Furosshu

(a few hours early bc I have a migraine and might not be around later)

Holiday Love Meme 2025 is officially open for comments, go spread some cheer. ♥ | directory | my thread

Haven't been around because my mom was in hospice care, and eventually died on March 19th. I'll keep not being around for an undetermined time, until I can make blogging make sense again. The only exception will be the annual holiday love meme, during which I am going to maintain the alphabetical list of participants, as is tradition. I hope to see you there.

I wish you strength and kindness and moments of rest. Given all the... *gestures at world* circumstances, I wish you were like an unkillable angry weed, like a deep-rooted reliable tree, or like a tiny ember holding out stubbornly for the hearth.

Being online is still too overwhelming, but physical letters (no parcels!) can be sent to:
Honigfrosch
Postfach 30 01 82 (attention, the spaces between the numbers are mandatory)
51411 Bergisch Gladbach
Germany
(If you need additional information, send me a DM, no problem.)

You can write about anything that's on your mind, be it good or bad or silly. We're all frogs in the same pond, and I'd like to hear from you (and write a letter back, naturally - I have a lot of pretty envelopes I'd like to use).

Obligatory exclamation of "How is it the end of 2024 already!"
The older I get, the quicker time flies, and together with my shitty memory it creates a sense of outside-of-time and the feeling that there's simply too much of it, a river of events rushing past and me being unable to catch up with whatever's happening.

Of course, my struggle with responding in a timely manner to pretty much anything isn't new, nor is my time-blindness. My life is more or less divided into "now" and "not-now", with future not-now being invisible until it hits me like a truck ("Why didn't you move?!," the despairing driver cries. "I've been honking at you for six months straight!!!") and past not-now being lost in an amorphous blob of vagueness. Yeah, I know this thing because someone person-shaped told me at some point but please don't ask for specifics. My legal transition was twenty years ago and five years ago and also always has been. I know you wanted me to do something, but I can't remember what and now I'm too afraid to ask.

I know this is a part of how my brain works (or fails to work, depending on how you want to look at it.) But there are many things that can mess with your perception of time and your memory and your sense of feeling anchored in reality. Depression. Constant stress. Medication. Accidents. Being gaslit. Sleep deficit. Drugs. An intense upheaval of the routine and order that you used to know. That fancy word everybody uses: Trauma.

What I'm trying to get at is, I'm hearing and reading certain joking remarks and memes a hell of a lot that weren't so ubiquitous years ago. Lol what even is time. I think I am in the wrong timeline, haha. I'm not even sure what matters anymore. Everything feels so unreal.

It does, sometimes. The mind doesn't quite know how to handle the situation you're in, or how to handle that the rest of the world doesn't seem to want to handle it in any meaningful way. So it creates unreality. This is happening. But what if: Not Happening???

Here we are, though. Happening. Being happened to. Some days you feel like a zombie, some days you feel that everybody else is the zombies. What we all have in common is the stumbling, lurching, and moaning. Perhaps the falling apart, too.

This is the first time in a long while that I don't really look forward to the new year. The first time that someone in my close family is pregnant and I can't make myself feel happy for them. The first time that it's difficult to find that ray of sunshine, much less say something encouraging to others. I have long debated whether I should go into detail, and decided against it, because the world is a giant ball of interconnected crises and predicaments - I wouldn't know when to stop talking, and probably bore you all with philosophical malaise as well. The short version: It is what it is, and it's fairly awful.

What I needed to learn this year was to sit with my feelings of helplessness, overwhelm, anger, grief. It's an ongoing process, and I'm not that great at it. There are times when, as the saying goes, all you can do is bear witness. But it's like trying to sit on a chair during an earthquake. Am I doing okay, or am I just dissociating? Some days I am okay, some days I am feeling happiness and gratitude. Then anger bubbles up, or despair comes rushing back, or simple tiredness engulfs me. Ups and downs. Like it has always been. It comes and goes.

It helps me to remember that life has never been fair. All through history, there has never been a time when everybody was happy, or healthy, or wise. I could go back through time and find people born hundreds of years before me, feeling the same anger, the same sadness, the same vulnerability. Often their grievances were my grievances, maybe not in specifics, but in kind. Which isn't to say that our current predicament regarding the climate wasn't unique; its speed and severity and global interconnectedness combine to turn it into a never-before-seen event.
It just helps with my perspective, is all. Makes it a little easier.

