merelydovely | Reading

Weather here's been interesting- a storm started Saturday afternoon and pretty much continued until late Sunday/early Monday and the temp plummeted. We'd had a few weeks of 30s and 40s and basically all the snow melted and stuff started to green up and then BAM 12-15" of the stuff followed by Monday being in the negatives. It was so fun shoveling then :( we've had another dusting since but then temps started climbing and it's supposed to be in the 70s on Saturday. Mother Nature is definitely having some fun with my area.

Tumblr has also been all over the place. It pushed through an update on the 16th that was *very* unpopular (radically altering how notifs of reblogs/adding comments work) and they first tried a 'we understand you have strong feeling about this but it is what it is' response about 9 hours later (their reply to their original post) but then early on the 17th they completely walked it back although it sounds like they're still thinking of implementing something?) But as a result it got me to take a dive into the stupidly high number tumblr posts I'd favorited with the intent to read/watch/research later when I had more time. Behold:

The 'Make 45 groups of 45!' sorting game, a great game for anyone who likes lists or sorting or desires to lose numerous hours of their day(s) in a fugue logic puzzle clicking state.

For those of you who use Firefox it recently rolled out an AI kill switch and here's an article about it and how to turn it off (basically, go to settings and look for AI controls in the sidebar, it should already be toggled to off but it's good to check)

Are normal looking links too boring for you? Try Creepy Link, the URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible.

A bunch of the posts were also things I wanted to check out to add to my resource posts so between what was there and links I was already behind in adding I'm going to probably be adding about 100 new links. Since it's so many, even though it's a little early I am also attempting a full click through for all the links to check to make sure they're still good. As requested, I'll also be adding a 'last updated' date to each post as I get to them.

And, as always, last but not least, 2 weeks of

recthething recs (tumblr art for Addams Family, Leverage, MDZS/Untamed, Merlin, Murderbot, and ST:TOS and a fic for MDZS/Untamed):

The Addams Family
- Addamses (absolutely gorgeous Gomez and Morticia)

Leverage
- the rundown job aka the episode that just kept on giving (gorgeous Parker, Hardison and Eliot)

MDZS/The Untamed
- same grumpy face, no matter how old he gets (baby and teen jin ling, so well done)

Merlin
- Merthur and a unicorn (love this)
- Arthur (gorgeous blue-tones digital art)
- once and future (love the framing of this with them on either side of excalibur and just their looks in general)

Murderbot
- A mini papercraft commission of Murderbot (I love these papercrafts and this Murderbot is great)

ST:TOS
- Best tos episode (Uhura and tribbles, hilarious!)

MDZS/Untamed fic:
Madam Gentian and the Fugitive by azure_enechelon (185k)
Summary: Wei Wuxian befriends a mysterious woman in a hidden corner of the Cloud Recesses. Lan Wangji has a mother to confide in. Madam Lan does her best to make up for a lot of bad parenting. It isn't going to change everything, but maybe it can change just enough. (Recently completed very long, but wonderfully detailed and interesting AU)

anais_pf posting in

thefridayfive

These questions were suggested by

melagan.

1. What was the reason you began a Dreamwidth or LiveJournal account (or both)?

2. How many DW or LJ communities do you subscribe to?

3. Do you have a favorite community or one you check out often to see what's new?

4. How did you pick your user name?

5. If you could change your user name, would you?

The following bonus questions are brought to you by the fact that I (anais_pf) have been unable to access any page of LiveJournal for more than a week (and therefore cannot post to The Friday Five there):

6. If you have a LiveJournal, are you currently able to access it?

7. Do you have any information about why one would be unable to access LiveJournal?

Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.

