petra: Icon reads in dark green on white: "Fuck it. We ball!" - Rocky, probably. Suggested by @hannah on the occasion of my writing xenophilia. (PHM - Fuck it. We ball!)
[personal profile] petra
Petrova Truthers: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) (3804 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary (2026), Last Week Tonight With John Oliver (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Ryland Grace & Eva Stratt
Characters: John Oliver, Ryland Grace
Additional Tags: Parody of Satire, late night television, Nobel Prize Nominee, in-universe media
Series: Part 2 of Last Week Tonight parodies by Petra
Summary:

John Oliver discusses people who think that the Sun is not getting dimmer, why everyone else on the planet is #HotForStratt, and what you — yes, you — can do to save the world.

pensnest: Barbue in magenta top, cowboy hat and grin (Barbie Cowgirl)
[personal profile] pensnest
We have a Goat. It has been steadily mowing the lawn for quite a lot of the day.

It is not, in fact, a living, breathing Goat, snacking happily on grass, vegetables and my T-shirts alike, it is a mechanical beastie which only mows lawns. Beast spent much of last week seizing the moments between showers (few) to instal an outdoor electrical socket for its charging pad, and this morning 'teaching' it the boundaries and exclusions in the lawn. It's fun watching the little chap trundle up and down, and it is very clear, watching it, just how lumpy and bumpy the lawn is.

I await with interest the day Sable ventures out and encounters it while it is mowing. Wonder if it will deter a muntjak?

I think I'll call it William.

*

My BIL is visiting us at the moment, and I am once again struck by the difference between the way Beast thinks and the way I think. He thinks in Physics, as does his brother. I have learned much from this, but I do not think in Physics. It is nice for him to have someone to talk to who understands the world in the same way!
petra: Cartoon of Shakespeare saying, "Read my latest, it is god damn glorious." (Beaton - Shakespeare)
[personal profile] petra
Item the first:

I have about 4K words of the Last Week Tonight: Petrova Truthers draft fanfic. It’s Project Hail Mary book canon but should make plenty of sense to people with only movie canon knowledge. I would love to bounce it off of at least one person who’s read the book before posting.

It’s gen, in the sense that John Oliver is of course hot for the hotties involved in PHM, but it’s unrequited and he doesn’t do anything but flirt shamelessly.

Hit me up with an email and I’ll invite you to the Ellipsus doc! It’s ad-free, it’s not the Google hegemony, and it’s pretty darn user-friendly.

*

Items the Second through Sixth:

I offered to write for Three Weeks for Dreamwidth and promptly flaked out, but I got to the prompts today! And then I prompted Katarik for inspiration, and ze wanted Darren Nichols. I love me some Darren Nichols.

*

There was an outlaw in Bolivia (30 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Harry Longabaugh | Sundance Kid/Robert Parker | Butch Cassidy
Characters: Robert Parker | Butch Cassidy, Harry Longabaugh | Sundance Kid
Additional Tags: Limericks, Poetry
Summary:

A limerick for Butch and Sundance.



*

There once was a witch from steep Lancre (32 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Nanny Ogg
Additional Tags: Limericks, Poetry
Summary:

Nanny sings.



*

I don't like to brag and I won't 'cause I don't have to (100 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Rome (TV 2005)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Titus Pullo (fl. 54 BCE) & Lucius Vorenus
Characters: Lucius Vorenus, Titus Pullo (fl. 54 BCE)
Additional Tags: Drabble, Linguistics
Summary:

Lucius Vorenus constantly surprises Titus Pullo.



*

Macbeth dir. D. Nichols, 2026 (100 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Slings & Arrows
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Darren Nichols & Geoffrey Tennant, Ellen Fanshaw & Geoffrey Tennant
Characters: Geoffrey Tennant, Ellen Fanshaw
Additional Tags: Implied Darren Nichols (Slings & Arrows), References to Macbeth - Shakespeare, Drabble
Summary:

Darren knows a hit trend when he hears it.



