Reading

Entry tags:

[#271 | In the Nick of Time] Voting Post

Here are the entries for this challenge:

( List of entries )

Please Note: Because we only have 4 entries this week, there is only a First Place and Runner Up to vote for!

In order to vote, please reply to this post using the form provided. All comments are screened, and entries are listed in the order they were submitted. For your vote to qualify, you must fill out your entire voting card (both spots) in order to be counted. Winner votes are worth 2 points, Runner Up votes are worth 1 point. Meeting the bonus goal on an entry gets an extra point for that submission.

When voting, please copy/paste the ENTRY NUMBER and the FIC TITLE from the list above into the spot you're voting for (this prevents accidentally mis-numbering a vote and casting it for the wrong entry). It should look like this:

First Place: 61. Fic Title Here
Runner Up: 88. Another Fic Title

Please note that you cannot vote for your own entry, and that votes cannot be made anonymously. You do not have to be a member of the community in order to vote, nor have submitted an entry for this week; everyone is welcome to participate in the voting. IP addresses are logged to prevent duplicate voting.

Voting closes Wednesday, September 3 at 9:00PM EST.

Entry tags:

web images

When big breakthroughs are required, Hattie can’t be stopped.

Entry tags:

[#271] From One Moment To The Next (Control)

Theme Prompt: #271 - In The Nick Of Time
Title: From One Moment To The Next
Fandom: Control
Rating/Warnings: PG-13 | Spoilers
Bonus: No
Word Count: 986
Summary: Both Trench and Darling wonder if there was a moment in which there could have been a different outcome.

( From One Moment To The Next )

Entry tags:

shakespeare

On Sitting Down to Read Macbeth Once Again

I am trying to re-read everything I teach this year, even if I know it well enough to walk into a classroom and teach it cold, because it's what I would want to have done if this turns out to be the last time I teach any of these texts. We'll see how long I keep it up. (Probably, until the papers start coming in. Which is next week.)

In the meantime, some thoughts about Macbeth that struck me this time through: this play is so very very much about the "king-becoming graces / As justice, verity, temperance, stableness, / Bounty, perseverance, mercy, lowliness, / Devotion, patience, courage, fortitude." Mostly, of course, it's about showing what happens when a king doesn't have those graces (in a word, emptiness: the sere, the yellow leaf; the sound and fury signifying nothing) but it matters a lot that we get glimpses of them -- in Duncan, in Malcolm, in the offstage Edward.

Macbeth never once says what he wants to do with the kingship, but it's pretty safe to say that "hang golden stamps about the necks of the sick and pray with them until they're cured" is just ... not on his agenda. Nor, for that matter, is the more ordinary stuff Malcolm pledges to do at the end of the play: recalling the wrongfully exiled, thanking his allies, and "what needful else / That calls upon us." He just doesn't want to do the work. Or, as Caithness puts it more eloquently, "He cannot buckle his distempered cause / Within the belt of rule."

But it matters that the good kings are out there, and that the idea that kingship is supposed to be sacred and sacramental is always there. (This was one of the major problems that I had with the production I saw at Stratford this summer, BTW, which turned all of the characters into ... a biker gang. It is not actually shocking if the leader of the Hell's Angels gets murdered, or murders someone else. It needs to be shocking!)

I don't, as an American, particularly believe in Good Kings, or in any kings; but I think the idea of just and righteous rule is something that we rather desperately need to hold onto.

Entry tags:

admin,
c: issue

Admin Post: Challenge 490: Issue

Our new challenge is:

ISSUE

As always, you can interpret the prompt literally or figuratively, in whatever way works for you.

Each work created for this challenge should be posted as a new entry to the comm. Posting starts now and continues up until the challenge ends at 4pm Pacific Time on Wednesday, 10th September. No sign-up required.

Mods will tag your work with fandom and challenge. When you've posted entries to three consecutive challenges, you will earn a name tag, and we'll go back and tag all your previous entries with your name.

All kinds of fanworks in all fandoms are welcome. Please have a look at our guidelines before you play. If you have any questions or concerns, don't hesitate to contact a mod. And if you have any suggestions for future challenges, you can leave them in the comments of this post.

