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Oct. 24th, 2025 10:08 am
yuletidemods: A hippo lounges with laptop in hand, peering at the screen through a pair of pince-nez and smiling. A text bubble with a heart emerges from the screen. The hippo dangles a computer mouse from one toe. By Oro. (Default)
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oursin: Illustration from medieval manuscript of the female physician Trotula of Salerno holding up a urine flask (trotula)
[personal profile] oursin

(Yogi Tea Bag tags, bringing the woowoo by random bollox generation long before AI started getting in on the act.)

Anyway, are we at all surprised by Millions exploited by ‘menopause gold rush’ amid lack of reliable information.

(Query: how far is lack of reliable information due to its being overwhelmed by menopause quackery, murmurs historian of medicine.)

Millions of women are being exploited by a “menopause gold rush” as companies, celebrities and influencers take advantage of a “dearth” of reliable information on the issue, experts have said. Healthcare companies and content creators saw menopause as a “lucrative market” and were trying to profit from gaps in public knowledge, women’s health academics at University College London (UCL) said. Researchers called for the rollout of a national education programme after finding a significant number of women do not feel well-informed about menopause.

You know what? I think part of this can be put on to the decline in the good old trad women's magazines, which had a) health columns written by pseudonymised health professionals b) agony aunts prepared to Do The Research and having a stack of helpful leaflets written in conjunction with qualified experts.

Brought to you by someone who was devouring her mother's magazines pretty much from the time she became literate and therefore encountered the concept of menopause decades before it became of personal relevance.

And what still gets very little play is what Stella Duffy points out in this piece:

while everyone in my research talked about physiological and emotional difficulties in the transition, once they were out the other side – even while dealing with workplace discrimination and the caring demands of their loved ones – all of them also described postmenopause as time of thriving and growing. We’re not done yet.

Margaret Mead mentioned this, but I'm not sure the 70s feminist discourse around 'croning' did a lot of favours to the idea of what happened after the pause.

james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


The August 2023 Nightmares Underneath Bundle featuring The Nightmares Underneath, the old-school horror-fantasy tabletop roleplaying game from Chthonstone Games.

Bundle of Holding: Nightmares Underneath (from 2023)

Girl in the Creek by Wendy N. Wagner

Oct. 23rd, 2025 08:51 am
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


Faraday, Oregon, seems to have a missing persons problem. Its problem is much worse.

Girl in the Creek by Wendy N. Wagner

Everybody's Perfect, by Jo Walton

Oct. 22nd, 2025 09:27 pm
mrissa: (Default)
[personal profile] mrissa
 

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author has been a dear friend since the mastodons roamed the plains.

It seems like half of the reviews out there claim that the book they're reviewing is something really different, but this, in fact, is something really different. It's like Marguerite Yourcenar's A Coin in Nine Hands, where the story passes from person to person as they encounter each other, showing different facets of life. But it's also very much not like that, because the story is a fantasy story with crucial worldbuilding, and the quiet nature of its plot makes it easy to miss that it's about massive social change.

Serenissima is not Venice, though they are connected. Serenissima, city of the mists, is the point that joins nine worlds, each filled with a sentient humanoid species, living and trading and growing and learning across worlds. No matter how long anyone has lived in Serenissima, no one person knows all of its secrets--so they need to work together to cure the blight that has stranded some of them there.

Because yes, this is a Venice Carnival mask book--but it's also a book that couldn't have been written in 2019. It is a book with strong awareness of the pandemic we've been going through, and all the ways in which it's only one possible way that we could suffer--and need to help each other. It's a book with a strong sense of forming community with others, even when those others don't fit our preconceptions of what a friend, an ally, a lover might look like. I really like the gentleness and the hope in this one. I think you might like it too.

Wednesday Reading Meme

Oct. 22nd, 2025 05:00 pm
sineala: Detail of Harry Wilson Watrous, "Just a Couple of Girls" (Reading)
[personal profile] sineala
What I Just Finished Reading

Once again, nothing. I have had a migraine for 48 hours and counting. (It comes and goes, which is why I am typing this post now. But you can tell I have one, because I clearly don't understand narrative enough to be reading comics and/or am too tired to type much.)

