radiantfracture: A ladybug faces forest armageddon (Everything is on Fire)
[personal profile] radiantfracture
It occurs to me that some folks might want to know about CAIABB (Canadian Authors and Illustrators Against Book Bans) and even, you know, join. But I keep forgetting to bump it here.

In the wake of US Supreme Court reinforcement of the ban on children's books that discuss LGBTQ+ and racialized experiences, my pals Kari Jones and Robin Stevenson founded Canadian Authors and Illustrators Against Book Bans.

Robin's book about an adorable puppy at a pride parade was the target of a particularly nasty spew of vitriol. Robin is perhaps the kindest, most generous person in the world, and she gets incredible amounts of hate for making affirming books for queer kids and families.

There's a Linktree here, but most of the action is on Instagram.

(ETA: [personal profile] bibliofile points out that they are also on Bluesky.)

Note: CAIABB is not directly affiliated with the American organization Authors Against Book Bans, but they cooperate with similar orgs, like PEN.

§rf§

Book Review

2026-02-14 17:11
kenjari: (Default)
[personal profile] kenjari
Suldrun's Garden
by Jack Vance

This is the first in Vance's Lyonesse trilogy, and I quite enjoyed it. It's set on the Elder Isles, a fictional group of islands off the coast of Cornwall based on Celtic legends of a land that sunk into the sea. The first third or so follows Suldrun, princess of Lyonesse. She is a disapointment to her royal parents due to being a girl, and is largely neglected until she is of marriageable age. When she defies her father's attempts to use her and her future as a pawn in his machinations, he confines her to a remote garden on the castle grounds. There, Aillas, prince of Troicinet, washes ashore. Suldrun nurses him back to health and they fall in love and have a child. The remainder of the book follows Aillas' adventures as he seeks his son and strives to regain his birthright as the ruler of Troicinet.
Suldrun's Garden was published in the early 1980s and is fairly old school. The prose style is a bit old-fashioned but still enjoyable to read. Vance does a really great job of weaving together plots, themes, and tropes from medieval legend, Celtic myth, and fairy tales. There are a lot of side quests added to the main plot, but they always connect back to the story. Aillas is a very likeable character - he's brave, caring, clever, and honest. Suldrun is also sympathetic, but in a different way. She's an introverted loner who just wants the time and space to find and make her own path. I do wish her part of the story had lasted longer. I alsoreally enjoyed all the secondary characters, particularly the mage Shimrock, who is clearly inspired by Schmendrick from The Last Unicorn.
muccamukk: Text: Endless jousting sprinkled with #relatable. (KA: Jousting)
[personal profile] muccamukk
Nenya's summary of an early account of St Valentine's Day as a romantic festival: "So it was RPF written during lockdown, which contained endless jousting sprinkled with #relatable? Whomst among us?"

Wild tonal shift to follow:

It's also the day that Frederick Douglass chose as his birthday, which is very sweetly illustrated here: What, to a Country, Is a Child’s Birthday? | Talk & Draw with Liza Donnelly & Heather Cox Richardson (video: 3 minutes).

Yesterday, we went to a No More Stolen Sisters march, which was very touching, especially given how many women were their with pictures of missing and murdered relatives. A lot of red cloaks and traditional woven cedar hats.

It was organised by the student union, and I appreciated how much care they put into cultural safety and looking out for family members.

We listened to the DNTO podcast "The Story She Carries: Lorelei Williams and her fight for justice" for class, and my professor said she'd gone to residential school with Williams' mother. It's all very close here.

Come to Dark Souls

2026-02-14 21:33
rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
We have terrible platforming, shortcut porn, hostile shrubbery, BOXRATS!!!, extremely smashable vases, “amazing chest ahead” (male), “amazing chest ahead” (female), “amazing chest ahead” (mimic), weirdly sexualized moaning (male only), repeatedly falling down inside a giant hollow tree to your death, Moss Lady, a magic medieval snakeskin-covered gramophone, hidden areas hidden behind other hidden areas hidden behind illusory walls, combat skirts (unisex), giant snakes with horse teeth, pretending to be an egg, quite a lot of jank, a very angry elderly cat who scolds you in bad faux-Shakespearian and is also a faction leader, the secret lake underneath the bottom of the world, “jolly co-operation,” chibi mindflayers, clams full of skulls, a trident that lets you do a silly little dance, ridiculous ragdoll corpse physics, a really cool double helix staircase probably based on the Château de Chambord, ball/crab things that turn up unexpectedly in your game and try to magic missile you because somebody in another game lost some stuff, getting punched to death by mushrooms, and Gender.

This is such a weird game (complimentary).

Holiday plans

2026-02-14 18:26
shewhomust: (bibendum)
[personal profile] shewhomust
My birthday this year will be a semi-significant one. Five years ago I had a proper, significant, ends-with-a-zero birthday (I wrote about it at the time): but of course it was not a good time for special birthday holidays.

This year, therefore, I have some catching up to do. I was just beginning to think about how I would like to do it - France by train, perhaps? It's about time I visited Strasbourg... Then GirlBear suggested that - well, I think she suggested that she and [personal profile] boybear come and visit, but we decided that the really fun thing would be to go somewhere together. So now I was looking for somewhere that had something special about it, but was also Bear-friendly (not Abroad, not too far north): and I booked a long weekend in Portmeirion, which I have wanted to visit since - well, you can probably guess. I have added a week beforehand in north Wales (actually near Chirk, which I had never heard of, but which sounds interesting).