Also, keep an eye out for the next

ffw_social post, which will go up in the next couple of days. If you haven't joined the

ffw_social comm, it's never too late to come and check it out. (Posts are locked, which means you have to join to see them.)

Entry tags:

admin,
c: amnesty

Admin Post: Admin: Challenge closed

The Amnesty challenge is now closed. Here are the entries:

Punch: due South: Fanfiction: Like a Punch to the Face by

lucy_roman
Revenge Challenge: FAKE: Fanfic: Revenge At Last by

badly_knitted
Crush Challenge: S.W.A.T.: Fan Fiction: Crushing On You by

darkjediqueen
Crowd Challenge: FAKE: Fanfic: Wait And Hope by

badly_knitted
Face: Spooks (MI5): Fanfic: At The Funeral by

smallhobbit
Old Friends: Final Fantasy XII: Fanfic: (Re)United by

the_paradigm
Science Challenge: The Fantastic Journey: Fanfic: A Man Of Science by

badly_knitted
One Night Only: Starsky & Hutch: Fanfiction: Love, Despair, and Starsky by

lucy_roman
Taking Turns Challenge: FAKE: Fanfic: Date Nights by

badly_knitted
Sorry Challenge: The Fantastic Journey: Fanfic: Words Aren't Enough by

badly_knitted
Mending: Sherlock Holmes (ACD): Fanfic: Providing an Income Boost by

smallhobbit
Credit Challenge: FAKE: Fanfic: The Interview by

badly_knitted
Red Challenge: Women's Soccer RPF: Fanfiction: Stanford Red by

infinitum_noctem
Long Challenge: The Fantastic Journey: Fanfic: Travelling Hopefully by

badly_knitted
The Fantastic Journey Double Drabble: Uncomfortable Doubts by

badly_knitted
Z challenge: Zorro: icons: the mark by

highlander_ii
Clean Challenge: The Fantastic Journey: Fanfic: Hot Water by

badly_knitted
Telephone: Multifandom: Rec: Ringtones by

treonb
Do-over Challenge: Sherlock (BBC)/Hamlet: Fanfic: Summer at Holmes' Hall by

smallhobbit
Dash Challenge: FAKE: Fanfic: The Real Thing by

badly_knitted
Red challenge: Marvel Comics: fanart: red by

fadedwings
Letter Challenge: The Fantastic Journey: Fanfic: Left Behind by

badly_knitted
Spicy Challenge: Torchwood: Spicing things up by

m_findlow
24 Hours: Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Fanfic: Overpowered by

veronyxk84
Relief Challenge: The Fantastic Journey: Fanfic: Exhausted by

badly_knitted
School/Midnight Challenge: Sherlock (BBC): Fanfic: The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine by

smallhobbit
Guest Challenge: Greek Myth: Fanfic: Trauma Shared by

drabblewriter
Double Challenge: The Fantastic Journey: Fanfic: Mirage by

badly_knitted
Spicy: Wildfrost: Art: spice yuki by

himejoshiheart
The Last Word: xxxHoLiC: Podfic: death as a perfect circle (that elusive object) by

bluedreaming
Je Ne Regrette Rien: You Are Desire: Poetry: the way we were by

teaotter
Waiting: Guardian: fanfic: Best Friends Forever by

china_shop

\o/ \o/ \o/

Thank you to everyone who participated! You're now free to post your entries to your journal or wherever else you'd like. If you're archiving on AO3, you can add your work to our fan_flashworks collection there.

New challenge is on its way.

Entry tags:

Waiting: Guardian: fanfic: Best Friends Forever

Title: Best Friends Forever
Fandom: Guardian (TV)
Rating: Teen
Length: 1487 words
Notes: Set in my post-canon Chu Shuzhi/Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan ‘verse. Outsider POV. One-sided Guo Changcheng/Chu Shuzhi.
Warnings: References to the canon showdown. Unrequited love. Bittersweet ending.
Summary: Now Hei Pao Shi was gone, of course none of them could stay the same.