If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!

forestofglory

I’ve been sick for the last week or so which meant there was a lot of time to sit around reading but I didn’t have a lot of energy to write things up. But now I’m doing better so have a media roundup! (This isn’t everything I read while sick because some of it I didn’t have the energy to write up, and also I’ve been slowly reading Batman: No Man’s Land and if I write something about it, I’m going to do so after I finish the whole story. )

Kareem Between by Shifa Saltagi Safadi— For kiddo’s school book club. This is so not my kind of book and I wouldn’t have read it if the kiddo hadn’t insisted. I just find contemporary books with political themes really really stressful! So this book about a Syrian-American boy in 2016-2017 was really not my cup of tea. So I think it was doing ok at being the book it wanted to be, but that book is not for me. Also the whole book was in poetry, and I don't think that actually added much – but also I’m not really a poetry person.

Krypto: The Last Dog of Krypton by Ryan North and Mike Norton— Since I've been reading a lot of superhero stuff an algorithm showed me this, and it's got a cute dog and is written by Ryan North so I thought I'd check it out (What has Ryan North been up to since Squirrel Girl? Maybe I should find out. Maybe I should reread Squirrel Girl)* This was a bit darker than I was expecting! And did really feature the elements of North’s style that I remember enjoying alot (witty dialogue and certain wacky over the top-ness) Though still mostly a sweet story. (Content note: abusive training/animal harm, animal death, children in peril)

Lumberjanes: Bonus Tracks and Lumberjanes: Campfire Songs— These are single issue Lumberjanes stories by a bunch of different writers and artists. I enjoyed the variety! I think my favorite story was the one that had Last Unicorn vibes (Look I watched that movie a lot as a kid)

Lumberjanes: The Infernal Compass by Lilah Sturges, polterink, et al— Lumberjanes original graphic novel – this was honestly a little disappointing, I didn’t feel like it really captured the vibe of the original comic. It did not help that this was one of those graphic novels with a very limited color palette (black, white and green) and I really missed the colorfulness!

Lumberjanes: The Shape of Friendship by Lilah Sturges, polterink, et al— Another lumberjanes graphic novel – I liked this one a lot better. It probably helped that my expectations were lowered after the first one but I do think it was a better story overall as well.

The Ribbon Skirt: A Graphic Novell by Cameron Mukwa— A middle grade graphic novel about Anang, a two-spirit and nonbinary Anishinaabe kid, who wants to wear a ribbon skirt to an upcoming powwow. This is very sweet! There are talking turtle spirits! There’s also Anang’s friend who is uncomfortable with Anang’s identity and kinda transphobic about it as heads up

* after writing this I did look up what Ryan North has been up to, some library holds have been placed. Also I noticed that he has PDF’s of all of his academic papers available on his website and I think that’s very charming and helpful of him.

shipperslist

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rekishi

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glitteryv posting in

recthething

Every Thursday, we have a community post, just like this one, where you can drop a rec or five in the comments.

This works great if you only have one rec and don't want to make a whole post for it, or if you don't have a DW account, or if you're shy. ;)

(But don't forget: you can deffo make posts of your own seven days a week. ;D!)

So what cool other kinds of fanworks/fancrafts/fanart/fics/fanvids/podfics have we discovered this week? Drop it in the comments below. Anon comment is enabled.

BTW, AI fanworks are not eligible for reccing at recthething. If you aware that a fanwork is AI-generated, please do not rec it here.

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soc_puppet posting in

the_great_tumblr_purge

This is a reproduction of a post I already made on Tumblr, but with that platform's future once again uncertain, I figured it'd be good to copy over here, as well.

Together with figuring out what to even post, one of the things that sucks about moving social media and/or blogging platforms is not knowing if there will be enough activity for you at the new place. Be it from old friends, new friends, or interactive communities, there’s a lot of ways you could find activity at a new place, but finding at least two of those categories can be tricky in itself.

Luckily, Dreamwidth has a few shortcuts for you already!

Adding new people to your reading page and finding new friends:

addme: Straight up a place to find new “mutuals” on Dreamwidth, with no particular focus; a good place to start!

addme_fandom: Same as above, but with a specific fandom focus! Interested in a particular fandom right now and want more people to talk about it with? Here’s a good place to find fellow fans!

findingfriends: Similar to the addme communities but with a more in-depth approach, including things like posting style and what sort of interactions you’re looking for. Takes more brain power than the addme comms, but I imagine that the connections result in a higher level of compatibility.