*

Josh Lyman and Leo McGarry: Limerick Fight! (195 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The West Wing
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Josh Lyman & Leo McGarry
Characters: Josh Lyman, Leo McGarry
Additional Tags: Limericks, Verbal Sparring, Poetry battle, Poetry
Summary:

Leo and Josh being irritated but fond of each other, in verse.

musesfool: zooey deschanel in almost famous (one day you'll be cool)
[personal profile] musesfool
So yesterday, I logged off a call with my boss and the CEO, and my internet went down again, just like it had on Wednesday, at almost exactly the same time (1:30 pm EDT). After some back and forth with Spectrum where they insisted it was a me problem and scheduled a tech visit, I got a message that there was an outage in my area but it would be fixed by 4:30 pm.

Unfortunately, instead of being done with work at 2:30 pm like a usual summer Friday, I had a board call from 3 pm - 4:30 pm (despite all of my written and verbal instructions to Assistant J, many meetings were scheduled on times and days I told him not to schedule things, like the Tuesday after a Monday holiday, or 3 pm on a summer Friday, but I hope this experience of having to work 2 extra hours on a summer Friday stays with him so he never does it again), so I had to be on by phone, because no one from IT ever answered my question about why I couldn't use my phone as a hotspot, the way I used to be able to. Until I was logged in on my phone - then Teams started blowing up with instructions and I was like, sorry, on a board call, can't talk right now. But it should work going forward if necessary. I was looking in the wrong spot (I mean, I was looking under "hotspot" instead of "wifi" so was I really wrong? I don't think so. and yet!), which they kindly told me.

I could have tried to switch in the middle of the call, but figured better to stay on and get all my notes than disconnect and not be able to reconnect. And then at about 4:35, the internet came back! And I still had to wait almost 2 more hours for one of my co-workers to finish editing her slides so I could PDF them and send to the chair for review. And then the slides were too large, even as a reduced-size PDF, to email with all the other materials, so I had to split it into 2 emails. I told my boss they need to slim that deck down, but one of the VPs is insisting on having his slides in there twice since he gave the same presentation at 2 meetings, instead of just saying, "please refer to slides A-K for this presentation." I am desperately hoping the chair dings him for that, but he probably won't. (If it were up to me, I'd have just deleted them but when I asked my boss told me the VP specifically stated he wanted them in there twice. It's just the pre-reads deck that probably nobody reads, so it probably won't matter to anyone else, but I think it is a bad way to manage your meeting materials.)

Anyway! In other news, I mentioned friend L is moving back to ATL next month, so she's coming to hang out here next weekend, so I need to get some of my clutter tucked away before that happens. I ordered some Rubbermaid bins to pile stuff in, which won't look great but will at least free up the chair from all my mixing bowls and cupcake pans. (I know, I know, but sometimes it's just easier to always have stuff out then to put it away and need to pull it out again three days later.)

I'm thinking about what to cook and I might do the white lasagna I like so much - I could send half of it home with her and still have enough leftover for dinner for a couple of days - plus the SK strawberry summer cake. And maybe breakfast tacos on Sunday? And some coffee granita? Idk, I'm still thinking.

*
umadoshi: (kittens - sleeping)
[personal profile] umadoshi
Before even more time passes, I want to tell you all that last weekend it was our Jinksy!bear (and Claudia!kitten)'s thirteenth birthday. I'm managing not to let my brain actually crunch the numbers to figure out exactly when in the coming year he'll (please, God) cross the line of "has now lived half of his life without her".

He's unmistakably showing his age, although he doesn't yet seem old. I can never shake the fact that when I was a kid, thirteen would have seemed OLD for a cat; it always seemed to be such a marvel when a cat lived well into their teens. (One of my childhood cats, Jenny, lived until after [personal profile] scruloose and I moved home from Toronto! She made it to nineteen, which is still a fairly impressive age now.)

I will forever wish we'd had the chance to see what kind of little old lady cat Claud would have been, and forever be grateful for how long we've had Jinksy. He continues to be just ridiculously sweet. We are so lucky to have him and the blues.