( Best Friends Forever )

[ SECRET POST #6814 ]

⌈ Secret Post #6814 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

( More! )

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 25 secrets from Secret Submission Post #973.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Dragon and on

Posted by camestrosfelapton

https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2025/09/02/dragon-and-on/

http://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/?p=53625

The Dragon Award’s were announced yesterday. I can’t know for certain but I feel like the best explanation for what won was that was who people voted for. That may seem obvious but most years, I’m not sure. File 770 has the list of winners here https://file770.com/2025-dragon-awards-winners/

There’s also been a press release and as always it has a vague number in it:

“Nearly 6,000 fans cast ballots for this year’s Dragon Award winners, selected from among 67 entries in 11 categories covering the full range of fiction, comics, television, movies, video gaming, and tabletop gaming.”
https://www.dragoncon.org/resources/media-pr-resources/pressreleases/

That is an interesting number. Last year it was “Approximately 7,000 fans”. The previous year it was “More than 7,000 fans”. https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2023/09/07/dragon-award-numbers/

Fair to say that the number of fans voting in the Dragon Awards dropped by at least 1,000 since 2023. Yes, that is still more than the number of people who vote in the Hugo Awards but in 2018 it was 11,000 if the numbers are to be believed. https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2023/09/07/dragon-award-numbers/

Onwards onto the actual winners.

Best Science Fiction Novel

This Inevitable Ruin by Matt Dinniman

Like most LitRPGs, this is a genre crossing story with a human protagonist fghting their way through fantasy-like dungeons created by aliens. This book seven in the sort of series that is very popular with the people who read it but not the sort of book people are casually picking up.

So not a surprise win as it’s a book series with a big fan base. The other finalists were solid picks but if they all had similar sized votes then I can see how this one won. This is also the kind of book that the Dragon Awards should be giving glass paperweights to. Popular books that otherwise don’t get awards.

Having said all that…this is book seven and it is the first time the series has been listed in any category at all in the Dragon Awards.

Best Fantasy Novel (Including Paranormal)

The Devils by Joe Abercrombie

Abercrombie is a big name, famous fantasy writer, so a plausible winner. He is not who I expected to win. Shadow of the Smoking Mountain by Howard Andrew Jones had a lot good will behind it and was published by Baen. Additionally, while Larry Correia was also a finalist in this category, he had asked his fans to vote for Howard Andrew Jones. Jones died recently and there have been campaigns to get his fantasy series recognised. On top of all that, the series has critical acclaim beyond the usual-Baen-suspects.

If we assume that the Dragon admins have been stacking the deck for Baen (eg in 2019) then we would expect Howard Andrew Jones to win. If, on the other hand, we assume that Baen (and Larry Correia in particular) is good at mobilising votes for the Dragon Awards then we also would have expected Howard Andrew Jones to win.

So, I’ll reject both hypotheses and the most obvious explanation is that Abercrombie won because that is how people voted.

Best Young Adult / Middle Grade Novel

Sunrise of the Reaping by Suzanne Collins

Another big name winner with a spin-off of Collins’s Hunger Games series. This is the Dragons in book-that-doesn’t-need-an-award mode. Notably the Baen book didn’t win here (David Weber) nor did an indie win.

Best Alternate History Novel

The Martian Contingency by Mary Robinette Kowal

Kowal has won Dragon’s before but this category has often been the Baen consolation prize category. This time though, there was likely a split Baen vote between 1635: The Weaver’s Code by Eric Flint, Jody Lynn Nye and 1919: The Romanov Rising by Tom Kratman, Kacey Ezell, Justin Watson.

Best Horror Novel

Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle

This feels like an additional coda for Debarkle. Chuck Tingle wins a Dragon Award? It is both laden with irony but also a straight forward win by an author who is currently a very popular and critically notable horror author.

Best Illustrative Book Cover

Wind and Truth by Michael Whelan

I think this is the kind of winner the organisers had in mind when they set up the category.

I won’t go through the rest of the winners as they are basically popular stuff wins popular vote. Cora has more analysis here https://corabuhlert.com/2025/09/01/some-comments-on-the-2025-dragon-award-winners/

https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2025/09/02/dragon-and-on/

http://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/?p=53625

Entry tags:

Possibly really after someone of the same name???