What I'm Reading Now

Comics Wednesday!

Fantastic Four #4, Ultimate Spider-Man #22, Ultimate Spider-Man Incursion #5, Ultimates #17 )

What I'm Reading Next

Hey, whoever it was who wanted me to review the sequel(s) to Fourth Wing and I said I wasn't going to do that because only the first book was on Kindle Unlimited and the library ebook waitlist was long and there was no way I was paying money for anything in this series?

Yeah, so books 2 and 3 are on Kindle Unlimited now, so at some point when I can stand to read lengthy original fiction books again (I do not know when this will be) I am willing to read and review terrible fantasy books because I love dragons too much for my own good. Clearly.

So this will probably not be the next thing, but it's on the list.

Dear Yuletide Writer

Oct. 22nd, 2025 01:00 pm
rabidsamfan: samwise gamgee, I must see it through (Default)
[personal profile] rabidsamfan
I'll apologize right now for how long this is.

Read more... )

Wednesday is World Wombat(t) Day*

Oct. 22nd, 2025 07:13 pm
oursin: Photograph of small impressionistic metal figurine seated reading a book (Reader)
[personal profile] oursin

What I read

I managed to plough through The Wheel of Fortune and do not think I will be plunging into a major Susan Howatch re-read binge. O all those angsty men. As for man handing on misery to man, Larkinesque-like, it deepens like the Mariana trench. Plus, the Katherine Swynford-analogue character gets no interiority, and besides being pretty much normal and sensible (unlike pretty much everybody else, no, Anna seems fairly stable) is full of deep mystical working-class Welsh wisdom. Good for her levanting to Canada (can one levant in that direction?). The last section in particular had me muttering about codfish.

O what a thoroughly delightful change to move on to Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A. (1977) - you do not need heaving melodrama or even actual plot to be compellingly readable, just saying.

On to Anthony Powell, Books Do Furnish a Room (A Dance to the Music of Time, #10) (1971) in anticipation of group discussion at beginning of November. Getting faint frissons of that narrative pattern of that period which was eschewing ominiscient voice but having a first-person narrator who just happens to be in a position to see or hear Events and can reflect upon them.

Latest Literary Review.

Also finished the book for review but have not yet got round to getting any thoughts on it written, this week having been a bit of a week, so far.

On the go

Maggie Helwig, Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community (2025).

Also happened to notice Jonathan Rose, Readers' Liberation: The Literary Agenda (2018) when I was looking for something else - I think this must have been something in return for reading something for a publisher? - I don't think I actually bought it - but looked interesting in the light of recent musings about reading.

Up next

Having discovered that I do, in fact, have a copy of The Making of a Muckraker, maybe a spot of dipping into that?

***

*Wombat Awareness Organisation: World Wombat Day!

rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
https://bsky.app/profile/luketurner.bsky.social/post/3m35pa3ywek2h



[Image description: Bluesky post by Luke Turner reading "here is a pleasingly anti-fascist animal painted on the Hurricane of gay RAF pilot Ian Gleed", above a picture of Gleed in the cockpit of his plane pointing to the image on its side of a cartoon cat swatting at and destroying a swastika.]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Gleed (he may have been the fastest RAF pilot to ever make ace, in two days; he was only 26 when he was killed)

Further research by [personal profile] robynbender established that he actually had said antifascist cat painted on all his planes:

http://www.hatfield-herts.co.uk/aviation/gleed.html

Back in blue

Oct. 22nd, 2025 05:40 pm
rmc28: (cuihc)
[personal profile] rmc28

I am very happy to say that I'll be playing for the Cambridge University Huskies this season.

