So I want a low stress short fic prompt fest for next month. However, those work much better for me if I don't know the prompts in advance. So we're trying this with me grabbing a couple prompt lists without actually reading them.

Whumptober 2021 by whumptober2021 | AO3 Collection

Comfortween Rerun by hurtcomfortex | AO3 Collection

( Oct 1st )

( Characters )

( Formats )

I keep feeling like I have things to say about stories, and then I post them in the evening and have to come up with titles and tags and summaries and by the time I get to DW I barely remember how sentences work.

Title: Far to Go
Rating: T
Universe: Marvel
Characters: Natasha Romanov, Clint Barton, Bucky Barnes
Warnings/Enticements: De-Aging, Implied Child Abuse, Canon-Typical Violence, Natasha Romanov Backstory, Angst, Paranoia, Hurt/Comfort, Natasha Romanov Needs a Hug, But She Certainly Wouldn't Accept One, Sign Language, Blizzards, Handcuffs, Unreliable Narrator
Summary: "We were on a mission today. You know the kind of thing: scientists make something, realize they have no use for it and no one sane would want it around, and then instead of destroying it like anyone sensible would they stick it in a high security containment facility and forget about it until someone steals it, and we have to go and steal it back. They say it’s only dangerous if you drink it, we say great, we’ll have it back by Tuesday, and then Natasha touches the bottle and loses twenty years."
--
It's a test. Of course it's a test. She must have been drugged. This must be a false mission set up by the Red Room. These men must be Red Room too. She just has to figure out how to pass the test.

Right?
Word Count: 4711

On AO3

So on Tumblr there was a Tiktok video going around, about Pride and whether gay people face discrimination anymore, which I don't want to hunt down the link for. But the video was a response by one queer man to another video by a much younger gay man, and it got me thinking about differences in campus queer communities in the past fifteen years.

( Read more... )

I was going to post a link to quilt pictures here and then I thought I should post pictures of the other quilts I've done and then I realized I didn't really have any good pictures of them and then it was two months later.

So here are pictures of a quilt I finished in March! (Tumblr) (Twitter)

And here are some of the other things I did in the past two months that didn't make it here:

Learned more programming

A bunch of unrelated thoughts about The Old Guard on Tumblr: one, two, three

Listened to some French podcasts

Signed up for my local city councillor's mailing list, which I recommend if you are that kind of person and have a decent city councillor

Had meta-thoughts on omegaverse (Tumblr) (Twitter)

Provided a blood sample for the Ontario Health Study's COVID antibody study (Tumblr) (Twitter)

Was moderately snide about "accessible design" by non-disabled people (Tumblr) (Twitter)

I would like to post about other things but I've just finished the semester and my government is being reprehensible, so.

( Stories posted to AO3 )

So I was listening to a podcast about an 18th century cookbook, and the host read out some recipes from it and added "These recipes seem lacking on specifics today..." and the two professional chefs I was listening with immediately said, "No, they don't. Those are perfectly normal recipes."

And I said, "For you, because you already know how to cook."

I've read several books on quilting and patchwork in the last year. Florence Hartley's Ladies’ Hand Book of Fancy and Ornamental Work (1859) assumes not only that the reader already knows how to make patchwork, but that patchwork was how she learned to sew in the first place. It includes a few patterns, mostly just by showing you the finished design, and introduces the reader to the concept of album quilts, and has relatively specific instructions for English paper piecing. It gives descriptions of a few individual quilts. But mostly the author just rhapsodizes on the history of patchwork, because of course her audience already knows all about how to do it. On quilting there's even less.

The first full length book solely about quilts was Quilts: Their Story and How to Make Them by Marie D. Webster (1915). She's got more space, but when it comes to instructions she mostly just tells you to sew the pieces together. She's more interested in appliqué than patchwork, and she has lots of detail on quilting, but she still assumes that of course you know how to sew and can make your own pattern.

Ruby Short McKim's 101 Patchwork Patterns (1931), now, actually tells you what size to cut, how to sew together, what seam allowance to leave, and usually what order to sew the pieces together. She tells you about bias, she tells you how to deal with triangles and diamonds, she tells you to baste appliqué before final sewing. She gives you actual pattern pieces and tells you how to cut them out.

The first book I read on quilting was The Perfect Patchwork Primer by Beth Gutcheon (1973). It goes through the entire process of designing and making a quilt. It tells you how to calculate fabric quantities. It has a diagram of how to do running stitch. It doesn't assume you already know how to sew, but it does assume you can figure out how to apply general rules to specific patterns.

All Points Patchwork by Diane Gilleland (2015) tells you how to tie a knot in your thread. (She does say this is because lots of people ask her this question.) It doesn't assume you have ever sewn before. It's an excellent book, lots of design inspiration, specific details on how to work with different shapes, etc.: and it has and repeats detailed instructions for everything down to the most basic tasks.

Gilleland's book is not actually representative of most books on quilting these days; it's a general introduction to a specific technique, and doesn't have any individual pattern instructions. Most quilting books don't have the basics, they certainly don't tell you how to operate your sewing machine, but they have extremely specific patterns: use this quantity of these five kinds of fabrics, cut them into these pieces in this way, join these together to make this segment, then those segments to make this one, and so on: an unbelievable level of detail for each individual pattern, that no one who has made more than two quilts would actually need, especially not if they had access to the internet.

I'm not objecting to this trend. It means that anyone can pick up a hobby as an adult, whether or not they have any experience with it or even know anyone else who does it. But I do have a strong personal preference for the middle of this progression; for books that tell you how to do things rather than what to do.

(I recommend all of the specifically named books in this post, though in some cases mostly for historical interest.)

I am amused to realize that immediately after I fell out of Holmes fandom and therefore stopped doing watsons_woes's July Writing Prompts, I found another annual month-long low-stress short fic prompt fest to participate in.

Tidying up my last few fills; fics over 100 words are appearing on AO3 as usual; recs post to follow.

( Narnia (2) )

( Greek Mythology )

( Marvel )

Maybe if there is productive activity in one area I will actually go and listen to my microcontrollers lectures.

Three Sentence Ficathon is now at a new post, so if you were thinking "Oh god 50 pages of comments" now you can start there. It's fine, you don't need to read everything!

That said, these are mostly from the previous post.

( Marvel (2) )

( Narnia )

( Hamlet )

( The Little Mermaid (Hans Christian Andersen) )

( Fin-de-Siecle RPF )

( Calvin and Hobbes )

( Harry Potter )

( Cordelia (Movie Poster 2020) )

Having another round of Pandemic Exhaustion but here are more 3 Sentence Fics.

Another one at be_compromised. They are also having a Valentine's Mini Promptathon until the end of the month.

( MCU )

And at rthstewart's:

( Slightly Scandalous by Mary Balogh )

( Captain America (2) )

( Hamlet )

( And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie )

( Harry Potter )

( The Old Guard )

Taking a break from scrolling through to post about Three Sentence Ficathon!

I am having so much fun again. (Possibly I should be thinking about microcontrollers instead, but whatever.) Fun is what I need in writing right now, and I hoped this would help, and it really really has.

So actually the first of these is not for this Three Sentence Ficathon, it's for the one at be_compromised which started Friday and is still open if you want MCU specifically and Clint&/Natasha more specifically.

( MCU )

And for rthstewart's, from the last couple days:

( The Old Guard (2) )

( Calvin and Hobbes )

( Harry Potter )

( Narnia )

All of that was just yesterday. Today so far:

( Original Horror )

( Much Ado About Nothing )

( Greek Myth )

( The Addams Family crossover )

So much fun.

A lot of these are drabbles or longer and will go up on AO3 eventually.