What I can say to you is that I'll do my best, just like you. It upsets me that I can't give all of you a hug when needed, that I can't cook a meal for you, help you out right where you are. Most of the time, we're just words on a screen to each other, and that sucks.

Then again: what a marvel that is, to have my words on my screen turn into my words on your screen, and receive your words in return. What a gift.

The times ahead will be rough, but we'll keep holding hands, won't we?

See you in 2025.

Notes: Some of these links aren't recent, but might still be useful. One link deals with politics explicitly as a helpful preparedness list, I have put it at the bottom of the list under a cut.

1. Dreamwidth Activities

🍄 Holiday Love Meme 2024 has officially opened, as per usual I maintain an index of participants A-Z (myself included)

🍄 holiday_wishes has received a lot of activity, you can still post your wishlists 🎁

🍄 wish_upon_a_meme is "a relaxed December gifting event modeled on prompt memes and the dearly departed LJ comm insmallpackages. Here you can request not just fanworks for your fandoms, but book and music recs, holiday greetings, personal anecdotes, pics of people's flowers/cats/holiday decor… whatever you can think of that could go in a comment". Unveiling & filling prompts starts Dec 1st, but prompts can still be posted all through December.

🍄 fandomtrees is a multifandom gifting fest, sign-ups close Dec 5th!

🍄 And if you're like, oh boy how do I even keep track of all these: apart from fandomcalendar, there's also whenisitdue keeping a running list of deadlines for different writing communities, icon challenges, and fests.

2. DW Tips and Inquiries

🍄 captaincassidy: DW Lingo? Kinks Memes? RP Groups?: "Is there a tutorial for Dreamwidth/LJ lingo? A breakdown of what a kink meme is, some etiquette re: RP groups, explanations of acronyms commonly used in said groups, etc.?"

🍄 vriddy: Dreamwidth etiquette question around linking!: "If I write an entry related to something I read in a LOCKED post in a semi-public comm, is it okay to include a link to the locked post?"

🍄 From 2022, but might contain stuff new to someone: theladyscribe's How to Dreamwidth: a linkspam

🍄 goss: Rekindling Community

3. Asking/Giving Recommendations

🍄 liriaen recommends the Netflix series "This World Can't Tear Me Down" (orig. Questo mondo non mi renderà cattivo, i.e. This world won't make me evil!)

🍄 hexmix posted recs for some favourites from this year's ShortBox Comics Fair. Difficult to choose just a few keywords but here you go: period horror with haunted paintings and cannibalism, mature fantasy about healing from trauma and displacement, q***r fantasy romance with a non-magical protagonist.

🍄 captaincassidy is asking for animanga recs where "q***r or POC characters ... aren’t treated like garbage by their authors, but aren’t uwu perfect babs" either.

🍄 sabotabby recommends the If Books Could Kill podcast episode about the non-fiction book "The Anxious Generation" and adds additional commentary.

4. Other Stuff

🍄 Blast from the past (2016): In the comm ladybusiness, litomnivore posted Ewan McGregor's Stupid Beautiful Face: A History of Han/Luke and Star Wars Slash

🍄 In little_details, prickly_vines asks for input regarding their fantasy story that features a society built with blindness in mind, and received lots of helpful comments.

🍄 fred_mouse: Litsy anyone?: "I've been poking around LibraryThing, and it has a 'link your account to Litsy' option, which I've just done. But I don't know what to do with Litsy, or whether it is just another social media time suck. - Anyone I know here there? Any drive by random people want to tell me about their Litsy self and why I should follow / engage?"

🍄 sewn needed Linux help with mounting a hard drive and found out that apparently the culprit was a Windows setting called 'fast boot'.

🍄 onlyknownothing: Escaping the Algorithm: FreeTube and Other "Tube" Varieties

( politics )

I'm impatiently waiting for gdgdbaby's annual Holiday Love Meme (and yes I'm going to provide the directory - it's gonna be the sixth year in a row ♥ I just love making lists ok).

There's also holiday_wishes opening soon; I don't even know what I'd ask for but I am excited about finding wishes on people's lists that I can fulfill.