Newcomers' Introduction and Friending Meme: A very in-depth adding meme, hosted by

newcomers! Includes a spot near the top for other platforms you're on, so it might be useful for finding Tumblr mutuals.

fandomcalendar: This is a community dedicated to announcing fandom events, which can include fandom-specific friending memes. (I’ll be linking this one again later, as well.)

Getting started on Dreamwidth:

newcomers: A community dedicated specifically to helping Dreamwdth newcomers find their way around on a new site! I believe it was launched around the time Cohost was being shut down, so a lot of the people there now are Cohost “refugees”, but it’s still a good place to start.

the_great_tumblr_purge: A community dedicated specifically to Tumblr refugees, started around the time of the new content restrictions in 2018. If you've got questions specific to being former Tumblr user, this might be a good place to ask them, though Newcomers is also happy to help.

dw_news: The official Dreamwidth news community. I highly recommend following this one and the next one, which will help you keep up with what’s going on around Dreamwidth. DW News typically only posts a few times a year, but maybe that’ll change if a bunch of new users come by...

dw_maintenance: Keep up with the mechanical goings-on at Dreamwidth! If there’s a planned site outage or if DW is updating code, you can find out more here; if there’s something funky going on at Dreamwidth but the site is generally still usable, it’s also a good place to check.

dw_advocacy: Want to know more about how Dreamwidth is fighting for our rights? Follow this community to keep tabs on what bad bills Dreamwidth and NetChoice are battling, and if there's anything you can do to help!

Things to do on Dreamwidth:

dw_community_promo: The official Dreamwidth community for promoting Dreamwidth communities! People will promote new communities here, as well as events going on in established communities. A good place to find out about new things in general.

followfriday: A place to share links to check out once a week. Did you find a cool community that you want more people to know about? Link it in the comments here! The host,

ysabetwordsmith, shares a themed post every week with posts, events, and communities related to said theme.

justcreate: A place where you can talk about things you’re working on. There’s a weekly check-in/reporting post, but sometimes people also organize body doubling sessions and other productivity-boosting things.

queerly_beloved: An anti-exclusionist queer space to get together and talk about all things queer, including intersectional matters. Hosts a weekly recommendations thread, but more and other content is very welcome!

allbingo: Do you like filling out bingo cards for just about anything? This community is for all things bingo cards, fandom related and otherwise! Put together a bingo card for making mood themes, post topics, or even bird watching (featuring your local feathered friends), and share your results!

Fandom things to do on Dreamwidth:

fandomcalendar: I linked this above, and I’m linking it again: Want to know about fandom events that are going on at Dreamwidth? This is a good place to do it! It’ll also fill up your reading page in a hurry; you might be surprised at how many events are going on at Dreamwidth, or are at least connected there!

fictional_fans: A community for all fans and fandoms. If you’ve got a post you want to make about fandom in general, or a specific fandom that doesn’t have its own community, this might be a good place to check out.

fandom_on_dw: Pretty much the same as above, honestly, but it’s good that there’s more than one place that hosts this kind of thing!

Anything else?

Search Interests: Individuals and communities can have lists of things they’re “interested in”. If more than one person has that thing listed, it may turn into a hyperlink that you can click to find other accounts with! You can also use the Search Interests function pretty much the same way. Simply type “cats” into the search bar, hit enter, and a bunch of accounts that have “cats” listed as an interest will pop up! Click through the various tabs at the top to separate accounts out into individual users, communities, and more.

The Latest Things Page: Literally the latest things posted publicly anywhere on Dreamwidth. There’s a list of commonly used tags at the top, if you want to narrow things down at all, but in the mean time, it can be pretty neat to see what J. Random Dreamwidth User just posted about! This is about the closest Dreamwidth gets to surfing random tags on Tumblr.

The Explore Tab: Useful links for Dreamwidth in general. In addition to linking to the Latest Things Page, it can take you to a random account, the FAQ page, and more! Worth checking out if you’re feeling lost.

