hogwarts intent on finishing his education. He has no time for the people who seem to think he should trust them now.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of Summer” shorter fics that I’m posting between the summer solstice and the first of August. It should have two parts. It’s also pure self-indulgence, with not much plot.

( Read more... )

sunshine_revival's next challenge is:

Game Night
Journaling prompt: What games do you play, if any? Are you a solo-gamer or do you view games as a social activity?
Creative prompt: Write a story/fic around the theme "game night".

Well, since you asked. :P

I've played video games for as long as I can remember. My dad was an early adopter of technology and he brought home an IBM clone in the late 1980s, when I was in grade school. He would download tons of games from BBSes for my brother and me. Sometimes these were pirated games from big companies, but this was also a huge heyday for what we would now call "indie" games—stuff coded by one guy in his basement or a couple of college students in the computer lab. Platformers, shooters, puzzle games, arcade clones, roguelikes, RPGs, text adventures, you name it, we played it. Often we didn't know what a game even was until we ran it, because while the original BBS post might have explained what it was, all we saw was an EXE file that was limited to eight characters.

I think gaming was always social for me. Some of the early games my brother and I played did have hot-seat multiplayer (alternating who's sitting at the keyboard) but if it was a single-player game we'd just take turns, and shamelessly order each other around if we thought the other wasn't playing it right. XD When I got a little older and more of my friends started to have computers or consoles at home, inviting people over to play games was a huge thing. I was just recently reminiscing about going over to my friend's house to play Myst, which was a massive phenomenon in 1993. We were young and the logic puzzles were too hard for us, so it would just degenerate into heckling the game and each other until we collapsed in hysterical laughter. That's still one of my favorite gaming memories... and I still don't think I've ever actually beaten Myst.

( cut for length )

what’s a 1k1h?|| time zone converter || 1k1h Calendar

All sprints are run on Discord only. You can find our Discord server here.

Monday ( time zone converter)

5am PT/ 8am ET/ 12pm UTC PreciousAnon

8am PT/ 11am ET/ 3pm UTC Max

11am PT/ 2pm ET/ 6pm UTC        LittleMissTPK

1pm PT/ 4pm ET/ 8pm UTC LittleMissTPK

5pm PT/ 8pm ET/ 12am UTC Alec

7pm PT/ 10pm ET/ 2am Tues UTC Joe

Tuesday ( time zone converter)

8am PT/ 11am ET/ 3pm UTC Alec

11am PT/ 2pm ET/ 6pm UTC PreciousAnon

1pm PT/ 4pm ET/ 8pm UTC Xia

7pm PT/ 10pm ET/ 2am Wed UTC Alec

9pm PT/ 12am Wed ET/ 4am Wed UTC NotTooLateForTheGame

Wednesday ( time zone converter)

5am PT/ 8am ET/ 12pm UTC Mrsimoshen 

8am PT/ 11am ET/ 3pm UTC Max

11am PT/ 2pm ET/ 6pm UTC        PreciousAnon

1pm PT/ 4pm ET/ 8pm UTC Treefrogie

5pm PT/ 8pm ET/ 12am UTC LittleMissTPK

7pm PT/ 10pm ET/ 2am Thur UTC Alec

Thursday ( time zone converter)

5am PT/ 8am ET/ 12pm UTC Mrsimoshen

8am PT/ 11am ET/ 3pm UTC Alec

11am PT/ 2pm ET/ 6pm UTC PreciousAnon 

1pm PT/ 4pm ET/ 8pm UTC Xia

5pm PT/ 8pm ET/ 12am UTC LittleMissTP

7pm PT/ 10pm ET/ 2am Fri UTC Alec

9pm PT/ 12am Fri ET/ 4am Fri UTC NotTooLateForTheGame

Friday ( time zone converter)

5am PT/ 8am ET/ 12pm UTC Mrsimoshen 

8am PT/ 11am ET/ 4pm UTC Max

11am PT/ 2pm ET/ 6pm UTC        LittleMissTPK

1pm PT/ 4pm ET/ 8pm UTC LittleMissTPK

5pm PT/ 8pm ET/ 12am UTC Treefrogie84

7pm PT/ 10pm ET/ 2am Sat UTC Alec

Saturday ( time zone converter)

Super Sprint Saturday! 24 hours of sprints starting at Midnight Eastern.

Sunday ( time zone converter) 

4am PT/ 7am ET/ 11am UTC PreciousAnon

7am PT/ 10am ET/ 2pm UTC Treefrogie84

9am PT/ 12pm ET/ 4pm UTC Treefrogie84

11am PT/ 2pm ET/ 6pm UTC PreciousAnon 

1pm PT/ 4pm ET/ 8pm UTC Treefrogie

5pm PT/ 8pm ET/ 12am Mon UTC Treefrogie84

7pm PT/ 10pm ET/ 2am Mon UTC Joe

FINISH LINE

YOU MADE IT!

I hope your weekend treated you well, but even if it didn’t, we’re here to celebrate your marathon achievements. If you posted anything you’ve written during the weekend challenge don’t forget to add it to the monthly fic round up here!

