Just one thing: 23 February 2026
Feb. 22nd, 2026 09:44 pmComment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished!
Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.
Go!
The Jewish War: Second half of Book 1
Feb. 22nd, 2026 07:06 pmThis week: More Herod! Definitely went quite a bit faster than last week! Featuring lots and lots of family drama... the kind that includes a ton of bloodshed. I'll talk more about it in comments.
Next week:
got another one lads ~
Feb. 22nd, 2026 05:34 pmof all types of art mediums/projects, it's probably the one i'm surprised to have gotten the most sustained emotional satisfaction from, despite the outsized effort involved.
~Children in the factory??? But this isn't all my other factories!
Feb. 22nd, 2026 01:51 pmIn stars-aligning type news, I've been doing a lot of good work on the next Vargas chapter! It was the Vargas anniversary like a week ago, which is one I constantly forget even though I usually try to keep track of this stuff. I had this really old meme I started in Flash ages ago I'd just found again, so I figured finishing that up would be something. So I did! I'd matched it to the source video so it's at a WAY higher framerate than usual, so Scri's little breakdance looks surprisingly smooth. It's also on Youtube if the Flash version isn't working for some reason. It should though, I have Ruffle set up so you can get the full experience! I used Swivel to convert it for Youtube which was so much easier than some other things I've had to do to get Flash videos into a workable format. I love the UI of Swivel, it's so dramatic and colorful and unique. I'm sick of the current minimalism trend in programs! Give me more elaborate UIs!
Oh right, Vargas chapter! Anyway, did a lot of good work the past few days smoothing out a lot of more tangled or awkward bits that had been bugging me for a while. I'm going to cut the chapter in half I think and just focus on getting this first part done and out. It's still like 20k so it's lengthy but it's more managable and it's at a good breaking point. It's been almost five years since the last update which is way too long lol. If I hadn't hurt my arm I'd be more on schedule! Or so I tell myself, anyway. I'd like to get it done before May... I'm mostly doing small adjustments with each pass now. I need to email my beta and see if she's still up for taking a look at it... god, 23 years, can you believe it? It's crazy to have characters 23 years old that still show up with some regularity that I still think about and write stuff for, haha. Even if there are long gaps, they're always going to be there. The number doesn't feel real to me at all. |D I wonder how many readers are younger than the fic itself at this point...?
It's still crazy to me how invested people get in the fic since it's so bizarre and long and complicated. It's so hard to pitch to people! And yet it seems to snag people and draw them in...
lj post
Gaming Questions
Feb. 22nd, 2026 11:35 am(2) What’s your favorite urban legend about a secret area in a game?
(3) Do you play any collectible card games?
( Read more... )
Hard Hat Mack (1983)
Feb. 22nd, 2026 09:54 am
But you don't need to me to tell you the illustrious history of EA (or, as it was briefly called at its inception, "Amazin' Software"—and I can't tell you how disappointed I am that we don't live in the timeline where they kept that name). I guess you also don't technically need me to tell you about this ridiculous game and my memories of playing it while being unable to identify most of the characters and objects it contains, but I'm going to go ahead anyway.
In Hard Hat Mack you play as a construction worker. I did understand that much. In the first level you have to collect pieces of a beam and use them to fill in the gaps, and then grab a wandering jackhammer to hammer them into place. ( This is where my understanding of the game began to break down; I thought the jackhammer was a tornado. )
Hard Hat Mack is... well, it sure is a game. You can find it on abandonware sites, but I couldn't really get it to run well on any version or emulator I tried. The DOS version (which I had as a kid) runs too fast in DOSBox by default, but when I reduced the clock speed I found that it lagged badly when multiple objects were moving, which made the second level pretty much unplayable. We probably shouldn't hold our breaths for EA to offer a re-release, and maybe that's for the best.
Projects and Bunnies
Feb. 21st, 2026 10:05 pmRandom Plot Bunnies in Progress
~ Fulcrum and Rex time travel to before Anakin runs to Mace. - NEEDS CANON REVIEW
~ Sequel to Retrieval - 93 WORDS
~ An Atin universe that is more like The Second Clone War or Mine, All of Them - 3 chapters written, each about 1k words
Potential Bunnies Pending Further Bouncing
~ Rachel and Joe meet with BOTH finally aware in Closing Up Shop
~ Drizzt's fallout/Vierna's reactions in the Divining Destiny universe
Finished
nothing
Just one thing: 22 February 2026
Feb. 21st, 2026 09:53 pmComment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished!
Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.
Go!
Recent Reading: Our Share of Night
Feb. 21st, 2026 05:51 pmThe book begins with Juan, a powerful but ill man who acts as a "medium" for the cult to commune with its dark god. Juan, struggling with the health of his defective heart, the wear-and-tear of years as the medium, and the grief and rage of his wife's recent death (he suspects, at the orders of the cult he serves) is desperate to keep his son Gaspar from stepping into his shoes, as the cult wants. Juan's opening segment of the book is about his efforts to protect Gaspar.
From there, the book branches off into other perspectives which give background to both the cult and the family. This is a great way of giving us a holistic and generational view of the cult, but it does drag occasionally. Gaspar's sections--in his childhood and then later in his teens/young adulthood--together make up the majority of the book, and while enjoyable, do amble off into great detail about his and his friends' day-to-day lives, such that I did wonder sometimes when we were getting back to the plot. I don't like to cite pacing issues, because I think that gets thrown around a lot whenever someone didn't vibe with a book, but the drawn-out length of these quotidian sections doesn't fit well with how quickly the climax of the book passes and is wrapped up. I would have liked to have spent less time with Gaspar at soccer games and more on his plans for addressing the cult.