Today wasn't [personal profile] scruloose's first market visit of the year, but it was mine. They went to pick up a meat order at one of the year-around main ones last week, and that errand meant that we didn't go to the little in-walking-distance market when it had its first day of the season last Saturday. But today we made it out, and since there wasn't much of a crowd--presumably due to the steady, if not heavy, rain passing through this morning--there were still plenty of strawberries available when we got there. (I wasn't surprised that things were quiet with the weather, and obviously financial pressures are hitting so many people brutally hard, but it was still quieter than I expected, esp. given that it was the first of the strawberries.)

First market haul of the year: strawberries (two quarts), salad greens, a sweet potato, eggs, a small dense sourdough loaf, kimchi, and kimbap (the sort that look exactly like onigiri--triangular and fully wrapped in nori, rather than rolled).
oursin: Hedgehog saying boggled hedgehog is boggled (Boggled hedgehog)
[personal profile] oursin

I suppose it is probably par for the course that the kind of bloke figuring in this article, Matchmakers Are Being Paid $25K to Find Trad Wives for Rich Men has apparently never met a specimen of the female of the species? or possibly another person.

Because those lists sound like somebody who has made up a list of requirements which don't have anything to do with personal preferences - okay, these are probably guys who live on Soylent and rawdog plane flights and so on and have not ever given any thought to the matter of developing individual tastes in things?

Anderson and other professional matchmakers tell WIRED that the men they work with are increasingly asking to be set up with traditional religious conservative women—regardless of whether they themselves self-identify as traditional, religious, or conservative.

I wonder what they mean when they say 'religious' or 'Christian', because, honestly, that covers a lot of territory, hmmmmm? ('Religious' could include a range of non-Christian options, 'Christian' =/= 'conservative'.)

Plus, the men do not sound to be prizes, even with the moolah (assuming it is actual moolah and not some crypto-based dream or AI bubble):

[T]here seems to be a disconnect between some of these men and the women themselves, who are often either already partnered or uninterested in the driven, sometimes socially awkward men who want to date them. For instance, when Anderson did finally manage to find a woman who fit her Austin-based client’s criteria, he alienated her almost instantly with his self-deprecating humor and boorish table manners[.]

Supposing that the women in question have bought into the 'tradwife' thing in the first place, I suspect that they have an image of rather more graciousness and traditional masculine courtesy than appears here in the prospective provider/protector.

The concluding anecdote:

One of her clients, a Dallas businessman in his early forties, went on several fruitless dates with a string of women, all of whom were, per his request, young, conservative, and Christian. But they never quite clicked, until she matched him with someone who was none of the above. They hit it off, and they’re currently still dating.
....
["]Someone may come to you wanting one thing and then realize the things they thought mattered weren't the most important things to be seeking after all.”

suggests that what, in fact, these guys need is just to Get Out More.

(no subject)

Jun. 12th, 2026 06:19 pm
skygiants: the aunts from Pushing Daisies reading and sipping wine on a couch (wine and books)
[personal profile] skygiants
A few weeks ago I was grimly gearing up to do the Hugos homework when suddenly I realized that Hugo voting privileges do not actually pass over year to year, only nominating privileges. I'm free! Flinging the nominations list joyously to the wind in favor of catching up on overdue library books and the massive stacks of books in my own home! However before this happy revelation I did read The Raven Scholar which had vaguely been on my list anyway, largely on a series of planes.

I was under a profound misapprehension about the plot of The Raven Scholar. I spent the first several chapters, in which a young woman whose father has been executed for treason gets brought before the reigning Emperor on the occasion of her majority, peacefully thinking to myself "and I suppose from here she's going to end up going to some sort of raven school." Not the case! Very different things happen to that young woman! In case you are confused like me, The Raven Scholar is ostensibly about adults in their late twenties and thirties, although I have to say I found them extremely YAish adults -- kind of a reverse Six of Crows problem, these people extremely felt like teenagers to me -- and the actual heroine is Neema, who has already graduated from raven school and is now a full-fledged raven postgrad.

