galadhir

I've just subscribed to



which looks very gentle and possibly like something I might be able to keep up with even if it takes me more than the requisite month.

Speaking of snowflakes, it has been below freezing here for the past four days, and I have been contending with the fact that I have no pairs of winter trousers that do not require a tight belt to keep them up.

Normally this wouldn't be a problem, but this summer I discovered that I had a sliding hernia (where there's a hole in your diaphragm and sometimes your stomach gets pushed up to bulge through the hole, stomach acid and all.) One of the big culprits in this is being tightly cinched in around the waist. So I changed into wearing dresses and promptly forgot about the winter.

Winter arrives, I dig out my winter trousers and wear them for a while, only to find that I'm suffering from heartburn/fatigue and pain in the chest. It finally dawns on me last week that this is the result of going back to being strangled around the waist. So I dig out my one pair of dungarees, and then it gets really cold.

What to do? It's nearly Christmas and if I order another pair on line they might not arrive for a fortnight. Plus they're £60 a pair! And they're not even that warm.

Time to bring out the sewing machine! I cycled to the local fabric shop and examined their selection. Brushed cotton looked warm but almost certainly wouldn't be. I couldn't afford wool, and it would be scratchy anyway. The fleece was all primary colours, camouflage pattern or ladybird print.

Hm, it was time to adhere to the spirit of "When I am old, I will wear purple," and throw social convention out of the window. So I bought the ladybird print fleece and made myself an emergency pair of warm dungarees.



They came in very handy when my family and I went out to do the Wimpole Christmas Lights trail last night. With ski boots and a ski coat, I was perfectly warm and my legs were toasty out in the snow for three hours.

We had pizza and hot chocolate from a food van, then did half the walk, past the tree halos and fire garden. In the middle there were braziers set up and marshmallows for sale for toasting - I had a chocolate one :) Then through the lazers and the fields of shining white roses to the end of the trail, where there was a helter-skelter and a carousel.

It was a really lovely evening. The ladybird print dungarees received a mixed reception. One lady told me what a good idea it was to have come in my pajamas, but a chance-met friend was like "Ooh, I love your dungarees, where did you get them?" And I will take my friends' opinions over strangers any day :)

Getting lured back to Tumblr by all the Untamed content over there. Mostly going through the blogs of Jin Guangyao stans and reblogging everything - basically being irritating to two websites at once. But this time I'm going to post about it here, so I don't just end up fading out again.

The Untamed/MDZS fandom must be the largest I've ever been in, and that includes the Tolkien fandom, and it is absolutely bursting with really great fic. Quite a lot of which is even Jin Guangyao centric. Of course I've done my usual thing of gravitating to a widely controversial character rather than nestling happily in the main pairing, which cuts down my reading choices somewhat. But I don't think I could ever be content shipping a pairing for which the canon had already come through. What is left for the fan writer to fix in those cases? Much harder to give JGY a happy ending, especially if you also want everyone else (except Jin Guangshan, he can die) to live and be happy too. But that's what makes it fun.

I'm currently in the middle of podficcing Shiome's Last of our kind, for which I can just about manage to produce a chapter a week. There are 14 chapters and I've done 8. So that should be finished in February. After which, I'm in a quandary as to whether I podfic Derillarch's Peony to Lotus series, or whether I attempt to finish the story I started writing months and months ago.

(That's 'The Will of Heaven', in which JGY comes back to life the same way WWX did, and must attempt to become Lan Furen while fooling the rest of the cultivation world that he is someone else entirely, or else deal with the consequences.)

There is so much good fic out there that it doesn't seem like the fandom needs mine. But there are not very many JGY centric podfics, so I do almost feel like I can make a bigger difference by podficcing than by writing, atm.

Chapter 6

Meng Yao frowns, his brain clattering to a halt. “You think my arm is haunted?” 

CWs: non-descriptive medical procedures... and an exorcism! :)

Notes:

I must have been very tired when I recorded this one because I had to edit out a full quarter of it where I was audibly breathing, yawning or coughing. When I complained as much to the folks on Mastodon bluedreaming@fandom.ink sent me a meme saying "Get rid of the breaths! We can't let people know we breathe!" Which is now my new motto

Bane of my life this week - the word 'zither.'



Chapter 6 is up here

Went to see wakanda forever tonight. Can't hear you over my new found love for Namor.