Most Useful Communities list, as curated by

ysabetwordsmith; this has a lot of other options that I either didn't know about, or didn't feel like I had room to include; this post is already longer than I like to go without a cut tag or two 😅

The comments on this post: People in this community are pretty helpful, and that includes sharing their own suggestions in the comments! If you have something specific you're looking for, you might even ask for help here; who knows, we might just have a good lead for you!

And that’s all I can think of at the moment! This should help you get started at least, and help fill out your reading page a bit.

skygiants

Because Becky Mahoney and I know each other, I boosted a Bluesky giveaway for her upcoming vampire novel Thrall (coming out next month!) in the spirit of friendship and then was somewhat surprised to discover that I had in fact won the giveaway -- surprised but delighted, obviously, since I've loved all of her previous books even when they weren't LUCY CENTRIC DRACULA RIFFS!! focused around a COLLEGE PIRATE RADIO STATION!!!

The central character of Thrall is Lucy Easting, who has just transferred into beautiful, isolated, mountainside Rollins University from community college, in a bid to get away from her stressed and depressed mother and live a life she's excited about for a change.

Alas! her first college party results in a couple of neck puncture marks, a marked tendency to experience severe migraines in sunlight, and a tragic susceptibility to the ominous vampire voice in her head that occasionally takes over her consciousness and directs her towards uncharacteristic action.

Fortunately! the college is full of prospective allies who are willing to take a chance on Lucy despite her regrettable thrall situation, including but not limited to the host of the local college late-night radio show, who has been a target of the vampire since her sophomore year and has been using the airwaves to try and fight back; Lucy's RA, a determined young woman with very nice arms, who came to the school to investigate after a terrible fate befell her high school ex-boyfriend Jonathan; and the very nice, normal party host who has no previous vampire experience but feels just terrible about the whole situation and is not about to relinquish responsibility for sorting the situation out! it was her party!!

It's a really charming book on a number of levels, but my favorite thing about it as a Dracula riff specifically is how much it's thematically invested in Lucy as a side character -- the narrative is consistently very clear that the vampire is not particularly interested in Lucy; he's obsessed with Athena the radio show host and everything else he's doing is part of his elaborate cat-and-mouse game with her, including incidentally overturning Lucy's life as a by-the-by -- and how Lucy makes the book her own story anyway by sheer force of determination not to be cut out of it. Lucy's energy really drives the book: she wants to live, and she wants to live a life on her own terms, and she's not about to let one horrible encounter take that away from her.

Also, I think it's not a huge spoiler ( but I guess is technically a mild one: lesbians! )

lassarina

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soc_puppet posting in

the_great_tumblr_purge

Hello again! With Tumblr's latest brush with implosion, it seems the tutorial writing bug has bitten me again. Today, I'm finally going to talk about uploading and sharing images on Dreamwidth!

Dreamwidth has given all users a certain amount of image storage to use: Free users get 500 MB, Paid users get 1.5 GB, and Premium Paid users get 3 GB.

There's two ways to upload images directly to Dreamwidth.

The first option has a fair number of steps, but it's the one I know the most about and the one I'm best able to help with.

( Option One )

The second option is to post an image by email, which I have to admit I haven't tried myself yet.

For Option Two, the first thing you need to know here is that it's possible to post to Dreamwidth by email; IIRC, it was

silvercat17 who made the tutorial I used to get that set up, but I can't seem to locate it at the moment 😩 I'll edit this post to add in a link if that changes, though! In the mean time, you can check out Dreamwidth's official FAQ entries about how to get it set up over here. If you post an entry by email, you can attach an image as a file to the email, and it will automatically be uploaded to Dreamwidth and included in the post! It won't necessarily have any particular title or description included, though, so you may want to visit Manage Images to edit that.

And those are the basics of uploading images to Dreamwidth! Culturally, Dreamwidth users tend to either share larger images as a thumbnail, or to put them under a cut (Dreamwidth's "Read More"), but otherwise this should cover what you need to know.