And of course a new round of snowflake_challenge coming soon - not sure I have the will or energy to participate, but it's often interesting to read other people's replies.

Please keep in mind that I am living in a different time zone and can't keep an eye on the comments during all times. I trust you to be kind to each other, and to know the difference between airing your mental anguish versus calls for self-harm or violence. (Obviously I do not want the latter in this space.) The gist of this is, I want you to have a virtual living room where you can cry and grieve as much as you can rally or help each other carry on.

Scream into the Void: For anger, dread, ranting, the "how is this possible" despair. You're not alone. Let it all out.
If you want to vent but no interactions with others, use the "I need to scream in private" link listed at the bottom.

Carry the Torch: For encouragement, resistance, and resilience. Can range from the small things you can do to keep yourself sane, to helping out in your local community, up to activist and political resources. Also suitable to shine a light on the good things that have happened/are happening, regardless of the larger battle.
Please use a helpful/descriptive subject line.

I need hugs and kittens: For the cute, the compassionate, and the fluffy. Hug each other, and make each other smile. Make a request for emotional support, if you need it.
Thread can be image-heavy. Please use a helpful/descriptive subject line.

I need distractions: Want to talk about anything NOT politics? Know some free-to-play games that you can sink into, or a great website to get lost in? Want to squee about your latest fandom obsession? Post it here.
Please use a helpful/descriptive subject line.

I need to scream in private: Maybe you don't want interaction. Maybe you don't want to air your feelings publicly for fear of falling apart. Maybe you just need someone to listen.
All comments to that post will stay screened, only I can see them, and you will not receive a reply from me unless you specifically ask for one (e.g. "I could really use a hug").

(cross-posted to booknook as part of the October Review-a-Thon)


Not to take the wind out of my own sails, but I am starting this review with the backcover blurb in part because I have already forgotten the characters' names. Besides, we all know blurbs are often marketing lies, but as a horror fan, I find this instance particularly annoying. If you call Leeds "a powerful new voice in horror" and marvel at "how thoroughly [the debut novel] thrums with life", my suspicion is that you are also afraid of brewing your tea too strongly. Somehow, this year I read three (three!) horror novels that dealt with occult music, and all of them were disappointments.

So here's the official synopsis, followed by my thoughts on this book. (Minor spoilers, but you'll probably thank me for dodging this bullet anyway.)

( Read more... )

Been quiet lately, been thinking a lot. Due to... *gestures vaguely* the way it is what it is. But I'd like to start blogging again.

🐸 Let's begin with the negative: At the end of this year, I am going to retire the Tiny Movie Theater events. Due to the different time zones, and the occasional technical issue, it's difficult to have the kind of movie nights that it was intended to provide. Additionally, I am thinking about canceling my DVD subscription entirely. Two years, with 37 movies, is enough. You can check out the remaining movies on this list. Snow Cake and Galaxy Quest are scheduled for this weekend and I'll post the Discord invites tomorrow.

🐸 That being said, I always wanted to do a rewatch of Star Trek: The Next Generation. But the format will have to be slightly different and more community-oriented, which in turn necessitates more involvement on my part, and I'm still at the planning stage. I'll let you know when my idea comes to fruition.

🐸 I've been reading a lot, and enjoying that immensely, so expect more book reviews in the future. I've decided to sign up for the booknook October Review-a-Thon as well and am going to cross-post. A good deal will be horror, the rest is fantasy or non-fiction.

🐸 Speaking of horror, I am looking forward to posting curated links at tastefully_haunted (my horror blog that only updates during October).

🐸 Which reminds me that I have collected so many tabs that are supposed to go into a list. So many. There will be link spams in this journal again. And music newsletters. Replies to the question meme from ages ago (I don't care how long it takes me, I will answer them all.) And when the stars align just right, my chaotic messy brain could bang out some long-form text posts as well, which I'd really like to make happen somehow. I feel like my last thoughtful essay was years ago.

I'll make a cut here, before I start rambling. The short version is, it's good to be back and I want to make reading this journal fun again. ♥

I can't remember last night's dream, except for one thing: there was a movie, and the end credits contained the following "played by":

Sam Bagel — Brioche Brigantine

I felt like I needed to write that down for posterity.