Painted the seed library box and half painted the 'Roots and Shoots' shop frontage today, and I'm not very satisfied with either of them. Painting something shaped, where the wood grain texture is uneven and the paint coverage is also uneven, is a lot harder than doing the smooth plastic bins. The paint had a tendency to flow along the lines of the wood grain, which meant I kept having to expand the letters to cover all the runs.

Also I mistook the line I'd written to mark where the space went, for the line I'd written to mark where the end of the second 'E' went. Resulting in one E being bigger than the other. I've slightly stretched the first E to try to make it less obvious. But it's not ideal, and the S is just plain ugly.

The script I chose for 'library' is also slightly less than legible. So basically it's a learning experience all around!

The main problem with the shop sign is that I've painted one of the S's wider than all the other letters. I have a plan for rescuing that (which involved painting over it with the background colour.) But the seed library will have to be resigned to being rustic.

Eh, it's only going to go in the local (defunct) post box to be a seed library for the neighbourhood, and the one it's replacing is a plastic tub that used to contain birdseed, so the standards are not high, and it will be good enough for the purpose for which it is intended.

Sigh. I know it's going to take at least a year of practice, and that it's important to practice on lots of different types of things, and that I've learned quite a lot by doing this badly which will lead to me doing it better later, but I want to be good *right now*

Ugh, been feeling steadily more and more fatigued for a couple of weeks now - got blood taken yesterday and sent off for tests. I hope the tests turn up something because today I'm finding it difficult just to sit and draw, and standing is a five-minute affair or less.

Last time I felt like this is was anemia. My fingers are crossed that it turns out to be anemia again, because that's just a case of going back on the (doctor prescribed massive doses of) folate, and then in two weeks I should be getting better.

If it's not that, then who knows?

On the plus side, I've finished recording another chapter of Last Of Their Kind, which I will get edited before Friday.

I've also made the pattern for my mini shop-fascia, which is the project for module 7 of the signwriting course. I'm supposed to be transferring the design onto some kind of aluminium fascia board, ut I don't know where to get any, and it's a bit expensive to be buying serious hardware just to practice my sub par skills on. Maybe I could get some plywood instead - when it was painted it would look the same

I've heard that some people are joining DW and then finding it really difficult to figure out how to find content that they want to see when DW doesn't have an algorithm to suggest things to you. So I thought I'd share my methods of finding content that I want to see.

This is more work than letting an algorithm do things for you, but it also means that you only get exactly what you want, and you get the opportunity to talk to people and make connections that you wouldn't do if you were only pressing a 'like' button.

So, you've turned up on DW and made an account. Now what do you do?

1. Establish you're a person
First of all, upload at least one icon and make a couple of posts of your own. This will establish you as a real person, so that when you start following people, they will be more inclined to allow you access and to follow you back.

It's probably a good idea to make one of those posts an explanation that you're newly arrived and you're going to be following a lot of people. That way if people whom you've just followed go to your journal to check you out, they'll know why you've started following them out of the blue.

2. Choose some interests
In your profile, there is a space to list your interests. List everything you can think of that you would be interested to read about or talk about. If you're fannish, this will be easy - list every fandom you're interested in, every pairing etc. If you're not fannish then list hobbies, interests and things you want to talk about, whether it's knitting or gardening or politics etc.

3. Use your interests to find people to follow
Once you save your interests, you'll see that every interest which is shared by someone else on the site has become a link.

Click on your first interest, and you'll be taken to a list of people who share that interest. Follow anyone who's been active in the last year.

Now see if there are any communities listed who share that interest. Join any communities which have been active in the last year.

Repeat for the next interest, and the next, until you've followed all the people and joined all the communities which list your interest.

4. Use your communities to find people to follow
The communities you belong to will be full of people who share your interests, but who may not have put them in their bio. Now you can go through the posts in each community and follow people who have made interesting posts or comments in the community.

By this time your reading page should have quite a lot of posts on it. Now you need to start commenting on people's posts. If you haven't made an introduction post, then comment on something that each person you followed has said and say hello that way. If you have made an introduction post just start commenting on things that interest you, and people will usually be happy to chat back.

At this stage you might feel that you're fine and you have enough connections and enough to read. If so, that's great - read your reading list, comment on other people's posts, make posts of your own, and people will comment on them. Soon you'll feel settled in a nice community of people you know who are talking about things you like.