But maybe I'm wrong about that! Feel free to ask any questions in the comments of this post, and I'll do my best to clear things up (and then edit the post to include the information). You can also check Dreamwidth's official Media FAQ and see if your question is answered there.

yourlibrarian

1) Curious events yesterday. A takeout place we order from every other month or so couldn't be reached. Its website was not working over a half hour period. I looked up their number and at least 3 other sites listed the same one. Called it and was told it was not a valid number. Since I wanted more oranges, I figured I'd stop by to see if the restaurant had closed down.

Nope. They seemed completely unconcerned the website was down, and told me I'd used the wrong number (also seeming completely unconcerned a wrong one is widely available!) But at least we are not down yet another restaurant.

2) Got many yummy oranges but this store sells them by count not by weight. So I picked all the largest oranges I could and I swear some of these are bigger than both fists.

3) Nesting time for ducks is great for all the adorable little fluffs we will be seeing soon. It is definitely not so when we have to keep watching drakes attacking the female ducks. This week there was one poor female attacked simultaneously and sequentially by 5 drakes. She was finally able to get out of the lake (I felt half sure she had drowned) and one followed her and kept attacking her on land, which was the first time I'd seen that happen.

4) Was watching Life of Chuck and can I say I am incredibly tired of the romantic convention of looking at stars together and (usually the man) pointing out the constellations to the person they are wooing. Come up with something else!

That said, it was a nice little film. ( Read more... )

5) Belatedly I was not impressed with the Oscars. I was glad there were only 2 of the nominated songs sung and that there was no opening number, but I also would have preferred to skip that whole pre-filmed Conan bit and just have a very strong monologue (which I didn't think it was). ( Read more... )

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rekishi

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yourlibrarian

1) Whoa, the changes at Tumblr have meant a flood of people signing up for accounts at Pillowfort. I just went through a feed four times longer than usual.

2) We've watched four episodes of Starfleet Academy and are both pleasantly surprised by it. I confess I haven't been very enthused by the new crop of shows. In fact my favorite season was one that it seems most viewers didn't care for, which was S1 of Discovery. ( Read more... )

3) Looks like it isn't just late night shows that are winding to a close but talk shows and entertainment news. I can see why podcasts would be far cheaper to make and competing with the audience, but I do wonder if most can put out episodes as consistently as is done with larger productions. (I note, for example, that Access Hollywood has four hosts).

4) Not being a reader of Outlander, I had no idea there was a separate Lord John Grey series. A spinoff based on the books sounds great, and you'd think with the success of Heated Rivalry (it was a Jeopardy question this week!) that the timing would be perfect. Granted, a period piece with a large cast would be significantly more expensive, but it also has a built in audience via its linked TV show and books.

5) Watched Zootopia 2 and enjoyed it. I particularly liked how they worked in references to favorite things from the first film without having it slow down or detract from the story in progress. For us this was wolves starting a howl, and the appearance of the sloth. There were lots of little in-jokes (such as the Hulu menu) and things moved along quite well, with fun new characters to meet.

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rekishi

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Dove | @merelydovely

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quick bright things

30. Dove. She/her. Cis bi woman blogging to you from the SF Bay Area.

Reading

Weather and whatnot

The Friday Five for 20 March 2026

Media Roundup: On the Mend (I hope)

Book Bingo 2026, bingo #1!

(no subject)

Community Recs Post!

Bucky Barnes | Aromantic Bucky Barnes presents: Aromantic Bucky Barnes Fest (2026)

Finding Friends and Things to Do on Dreamwidth

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What Are You Playing Wednesday

Uploading Images to Dreamwidth

Odds and Ends

[MULTIFANDOM] vampiremedia's April Drabblethon!

Ilya and Shane and what shaped them as players

Reading Wednesday 2026, #11

Haikyuu: Miyacest Spring Break Week

Things to Like

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Multifandom: Seasons of Fandom S02 - Sign ups open!

The Unbalancing by R.B. Lemberg

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January 2023

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