Some while since I posted about being solicited to attend a dodgy-sounding medical conference ('a boutique-style event that emphasizes depth and interaction. Modest in scale but rich in content, the conference’s intimate setting fosters close communication and meaningful dialogue.').

My dears! they must be quite desperate for me to attend, for I have subsequently received not one, no, but TWO further invitations to 'be an Oral Speaker and/or Session Chair', they 'would be honored' to have my participation.

This may be like that invitation I received to a Virtual Trade Mission to Estonia in the supposition I was person of similar name to mine who had at one time had something to do with the Alpha Chi Omega Fraternity, Inc (I do not know whether it would have been of any relevance to them, either).

Maybe there is an actual OB/GYN person of similar name - further hilarity if they are of a different gender, my first name being liable to confusion - and even more if they get queries asking them to be on podcasts about Queen Victoria's sex life and other saucy topics.

On another prickly paw, this person, who does in fact exist and Know Who I Am, and has been assured my continued existence and (relative) compos mentis state, has quite failed to get back to me. Perchance the tone of my response was just a tad tetchy - I did not say JFGI but even these fallen days I felt that a little poking around on Ye Internettez would have uncovered usable contact details.

Entry tags:

Je Ne Regrette Rien: You Are Desire: Poetry: the way we were

Title: the way we were
Fandom: You Are Desire (mods, please use the cdrama tag)
Challenge: Je Ne Regrette Rien

( Read more... )

Current Mood: restless

Entry tags:

Let's blame the change of season for today's restlessness and this disjointed post

When it took forever to fall asleep last night, my brain's hamster wheel of choice was all household things--puttering and cleaning products and other such exciting stuff. I'm feeling fidgety and restless about home-related things, and I choose to blame the arrival of meteorological autumn (which TBH I usually forget is a thing, even though those seasonal dates are easier to pin down than the solstices and equinoxes). We often sort of melt into autumn here, but this year everything's taken a beating from lack of rain, so I've read several people talking about some leaves already coming down. :/

This morning I did manage to do some small puttery things that needed doing, but most things require input from both of us and

scruloose's mind and energy are currently elsewhere (long-overdue reno project). Also, y'know, I have a rewrite due in less than two weeks that I'm having real trouble focusing on; both that and the general restlessness are presumably not being helped by inevitable mild worry about Jinksy having dental extractions (also long-overdue) tomorrow.

(I'm reminding myself that any surfaces we can declutter before the fall crunch starts at Dayjob will be a significant help for my brain while that's going on. Here's hoping we can manage some of that.)

I won't think it's properly autumn until equinox anyway, but I do think maybe I'm ready for it.

Entry tags:

The Last Word: xxxHoLiC: Podfic: death as a perfect circle (that elusive object)

Title: death as a perfect circle (that elusive object)
Fandom: xxxHoLiC
Reader's name: bluedreaming
Author's name: bluedreaming
Link to text version of story: text here
Rating: G
Length/file size: 1:15 min, 1.19 mb
Content notes: none
Podficcer's notes: The music used is an excerpt from track 21 HoLiC End Title (YouTube music) from Keiichiro Shibuya's 2022 ATAK025 xxxHOLiC soundtrack album. The photo is my own work.
Summary: In which Doumeki has the last word.

( embedded streaming and direct-download links )

Entry tags:

Chat corner: Free-for-all

Hi!

This is a free-for-all chat corner. Anything SW-related is fair game.

Have fun!

Entry tags:

bundle of holding

Bundle of Holding: Fragged Empire 2E

The 2024 revised edition of Fragged Empire: fifteen thousand years in the future, humanity has gone extinct, but eight engineered species rule the wonders that remain.