5. Use the people you follow to find people to follow
If your reading list is still sparse after going through the steps above, then you can use the people you follow to help you locate more people to follow.

Go to the profiles of people you follow. There will be a list of the people they follow. If you follow interesting people, the chances are that they follow interesting people too. Check out the people your friends follow and follow them too.

EDITED to add this great list of links with lots of tips on how to feel at home on DW by theladyscribe How to Dreamwidth: a linkspam

That's all I know! Anyone else got other hints?

Woohoo! Successfully renamed my journal Galadhir, which is what I used to be called on Livejournal, back when I was writing Tolkien fanfic. I really am returning to my roots :)

(Wulfwaru was a good name, but had no fandom history behind it. Galadhir, otoh, people might actually remember.)

I owe people replies, I know! But it's been a long and hectic day so I will get round to it tomorrow, sorry :)

I'm definitely still not following enough people. My reading page is still not long enough to keep me off Tumblr. So far I've mostly followed people I know or people I found by clicking through my interests. Now I'm going to have to scrape friends' subscription lists.

This is where an algorithm would be welcome (I'm joking!)

I hate this squirrely argument that Tolkien was writing his world as a mythology for England and that therefore you're somehow doing it wrong if you include people of colour.

There are people of colour who are English, and who therefore deserve to see themselves in any English mythology
There were people of colour in England from Roman times onward
The first people to have settled in the land that came to be known of as England looked like this:



Cheddar man (so called because his 10,000 year old bones were found in a cave in the Cheddar gorge. His DNA was decoded and carried the markers of dark skin and blue eyes - click on the link to get the full details. Some of his descendants have been found still living there, btw.)

Middle-earth is set before that, so honestly, it's the people who are claiming that everyone in the series is white who have to explain why.

Fic: Life Sentence
Chapter 3
Fandom: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Pairing: Armitage Hux & Poe Dameron (kind of pre-slash, kind of just emotional entanglement)
Rating: PG
Follows on from my From the Ashes

In which Hux's effect on prison life becomes visible even from the outside. And it begins to become clear that Poe is not well.

( Read more... )

Let's see if I can remember how to do a header
Fandom: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Pairing: Armitage Hux & Poe Dameron (kind of pre-slash, kind of just emotional entanglement)
Rating: PG
Follows on from my From the Ashes
Poe visits Hux in prison to see how he's doing. He is doing almost exactly as you might expect.

~*~*~*~
( Read more... )

Naively thought there could not be the usual wank in the Dark Crystal fandom over villain stans, because none of the characters are human. But no, apparently you can be racist for liking the villains even when the villains are four armed non-binary lizard-birds which contain only half a soul, because their original forms were split in two and they and their other halves were turned into two entirely different species.

I mean… in itself, that’s a pretty fascinating concept that it doesn’t surprise me that multiple people want to explore. And then the Skeksis are ridiculously over-dramatic and petty and sneaky among themselves - which makes them a lot of fun.

Plus, their not being even vaguely human-shaped means you don’t get the slightly uncanny-valley effect that you get with the Gelfling. It’s much more apparent that the Gelfling characters are played by puppets than it is with the Skeksis (and Mystics), precisely because the Gelfling are more human-like and it’s easy to see where the shape of them is not moving naturally.

IDK, this is actually one franchise where I don’t like the villains best, (although I do have a soft spot for SkekSil the Chancellor.) My favourite character is still a Skesis, though–SkekGra the Heretic.

Who I like because they’re nonbinary, and over-dramatic in that bird-puffing-itself-up-against-a-threat way, and so very not human, and has learned to love the other side of themself, and is creative and funny and ott and has learned to do good, despite being a carnivorous raptor for whom good doesn’t come naturally, and is in a loving relationship (albeit with itself) and is still trying - even though they got a nail through their head for it - to do what’s best for the world.

They are the cantankerous, old, reclusive, enthusiastic Zuko of Thra, and I don’t see why it’s worse to like them than it is to like, say, Deet (who is my favourite Gelfling.)

Actually really enjoying watching The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance. It took me a while to get over the fact that they were all puppets, but now I am really enjoying the imagination of the whole thing. The Skeksis are immensely entertaining, and the Chancellor in particular is my favourite.