Fixture list (clashes with Kodiaks 2 games in italics)

  • 1 Nov 2025 21:00, Cambridge Ice Rink, Oxford Women's Blues
  • 15 Nov 2025 23:15, Oxford Ice Rink, Oxford Vikings B
  • 22 Nov 2025 20:30, Planet Ice Gosport, Southampton Spitfires B
  • 29 Nov 2025 21:00, Cambridge Ice Rink, Birmingham Lions B
  • 6 Dec 2025 21:00, Cambridge Ice Rink, Kent Knights
  • 24 Jan 2026 21:00, Cambridge Ice Rink, Oxford Vikings B
  • 7 Feb 2026 21:15, Planet Ice Solihull, Birmingham Lions B
  • 14 Feb 2026 21:15, Oxford Ice Rink, Oxford Womens Blues
  • 21 Feb 2026 20:15, Streatham Ice and Leisure, Kent Knights
  • 28 Feb 2026 21:00, Cambridge Ice Rink, Southampton Spitfires B
  • TBD: Varsity game against Oxford Vikings B

No guarantee I'll be on the squad for any particular game, and Kodiaks 2 will have my priority when there's a clash. But yay, getting to represent my university again.

Timmy is BACK and ALMOST ON SCHEDULE

Oct. 22nd, 2025 12:00 am
[syndicated profile] dinosaur_comics_feed
archive - contact - sexy exciting merchandise - search - about
October 22nd, 2025next

October 22nd, 2025: This continues the tale of Timmy, who you'll remember we first encountered in 2013 and then 2018! In 2018 I said you'd have to read for six more years to find out what Timmy did next and I didn't lie! You had to read for six more years and then some extra time too. Thanks to Jan for the reminder!!

– Ryan

A Thousand Blues by Cheon Seon-Ran

Oct. 22nd, 2025 08:53 am
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


A robot muses contentedly on the events that led it to its rapidly approaching doom.

A Thousand Blues by Cheon Seon-Ran

Yuletide letter 2025

Oct. 22nd, 2025 06:19 pm
nnozomi: (Default)
[personal profile] nnozomi
Amended from past years:
Thank you for writing something for me. With the exception of the do-not-like stuff, please take any and all of this as optional suggestions only, and do what works for you.

Do not like: darkfic in general, incest, humiliation, graphic violence, PWP or graphic parts-and-fluids sexual descriptions (no moral objections, it's just not what I enjoy reading), blatant out-of-characterness, rape/dubcon, Christmas themes (not Christian myself), coronavirus/quarantine references etc.

Enjoy in particular: work (in all definitions) and people being competent at it, hurt/comfort, futurefic, ensemble pieces, playing with language(s), cuddling, scenes from everyday life.

Genfic is good, shipfic is good, although in the case of the latter I’d rather have a story that has something going on as well as pure romance, whether it’s a separate plot thread or a characterization arc.

I'm open to treats if anyone is so kind.

By fandom/characters (alphabetical):
The Crater School – Chaz Brenchley (Any)
The mixture of “boarding school story” with “science fiction” absolutely delights me and basically I just want more (set specifically at the school rather than in the larger setting, ideally). Of the characters I nominated, I love Mary Ellen “Mae”’s relationship with reading and writing, and Levity’s arc of getting comfortable at school, discovering her inherited talent for art, and falling in love; as far as Rachel is concerned, honestly I just want to see her (along with Jessica, of course) be explicitly Jewish (in whatever sense) on page, I refuse to buy that all the way on Mars even a girl named Rachel Abramoff has to be Christian! However, you can use any or none of these three, and/or other existing characters, and/or make up a set of original characters altogether; I’d just like to see the school doing its thing. (Something leaning more toward Antonia Forest than Elinor Brent-Dyer would be wonderful, but that definitely falls under optional-details-are-optional.) ETA: I finished reading Radhika's book just barely too late to nominate her, but I love her and I would be delighted to see her in a fic if you feel like writing about her too.

The Incandescent - Emily Tesh (Worldbuilding)
I have a thing about administration-saves-the-day (not that it does exactly here, but I love how big a part school administration plays in the book) and I love magic integrated into a modern-day setting, so this book did good things for me. Here again more than anything I kind of want a slice of life at school, set during the book itself or otherwise; I loved the A-level students, especially Aneeta, and would be delighted to have a fic focusing on them, but something from the teacher/staff perspective would be great too, or else feel free to make up entirely original characters if you’d rather. If you want to look into what the school (or one of the new schools/programs!) looks like after the events of the book, that would be fascinating too.

Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary – Pamela Dean (Any)
I’m always about equally fascinated and frustrated by this book, and Gentian’s friends are what I like most about it—they have the most interesting takes on the themes of the novel, femininity and gender in general, religion, art and science, conventionality and unconventionality, romance and friendship, togetherness and solitude, what you have in common with people and what makes you different from them. I’d love a missing scene from the book, futurefic, or anything from their perspectives, especially if it provides a bit of comforting closure for the ending, or else a canon divergence where things go better in the first place. You can throw in romance in any combination among them if you’re interested or keep it to friendship, whatever works.

The Melendys – Elizabeth Enright (Rush Melendy)
I love all the Melendys and their friends (and would be happy to see any and all of them appearing, in and out of the tagset), but I’m especially fond of Rush, the sarcastic, cheerful, quick-witted, occasionally self-doubting polymath who spends hours at the piano; I would love to see Rush a little older and what he’s making of himself, in whatever context. Again, really an ensemble fic in which Rush has his fair share of page time would be great too. I’d rather no focus on romance for this canon (although if you want to give Willy Sloper a love life with any non-Melendy person, that would be delightful!).

叛逆者|The Rebel (Wang Shi’an)
I got a spectacular Wang Shi’an fic a few Yuletides back, and I have never quite stopped thinking about him and wanting even more. (You can find my thoughts on him AT LENGTH under the "pannizhe" tag here--please feel free to read or ignore as you like.) I can't help wanting a story in which, without necessarily being a better human being, he's compelled by circumstance to turn his talents (thinking on his feet, lying and deceiving as needed, planning ahead, balancing temper and calm...) to good purposes instead of bad ones. I know that is a weird, and weirdly specific request, and I will not hold you to it; basically anything Wang Shi'an-centric, whether canon-compliant or -divergent, would be wonderful.
I’ve requested only Wang Shi’an himself so as not to complicate matters, but please also feel free to bring in any other characters who occur to you—Lin Nansheng and Chen Moqun, with whom he has incredibly complex relationships; Lan Xinjie, Lao Gu or Lao Ji, Meng Annan, even poor dumb loyal Secretary Zhang or Wang Shi’an’s blink-and-you-miss-her wife. One request I do have for this canon is attention to the historical context--I don't mean you have to do a huge research project, but I feel like the story has to be grounded in the time and place for the characters to be who they are.

Rivers of London – Ben Aaronovitch (Abigail Kamara, Indigo)
Indigo and her foxspeak and her adoration of Abigail all delight me, and Abigail’s brilliance and teenage-ness and resilience likewise; I’d love to see them having an adventure of some kind, large or small, details up to you. Any other characters (original ones included) welcome too, although I especially enjoy the way Abigail looks to Nightingale as a mentor and her unlikely friendship with Simon. (My other favorite character is Kim Reynolds; I can’t exactly see how she could fit easily into an Abigail-focused story, but if something occurs to you, go for it!)

Taiwan Travelogue – Yang Shuang-zi (Any)
Because their futures are less determined by the canon, I’m especially curious to read about Ozawa Reiko and Tan Tshiok-bi (Chen Chueh-wei? Chin Jakubi? why is romanization so linguistically and sociopolitically complicated; come to think of it, should Reiko be piped with Ta-tse Li-tzu? sorry, just doodling); what their friendship/romance was like and what happened to them after the events of the book, in Taiwan or Japan or elsewhere, whether they mirrored Chizuko and Chizuru’s relationship, as they do in the book to some extent, or developed in their own unexpected directions. That said, if you want to focus on Chizuko and Chizuru (Chien-ho|Tshian-hoh…), either with missing scenes from the book’s history or giving them an alternate future, that would be lovely too. In either case, one request I do have for this canon is attention to the historical context--I don't mean you have to do a huge research project, but I feel like the story has to be grounded in the time and place for the characters to be who they are. (I speak Japanese and some Chinese, so the more of either, as needed, you want to throw into the fic the better, as long as you’re confident in it!)

Thank you again!

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