Bundle of Holding: Fragged Empire 2E

"Intonation units form low-frequency rhythms"

Posted by Mark Liberman

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70850&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=intonation-units-form-low-frequency-rhythms

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70850

Several people have asked me about this paper — Maya Inbar, Eitan Grossman, and Ayelet Landau, "A universal of speech timing: Intonation units form low-frequency rhythms", PNAS 8/19/2025:

Intonation units (IUs) are a hypothesized universal building block of human speech [W. Chafe, Discourse, Consciousness and Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing (1994); N. P. Himmelmann et al., Phonology 35, 207–245 (2018)). Linguistic research suggests they are found across languages and that they fulfill important communicative functions such as the pacing of ideas in discourse and swift turn-taking. We study the rate of IUs in 48 languages from every continent and from 27 distinct language families. Using an analytic method to annotate natural speech recordings, we identify a low-frequency rate of IUs across the sample, with a peak at 0.6 Hz, and little variation between sexes or across the life span. We find that IU rate is only weakly related to speech rate quantified at the syllable level, and crucially, that cross-linguistic variation in IU rate does not stem from cross-linguistic variation in syllable rate.

Note that 0.6 Hz is 1/0.6 ≈ 1.7 seconds in the time domain.

Here's the chapter on "Intonation Units" in Wally Chafe's 1994 monograph (annotations are not mine…). N. P. Himmelmann's Google Scholar page offers the cited 2018 paper "On the universality of intonational phrases: A cross-linguistic interrater study", as well as other relevant references. Both citations make it clear that the issue is a complex one, with "phrases" in (various aspects of phonological and syntactic) message structure and "phrases" in (various aspects of phonetic) speech production being often quite different, especially in spontaneous speech. In addition, both "phonological" and "phonetic" phrasing have generally been regarded as hierarchical., so that I'm skeptical of the view that a single well-defined series of "intonation units" makes descriptive or cognitive sense. And in any case, it's obvious that individual speakers differ from one another, and also from their own performances in different settings — which doesn't mean that there are no typical or average values, but …

Maya Inbar has put relevant links to data and code on OSF, but I won't have time for a while to examine that material and evaluate their analyses. So for now I'll just list some relevant past posts, with brief associated comments.

"Speech rhythm in Visible Speech", 12/18/2013 — describes the section in Visible Speech (the 1947 book by Potter, Koop and Green) on "Rhythm in Speech", where the authors use a syllable-scale spectral analysis to look for phrase-scale rhythms.

"My poster for the 'Prosody Visualization Challenge'", 6/14/2018 — various ways to visualize relations among pitch, ampitude, and time,

"Towards automated babble metrics", 5/26/2019 — I replicate the 1947 method digitally, taking infant babble recordings as input, showing a spectral peak at 2.25 Hz (= 445 msec in the time domain), as well as other spectro-temporal structure.

"Cumulative syllable-scale power spectra", 6/11/2019 — I look at the syllable-scale power spectra of a car commercial and the associated rapid disclaimer:

"Political sound and silence", 2/8/2016 — compares two-dimensional density plots of speech-segment duration and (adjacent) silence-segment duration in the weekly radio addresses of Barack Obama and George W. Bush. The patterns are quite different, illustrating the point that things are not necessarily the same within the same genre and language:

"Poetic sound and silence", 2/12/2016 — offers similar plots for poetry readings by W.C. Williams, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, W.H. Auden, Gertrude Stein, Charles Bernstein, Carl Sandburg, Y.B. Yeats, John Ashbery, and Allen Ginsberg. Also adding Ronald Reagan, though he was not reading poetry.

"Some phonetic dimensions of speech style", 4/9/2016 — differences in speech-segment and silence-segment distributions for various sources of read and spontaneous speech.

"Political sound and silence II", 5/30/2017 — adds Donald Trump…

"Inter-syllable intervals", 9/13/2023 — What the distribution of inter-syllable time intervals looks like, in a range of examples at different speaking rates, along with the T-SNE analysis of a simple 4-parameter model…

"Read vs. spontaneous speech", 10/16/2023 — press briefings offer a useful local contrast between the reading of a prepared statement and the spontaneous reponses to questions about it.