(Though I also love The Heretic. It's nice to see a good Skeksis and to see that they don't get any less over-the-top dramatic even when they're on the good side.)

Watched Peter Rabbit 2, which was funny and charming. I'm vaguely wishing for Thomas McGregor/David Basil-Jones fic, or even Bea/Thomas/David OT3 fic. I'm pretty sure I won't get it, so I might have to write it myself.

Read Witness for the Dead and am now on my first re-read. It's good, but it's not hitting my emotional issues the same way as The Goblin Emperor did.

Today I feel as though I’m making some sort of progress on the ‘novice gardener attempts to plant food forest’ front.

This morning I went out and picked myself a pot of tea. I took a few flowering heads of lavender, two peppermint leaves and two lemon-balm leaves, put them in one of those individual tea-pots that comes with a cup and had three cups of tea out of it. Very fragrant and lovely it was too!


It hadn’t occurred to me that I could grow my own tea before reading Martin Crawford’s Creating a Forest Garden about a month ago. But I had space for more plants, so as soon as I did, I ordered a chocolate mint and an anise hyssop plant. And on Monday I was in town at the bulk buy shop and discovered a very bedraggled, unhappy lemon balm plant in their ‘please take these away because they’re dying’ bin, so I brought that home in my bike pannier too.

The lavender and the peppermint were already in place.

Having tried for a couple of days now, I discover that there is something very special about being able to start the day by picking your own tea blend from the garden. It’s a revelation almost on a par with how much difference fresh herbs make to the taste of your cooking. They give much more satisfaction and pleasure than it seems like they ought to.

Other successes–there are slugs in the slug trap. The little bastards have been chomping their way through three quarters of the tender baby plants I put in. I fully intend to let thrushes and toads deal with them later on when things are established, but for now I have neither of those things, so drowning in beer it is.

I had a bit of a paradigm shifting moment as regards the lawn this time last month. I had very much been of the 'lawns are a waste of space’ persuasion previously. But we have one. We may not always have one, but while we have one, it finally occurred to me to treat it as an area of soil covered with a ground covering plant.

Namely–not as a waste of space, but as an area of soil that also needed its soil carbon levels building up via nurturing and encouraging the soil lifeforms.

So, two weeks ago, I raised the cutting height on the lawnmower to 6.5 cm and put on it one of those plug in things that cuts up the grass cuttings and scatters them on the lawn behind you. I’m no longer removing the nutrients from the soil by taking the cuttings away to go in the compost bin–I’m letting them accumulate and feed the soil.

I also scattered some chicken manure over the whole garden, and watered it in with some powdered mycorrhizal fungi in solution. If I’m improving the soil, it doesn’t really matter so much what’s growing on top of it, right? It’s still drawing down carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen like a tree.

And I’ve got to say, two weeks and two cuts later it’s noticeably thicker and lusher. It’s still full of wild flowers and weeds, of course, but that’s a bonus imo–I have a prairie.

I also have clouds, absolute effing hoards of hoverflies, bumblebees and ladybirds. I like to think it’s a sign that the biodiversity is improving. As is the fact that there’s a frog in the pond, and that five of the golden-rod sticks, two of the skirret sticks, and one of the perennial kale sticks seem to have taken and sprouted.

The cycle path is absolutely radiant with wild flowers atm. So much better than the old days when the council mowed the verges until they looked like lawns.

The photo is not really great, but there's the yellow flowers who's name I don't know, and white dead-nettle, and white cow parsley, and red poppies and purple teasles and purple thistles. Earlier in the season there was purple dead-nettle and blue bugle and orange fox-and-cubs. Hard to believe we ever thought it was a good idea to cut it all down because lawn was neater.

Ugh, I'm going to stop weeding the garden. Or at least, I'm going to make sure what the weeds are before I pull them up.

I pulled a plant out from underneath the comfrey this morning, thinking "Well, you are definitely not something I planted!" And then I thought, "let's check to see what it is." So I turned my plant identifying app on it. Lo and behold, it was Wood Avens, aka Herb Bennet, which I have been trying to grow from seed for two years without success.

Wood Avens, aka Herb Bennet, aka Cloveroot has edible leaves and a root that smells like cloves, which can be dried and used to keep the moths off your clothes - while also giving them a spicy scent. And we have such a problem with moths!

I fished it out of the compost bin and replanted it asap.