 

Please reply with your numbers for the weekend–word count, number of pages edited, outlining work–whatever you accomplished. Include what you feel should be included, but please remember that we love numbers almost as much as words.

Thank you for writing with us this weekend!

I hit Price Chopper and the Bakery while I was downtown and got in a walk around the park.

Morning chores included mixing up egg salad, tossing a load of laundry into the washer, baking chicken for the dogs' meals, hand-washing some dishes, scooping kitty litter, and taking the dogs for a walk during which I also picked more berries.

I visited mom ~11:15am to ~2:30pm. After I got home I dried and folded the morning load of laundry, washed and dried another, and hand-washed more dishes. The reason I left earlier than usual was that I found out that there was a ‘pig roast’ happening, so I stopped there on the way home and got some pulled pork. I didn’t know what time they stopped serving as there were no times on the signs, so I wanted to play it safe. I also husked corn for supper because someone had given Pip a half dozen ears.

I watched last week’s ep of Resident Alien and an HGTV program, and read more in Rivers of London.

Temps started out at 50.0(F) (it was freaking cold!) and reached 87.4. It felt so cold I wore a scarf and light gloves with my hoodie when I left the house (and brought along a jacket just in case). By the time I went for a walk at 8:30am it was much warmer. And then it got surprisingly warm for a day that started out at 50.

(Today is my brother’s birthday! He’s seven years younger than me. I think I’ve mentioned, but I’m the oldest of the bunch.)


Mom Update:

Mom was feeling kind of meh today. ( more back here )

Almost immediately upon the release of ChatGPT, everybody in the educational field realized it could produce an unlimited variety of essays that would pass muster in a high school or undergrad classroom, and might even get a better grade than a real student's work. Some concluded this meant the end of teaching students to write. John Warner, a college writing instructor, sees it differently—if the writing assignments we give our students are something ChatGPT can easily do, that means there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we have been teaching writing. This isn't a new problem, it's a decades-old problem that new technology is forcing us to finally confront: in our classrooms, we have forgotten what writing is for.

He argues that the process of writing offers invaluable opportunities not only to communicate ideas but to help us learn to think—to analyze our outer and inner worlds, and to synthesize meaningful conclusions. It's a tool for reflecting on and organizing our messy interiority, and (perhaps) using it to convey to other people something of what it's like to be us. This perfectly aligns with my own experience of writing, in which I often don't entirely understand what I think until I write it (and I am currently learning what I think about this book by writing this post) so I will admit that I'm not the best judge of whether Warner successfully communicates this to people who don't already believe it, but he seems plausibly convincing to me.

But education in the US has become increasingly dominated by teaching to the test rather than teaching anyone to think. (Warner traces this to Cold War-era anxieties over being outcompeted by rising economic powers like Japan, leading American legislators to push hyper-standardized measures of school success.) Students have adapted to this by learning only to write what the teacher expects to read—to produce essays that get everything superficially "right" but offer no individual thoughts or insights.

( cut for length )

I had a pedicure this morning; I went with a periwinkle again and she gave me a nice design. I got in a walk around the park and hit the farm stand on the way home. While I was downtown I remembered to stop by the bank to deposit money in Baby A’s account (I give her money for her birthday and Christmas, since she gets a ton of stuff from everyone else. And a book, naturally.).

I visited mom from 11am to 3pm. I also hand-washed dishes and scooped kitty litter. I grilled chicken legs for Pip’s supper, cut up chicken for the dogs, and hard-boiled eggs.

I read more in Rivers of London, started and finished another Kindle cozy, and watched the first new ep of Strange New Worlds.

Temps started out at 59.7(F) (I wore a sweatshirt and was still chilled during the walk from the house to the garage) and reached 77.7 with sun and a breeze. It was cool enough this morning that I wore a scarf and pair of light gloves on my walk around the park, but by afternoon the temps were perfect. That’s pretty much my ideal.


Mom Update:

Mom was doing well today. ( more back here )

I hit Price Chopper and the Pharmacy while I was downtown. I hit the bank drive-thru on my way to visit my aunt. I stopped at mom’s on the way home and spent about four hours with her; some of that time we talked, and some we just did our own thing.

I did a load of mom’s laundry, hand-washed dishes, and scooped kitty litter. We had spaghetti for supper.

I read two more Kindle cozies and started the new Rivers of London.

Temps started out at 74.8(F) and reached 92.4.


Mom Update:

Mom had a busy morning before I arrived. ( more back here )

***

Posting now because I predict being way too sweaty and exhausted for that after Stray Kids gig. And in honour of that, I'm posting the MV and dance practice of one of my favourite songs by them.

The song is beautiful but I also have a lot of feelings about the choreo, mainly: 1) The way it starts with everyone holding Chan's heart 😭😭😭, 2) the sequenced kneeling of Minho, Seungmin and Jeongin (the bdsm au feels I have about this), 3) Seungmin solo choreo! 




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