Note that all of the above posts deal with phonetic aspects of phrase-level patterns — the spectrum of syllable-scale oscillations, or the distribution of speech segment and silence segment durations — not the spectrum of "intonation units", whatever they turn out to be…

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70850&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=intonation-units-form-low-frequency-rhythms

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=70850

Current Mood: vibrating slightly

Entry tags:

at least i'm up to date on laundry

Back to work was a slog today! That was my last day off until Christmas, and September is looking like being pretty intense as a month. The "be on campus for a week to act as a reserve for visa checks" has morphed into "three and a half days of being a reserve plus two full days of actual checking" (yes, this does add up to more days than exist in the work week; I have refrained from accepting the relevant calendar invites until someone can clarify quite how they expect me to staff two desks at the same time). I've also been voluntold to attend a full-day meeting on campus the previous week, which is not only on a work from home day but also a day with choir in the evening (not to mention choir the office day before it and choir the work from home day after it). I am trying very hard not to think about the number of things which I really ought to be getting completed before the start of term, because my odds are looking extremely poor.

On the other hand, I did get through the 300 system emails, 84 personal emails, and 31 Teams notifications which were waiting this morning, and only have a dozen or so new actions to pick up from them. And I did the first round of monthly reports, including desperately scraping my brain to extract suggestions as to what I did during August (not very much, apparently!!). I left the intimidating email from Legal for tomorrow morning, and then have ambitious plans to make a proper list of what I want to get done this month and try and make some progress on... well, anything. Something. A Task of some kind. Perhaps if I can manage that I will feel less like the human incarnation of the scream emoji.

September 2025 Patreon Boost

Like Sisyphus' rock, September has returned!

September 2025 Patreon Boost

Entry tags:

Spicy: Wildfrost: Art: spice yuki

Fandom: Wildfrost
Rating: G
Summary: yknow delta pokemon? yeah? spice yuki

( im thinkin. perma atk up whenever a card gets spice. just like regular yuki )

Entry tags:

September Theme + Request Post

Recs of any sort may be posted at any time, but in addition we have monthly themes.

tardis_library's theme for August is now closed, and here is our new theme for September:

Eighth Doctor // Dream(s)

"It was a childish dream that made you a doctor. You dreamt you could hold back death. Isn't that true? Don't be sad... You'll do great things."

Time to bring out your favourite fanworks for the Eighth Doctor and anyone and anything from any of his many eras! Or any work that ties in with the theme of dreams in any way. Or, as ever, both!

Post your recs to the community in the normal way any time from now until midnight on 30th September 2025 in your timezone. (See Info & Guidelines for posting template and instructions). Recs posted for monthly themes have their own tag with banners at the end of the year for reccers who posted a rec for 6 or more of each year's themes.

When making your post, add the tag "other: monthly theme". (The mods can take care of any other needed tags if you prefer, but a challenge/theme tag could easily be missed.)

Our current Seasonal Challenge is Reccer's Bingo, which is open for sign ups for cards and posting recs until 21 September 2025.

Request List
Anyone may also request any specific recs they'd like to see. (e.g. "Fourth Doctor fic, not on Teaspoon," "Cheerful Bill Potts artwork," "Leela vid," "recent Ten/Rose," etc.) If you are only interested in one medium (fic/vid/art etc/), don't forget to specify.

Current requests:
* Classic Who fanvids, any Doctor/TARDIS team (music, no/minimal audio quotes preferred), especially out there on tumblr/YT -

thisbluespirit
* Twelfth Doctor h/c that's not on AO3 (any pairing or gen) -

ruuger
* Rose/Nine fic, any genre, anywhere - anon
* Jack/Esther fic (Torchwood) -

chamilet
* Babyfic and/or de-age fic, any era/any team -

romanajo123
* Fanworks in more unusual media (not Art, Fic, or Vids) -

lurking_latinist
* Gen fic featuring the Doctor's scarf any era -

liadt
* fic set after Planet of Giants that focus on the events of that story -

scifirenegade

Make your requests in the comments here to be added to the list. (Anon commenting is on.) If you make a rec that fills any of these requests, please add the "other: request" tag to your entry so it can be found easily.)

Any other questions? Ask here or at the Info & Guidelines post, or PM the mod.