I'm really beginning to think that there is no such thing as a useless plant. And if it has uses, why would I not want it in the garden?

Admittedly, this is from the perspective of someone whose garden has a lot of bare soil that I need covering asap. I may feel different when the Wood Avens is fighting with the strawberries for dominance. At that point it may need to watch itself. But rn I'm definitely going to check everything before I run rampant with the hoe.

This is year #2 of my garden - the second year since I tore up all the ivy and weed suppressant membrane and scraped up the weedy shingle to start putting plants in the soil.

Last year - year #1 of the garden with the new plants - I had such a slug problem. OMG, the damn things were everywhere. I couldn't grow anything except naturally slug-resistant plants like onions and garlic. If salad plants went in the soil they were devoured whole overnight.

I had heard that this is how it normally goes - the pests arrive first, and for a period you have unrestrained pest problems until eventually the huge amounts of pests start to attract the creatures who feed on the pests. At which point the system starts balancing itself out.

I didn't really believe this would happen (any more than I really believe that my weight will eventually stabilize if I let it do it's own thing,) but this year, year #2, it does in fact seem to be the case that my salad plants are thriving, and even the lupins, which are notoriously vulnerable to slugs, are surviving.

So it seems to be true. If you let the system look after itself, it will eventually balance into something sustainable. Good news!

I still think I'm losing my wasabi, though that's mainly because I planted it down slug corridor - the part of the garden closest to where they breed in the compost bin. I thought they might not like wasabi, on the grounds that they don't like garlic, but no, it seems they enjoy a bit of spice.

Speaking of spice, one of the hostas the slugs ravaged last year has come back, right in the middle of a sprawl of mint. It's the only hosta that has. I wonder if the mint is protecting it. I might try planting some mint around the wasabi and see if that keeps them off.

Time for some new spring time masks!



Probably not the fabric I'd have chosen for myself, but rather than let anyone inside the shop to browse the fabric choices for themselves, the fabric shop has put a table in the doorway to stop you coming in. You have to ask the assistant to choose the fabric for you. I asked for spring material and she came back with a selection of four rolls of which I quite liked these two.

I know they have many much nicer choices which I could have found if I'd insisted on her going back and trying again, but these weren't so terrible that I felt like sending her traipsing back and forth to find something better.

It's very odd to roll up at the haberdashery shop and place an order at the window for two fat quarters of spring material, a metre of black felt and a metre of velcro, but it makes a lot of sense and keeps everyone safer, so I'm all for it.

I've had the first salad of the year out of the garden 😀 The tomatoes aren't ours yet, but all the green stuff is. These are all from perennial plants, so I didn't have to plant anything new this year, but I did have to wait until the plants were growing again--the sweet cicely and wild garlic only recently re-emerged from underground, and everything else was focussed on just hanging on through the winter until it began to leaf out again this month.

In this bowl, wild garlic, perennial onion leaves, wasabi leaves, sweet cicely, perennial kale, wild rocket, sorrel, fennel, salad burnet, chard, mint and marjoram.

No more plastic wrapped salads that go off before you're half way through them!

Last year we stopped harvesting salad stuff at the end of November, but I only have one of each type of plant at present, so I bet I can close that gap a bit as I add this year's crop of seedlings.

Having thoughts about how restoring ground is all about encouraging it to do the things it was going to do naturally if it had only been left alone. About how the earth's ecosystems are complex interconnected systems that exist in a beneficial equilibrium and can self-correct in order to stay healthy... IF they are not pushed too far out of kilter by unwise forceful intervention.

Then thinking about how the same is probably true of the human body. Also a self-correcting ecosystem of many interconnected systems.

Maybe the human body evolved to keep itself at a weight that was healthy for it. Maybe it's the human intervention of unwise forceful starving to try to bend it into a form that we like, for arbitrary reasons, that throws the whole system out of kilter.

Maybe if we just trusted the hugely complex system that we are to know what to do, things would be better with us?

Idk, but the parallels feel relevant to me as I'm currently trying to learn to eat intuitively after a lifetime of dieting. I've tried to control my body so long I have no idea what it would be like if it was allowed to do its own thing. But maybe... maybe it would pleasantly surprise me? I hope so. Watch this space.

Oooh, God. I fully intended to blog about my garden but my knee hurts SO MUCH I don't think I can even sit up any more.