However, on the whole, the book is a fun, if very dark read. It also serves well as a critique of Argentina's moneyed class and of colonialism in general, and how money sticks with money even across borders. Here, Argentina's wealthy have more in common with English money than with the Argentine lower classes (and that's how they want it). The cult, populated at its upper echelons by the privileged, is an almost literal blight on the land, willing to sacrifice an endless amount of blood, local and otherwise, to beg power off a hungry and unknown supernatural entity.
It brutalizes its mediums, which it often plucks from poverty to wring for power and then discard. Juan was adopted away from his own poor family at six, under the insistence his parents would not be able to pay for the medical care he needed, and he is the least-abused of the cult's line of mediums. As soon as the cult sets their eye on his son, Juan must begin scheming how to keep Gaspar away from them.
Although he acts out of love of his son, Juan is also a deeply flawed person. He is secretive, moody, lies constantly (there is actual gaslighting here) and doesn't hesitate to knock Gaspar around to make him obey. The more he deteriorates--a common problem with all cult mediums--the less human he becomes. Part of this is his work, but much of it is also attributable to years of being used by the cult for its ends and the accumulated emotional trauma. This, of course, is then inflicted on Gaspar through his father's tempers and secrets.
Similarly flawed are the other members of the immediate family. Juan's wife Rosario, despite a better nature than her parents, still supports this cult and is eager for Gaspar to follow in his father's footsteps as a cult medium, in part for the prestige it will bring her as his mother. Gaspar, although far more empathetic and gentle than either of his parents, eventually grows up with his father's temper. Watching him grow from a sweet-natured little boy into the troubled young adult he becomes after years of his father's abuse and neglect is painful, but realistic.
The book is also unexpectedly queer. It's not often a book surprises me with its queerness, because that's usually what landed it on my radar in the first place, but this one did. Juan and Rosario are both bisexual and later in the book we spend some active time in Argentina's queer scene, including during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.
The translation was great! It read very naturally, even the dialogue, and it never felt stilted or awkward in its phrasing.
An ambitious novel that for the most part, pulls off what it's trying to do. As mentioned, I wish the ending had gotten more room to breathe, and I would not have minded this coming at the cost of some of the middle bits of navel-gazing, but I still felt the story was satisfying.
Creators Revealed!
Feb. 21st, 2026 08:00 pmThank you to everyone for participating this year, and a special thanks to our pinch hitters, who made it possible for the collection to open on time! I hope everyone had a happy Valentine's Day.
Recruitment post!
Feb. 21st, 2026 04:58 pmNow recruiting: DW users who would be interested in the possibility of helping us out in one of these legal challenges, now or future!
If you would be open to the idea of potentially filing something with a court talking about the ways that the restrictions that Dreamwidth would have to impose to comply with a specific state's law (commonly, obligations like age verification via document scan or biometric verification, treating users as though they're underage until/unless they age-verify, etc) would have a chilling effect on your online activity and speech, and especially if you're a parent who would also be willing to explain to a court all the ways in which a specific state's law would interfere with or burden your parenting decisions: we're looking to assemble a list of people we can contact in the future if necessary.
If this sounds like you, please leave a comment with what state you currently live in. (Also, commenting is not a commitment, just you saying that you would be okay with us reaching out to you and seeing whether you were available/able to help.) I'm currently most interested in hearing from people from South Carolina, but the ubiquity of these laws being proposed means any state could be the next. All comments are screened so nobody but us can see them.
(Obligatory risk considerations: you would have to file under your wallet/government name, and there's a chance of having to associate your wallet name with your DW username to at least the court and to the state, if not publicly. If this could be a problem for you, don't risk it! But if you're willing and able, us being able to show the court a sworn statement from one of our users about the effects the mandated changes would have on you could be very helpful.)
EDIT: Also I forgot to explicitly specify, this is for US folks! We do not unfortunately have the ability to get involved with anything outside the US.
Just One Thing (21 February 2026)
Feb. 21st, 2026 12:32 pmComment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.
Go!
2026 Writing Log, Part Eight
Feb. 21st, 2026 06:36 amThe theme of this week was executive function disorder. I tried every trick in my ADHD arsenal to overcome it, but alas. The only thing that will fix me is the end of this horrible winter.
New musical crush?
Feb. 21st, 2026 09:48 pmFor once I'm not metalposting, either! Well, okay, it's sort of metal-adjacent; Melissa Bonny was a metal vocalist, but has just launched her solo career with a tracklist that's more pop/rock than anything else, albeit with a lovely dark twist. Here's the first song off the album, which is also my very favourite:
My motor cortex learning to play Dark Souls
Feb. 21st, 2026 09:07 am(Except that these guys mastered jumping WAY faster than I did.)
It's hilarious and delightful to me to watch people having an experience of Dark Souls which is not wholly unlike mine. In a weird way I feel kind of #represented.
In later vids, they have (like me) discovered the joys of the halberd as adaptive technology for people who are bad at spacing and aiming.
RFE is live and this is MINE
Feb. 21st, 2026 12:32 amChapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Guinan/Ro Laren
Characters: Ro Laren, Guinan (Star Trek)
Additional Tags: Getting Together, Ten Forward (Star Trek), Jealousy, mentions of guinan flirting with an original female character
Summary:
Guinan is usually the one offering Ro advice, but when Ro decides to give Guinan some advice for a change, things don’t exactly go as planned.