Neema's plot begins with her at the bottom of the raven postgrad pecking order due to classism and being a poor scholarship student; then she accepts a government order that everyone thinks is a bit evil and gets a big promotion out of it, so by the time the plot proper begins she's the most important raven postgrad in the Empire and also the most disliked. She has a mean girl nemesis, and a sexy chaotic ex-boyfriend from the fox monastery who hasn't spoken to her in the years since she accepted the evil order despite the fact that she's pretty convinced that he himself does government assassinations --

-- there are six important animal schools, by the way, or rather animal monasteries, and they're all associated with Characteristics. Perfect for sorting! The shadow of Harry Potter does inescapably hang over this a bit; we've got our Scholarly Ravens, our Hardworking Oxen, our Brave Bears, our Extremely Classist Evil Tigers, and then we've added to this Loyal Hounds, Artistic Monkeys, Sexy Chaotic Foxes and Weird Magical Dragons, so don't worry! there are eight kinds of people instead of the reductive four! I was also unfortunately reminded of when I had to take management training classes at work and we were taught with great seriousness how to identify our coworkers as lions, peacocks, turtles, and doves --

Anyway! Neema is having problems with her social life, is what I mean to say, and she's in charge of organizing prom, by which I mean the big festival during which representatives from each of the different types of monasteries compete in combat! and absurd little Taskmaster competitions!! to see who will next be awarded the throne now that the current Emperor has ruled the legal amount of years he's supposed to after winning the last competition and is ready to retire!!!

AND THEN ... in the MIDDLE of all of this ... someone is MURDERED.

After my initial confusion, I found the first 2/3 of the book really enjoyable to read on a plane. I think it was very clever of Antonia Hodgson to go "what do people like? well, murder mysteries. And what also do people like? When people have to compete in absurd little Taskmaster competitions." I'm people! I also like murder mysteries and absurd little competitions. some broad strokes plot spoilers from here )

So although I had a good time for much of this book I ended up pretty disinclined to read the next one, but I can certainly see why people liked it and it probably wouldn't have come bottom of my Hugo list, if I was voting. Which, thankfully, I'm not, so I don't have to rank anything!

(no subject)

Jun. 13th, 2026 12:19 pm
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] arkessian and [personal profile] ironed_orchid!

Things

Jun. 13th, 2026 07:52 pm
vass: Small turtle with green leaf in its mouth (Default)
[personal profile] vass
Books
Finished T Kingfisher's Paladin's Faith, which I think was better than any of the preceding books in that series. I liked it a lot, and I hadn't really expected to, since neither of the protagonists had really appealed to me in the earlier books.

Read Isaac Asimov's 1957 short story 'Profession', which some website somewhere linked to as an example of Why LLMs Are Bad, but which read to me as a strikingly good fictional example of the social model of disability in action. Unfortunately, I don't think Asimov knew that was what he was writing, and I think we were supposed to agree with the historian informing the protagonist that he was the one in a gazillian very special snowflake who was smart and original enough to be worthy of the financial burden of individualised education.

Listened to the audiobook (read by Ali Stroker) of disability rights activist Judith Heumann's memoir Being Heumann, cowritten with Kristen Joiner. I'm unfamiliar with Kristen Joiner's work, but the writing style of the memoir made me think ghostwriter. The narrative voice was... well, the association in my head is "90s middle grade novel", but that might say more about me than it does about the authors. It's that in medias res, "Chapter One. Ring, ring! I awoke suddenly to the sound of the telephone. I started to get excited butterflies in my stomach. Who could be calling me at this time of night? I sat up in bed and reached for the receiver. It was 1991, and I was Claudia Kishi, secretary of the Baby-Sitters Club, and I had my own phone in my bedroom." kind of thing.

That said, nothing wrong with writing something in an easily accessible style so long as you're not leaving important parts out. Not knowing Judith Heumann's life well enough to know what I don't know, I can't speak to the facts, but I can say that the word "bullshit" appeared once in it, which wouldn't have happened in the aforementioned 90s middle grade novel. And she packed a solid amount of real, usable information about activism tactics and strategy, and real disability rights history and organising principles and also disability 101 in there, and with a minimum of inspirational glurge or undue optimism about the present political state of America (it was published in 2021, two years before her death.) It's simplistic but not trite.