I was very excited about this that I carried on planning. D. has already booked our midsummer getaway, near the Moray Firth (that is, not far from where we spent his last birthday in Aberdeenshire, but nearer the coast). It has been my plan all along to go on from there to Orkney, and now that is also booked - nothing ambitious, but overnight ferry north, and a few nights at the Foveran...

[personal profile] durham_rambler has found a travel company who do rail holidays in France, so maybe we'll make that happen in the autumn - last week's travel section had a piece about Metz which would combine nicely with that trip to Strasbourg. And we have other things planned: the home-town-reunion get together (not in his home town), the Folk Festival...

It could be quite a fun year, in fact.
umadoshi: (W13 - Claudia crying (vampire_sessah))
[personal profile] umadoshi
In the comments of [personal profile] spikedluv's final post, which she made on Feb. 2, there's info saying that she died unexpectedly later that day, with a link to her obituary. :( No cause of death given.

Thank you, [personal profile] shipperslist, for the heads-up.

ETA: [personal profile] lunabee34 confirms in comments. ;_;
(Note: I'm taking the info in good faith as posted; I don't know the person who shared it, and while [personal profile] spikedluv and I were mutuals for a long time, I never knew her wallet name. But the obit info matches what I did know and she was an extremely regular poster, so even a day or two of silence was worrying.)
jjhunter: Watercolor of daisy with blue dots zooming around it like Bohr model electrons (science flower)
[personal profile] jjhunter
Happy Galentines/Valentines Day! We are midway through February. If you started the year with some intentions, or have accumulated some new intentions since, how are they going? Is there anything you want to prune back or lean into?

How Are You? (in Haiku)

2026-02-14 10:07
jjhunter: Serene person of color with shaved head against abstract background half blue half brown (scientific sage)
[personal profile] jjhunter
Pick a thing or two that sums up how you're doing today, this week, in general, and tell me about it in the 5-7-5 syllables of a haiku.

=

Signal-boosting much appreciated!

Hail, Bishop Valentine

2026-02-14 13:02
poliphilo: (Default)
[personal profile] poliphilo
 Oh, and by the way-  Happy Valentine's Day.

yUStQweLylo6AwLdGGhR--0--lmcju.jpeg

Hail Bishop Valentine, whose day this is,
All the air is they diocese,
And all the chirping choristers
And other birds are thy parishioners..."

John Donne
lauradi7dw: (abolish ICE)
[personal profile] lauradi7dw
At the men's Olympic giant slalom hill (which is on live now) there is a lot of snow falling. I'm not listening to the commentators, so I don't know if this is perceived as adding difficulty. Surely people who are at that level train most days, which would include snowy days. I know that precipitation looks more intense through the camera lens, but my first thought was "look at the snow pouring down." I don't think that is what we say.
viggorlijah: Klee (Default)
[personal profile] viggorlijah
this is completely ai code but i did go through it to check it's fine. It is ridiculously simple: Typing Game. You can escape back to regular browser by pressing shift+alt+x as noted in the corner of the screen.

Basically, this allows the toddler of your choice to bash away merrily at your laptop for A-Z and 0-9 characters without messing up your computer. Lily took great delight in spelling out her name and various short words. The space key will clear the screen, with up to 9 characters displayed at any time, older characters dimming.

Brought to you by an afternoon of having to reload various typing/kids apps that Zoe and Lily enjoyed but my computer very much did not.

Repair Work

2026-02-14 08:01
poliphilo: (Default)
[personal profile] poliphilo
 So that's why I'm sneezing so much. We have workmen in at the Meeting House creating dust- but I hadn't made the connection until the Singing Group that hires the place on Tuesdays cancelled because the dust was interfering with their tubes. We gave them their money back because that's how Quakers rock. Another hirer nearly cancelled a booking of several months worth of Fridays because of the noise but Ailz managed to talk her round. 

All this repair work is in confirmation of our decision to keep the Meeting House in Quaker hands for the foreseeable future. As Meetings go we're in pretty good health.  We regularly get ten worshippers on a Thursday and between fifteen and twenty-five on a Sunday. And there are other things happening and plans being matured.....

Foreseeable future- what does that signify?  Intention, merely, because who knows what's coming?  All the same I have this feeling, intuition, idea that small community centres like ours may have a significant role to play in the societal breakdown and reordering that I more than halfway expect to happen over the next few years. 
sholio: (B5-station)
[personal profile] sholio
But before I get to that, I started posting another fixit WIP over on AO3. This one will probably be about 4 chapters long, most of which is written, but it's kind of a mess so I'm posting it as I finish cleaning them up and filling in the missing parts.

The Living and the Damned - goes AU from the beginning of 5x18, rated mature because there will be tentacles, though things are a bit too dire for that yet.

And speaking of tentacles.

More from the behind the scenes books (tentacle related) )

Contrariwise

2026-02-14 00:04
nineweaving: (Default)
[personal profile] nineweaving
 A pleasant day at Boskone, ending in their traditional spread of chocolate pastries at their stunning art show. 
 
Saturday, I've signed up for a colored-pencil workshop! Haven't taken an art class in half a century. Then I've got two panels. "From Ancient Kingdoms to Urban Jungles" is at 2:30. The moderator rather insists on the "traditional aesthetic of 'castles, cloaks, and dragons,'” as if fantasy had always been a monoculture, so I'm going to talk about Lud-in-the-Mist, The Owl Service, and Little, Big, Then I've got "Future of Libraries" at 7.
 
On Sunday, I've got "The Art of Crafting Authentic Periods" at 10, and a reading at noon, hurrah!
 
No tradtional blizzard is forecast.

Nine
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