Plus Judith Heumann did have a genuinely very eventful and interesting career.

Tech
I got my current self-hosting project working: I can now point my phone (or my laptop) at my RasPi and select a song from the disk attached to it and play that song through the phone or laptop's speakers. (The difficulty was that most of the guides I could find assumed I wanted to use my phone to control a RasPi with a speaker attached to it, so I could play music hosted somewhere other than on the RasPi.)

Weather
Wet and cold.

Cats
Dorian experimented with a salchow too, at least once. He also was kind enough to demonstrate for me today that he can reach the one remaining kitchen bench I thought he couldn't get up on. At least this way I know he can do that. Meanwhile, Ash has the salchow locked in, and is now innovating with other Birdie eradication methods, such as a crocodile death roll.
china_shop: An orange cartoon dog waving, with a blue-green abstract background. (Bingo!)
[personal profile] china_shop
1. Got in my car on Thursday (to take a friend to lunch), and it wouldn't start. *headdesks forever* So I emailed the mechanics, they came and took it away on Friday, disconnected the stereo (it was shorting out the battery), and brought the car back, all for free. I'm assuming my troubles are now over. *knocks on every wooden surface within reach*

(I feel a bit foolish about all this. I bought a new battery a month ago because of repeated issues, and I have a trickle charger. So ot1h, I kind of did the best I could. But otoh, the stereo was making occasional weird thumping noises to the point where I had "call the mechanic" on my to-do list for weeks. I just never actually did because talking to mechanics is awkward. Doh! Anyway.)

2. Blocco 181 is a beautifully filmed Italian show about drug dealers and gangs, with three central characters who quickly get into an m/m/f relationship. The sex is Sense8 levels of explicit, and the ship is so good -- very little of the angst is about its configuration; it's all divided loyalties and "Two households [...] from ancient grudge break to new mutiny," etc. Loving it. Carefully not checking AO3 for fic, because I don't want to be spoiled for season 2.

3. Our @*%$&#$% government is trying to pass some UK-style "definition of a man and a woman" nonsense, so I went to a trans rights rally today. My sign. )

4. Duolingo is still eating me alive, ahhhhhhhh. (It's trying to teach me characters for real now; so satisfying.)

How are you? *waves*
settiai: (Kes -- settiai (TriaElf9))
[personal profile] settiai
In tonight's game, the rest under a cut for those who don't care. )

And that's where we left off.

Landfall.

Jun. 12th, 2026 09:09 pm
hannah: (Support - fooish_icons)
[personal profile] hannah
I don't know how far I can see from my parents' rooftop. I know it's across the Hudson and into New Jersey, but I don't know how many miles it is past the Palisades and beyond. On days like today, it's even farther, because I watched a thunderstorm roll in. It wasn't quite over the horizon because there's no real horizon up there, and it was still a good long ways away, enough of a distance that when I got up there, it was sunny enough I put on sunscreen. It took a while to notice the cloud covering up the sky, a flat, hard gray all the way from here to far out there, because it wasn't doing anything but slowly moving in. There wasn't even any noise. There was a gorgeous set of edges to the clouds closer to us, the kind you get where it's a stark boundary between the clouds and the sky beyond, punched together and folded into itself and never going past that boundary.

It didn't have a smell and it didn't have a sound. It had a feeling from the sight of it, and it had an aura in the air you could feel, if you knew what to feel for. If you'd felt it before. I've seen thunderstorms come in from New Jersey before and it's always a thrilling treat. The anticipation makes you want to sing. I could see how, for all it was covering the sky north to south, there was still a bit of clear sky left far out west. Until there wasn't, and it was something hazy. Until it was gone too, and it was coming in.

My dad and I stood and watched, and took some pictures. We talked about the lightning and the thunder, and of watching the rain start to take over.

Far out west, we could see where rain was from how the clouds were coming down to the horizon line. Nearby west, we could see where the rain was from how the clouds had come down to the ground. It was almost like seeing fog roll into San Francisco, clouds come down to greet the dirt. We could still see the Palisades, the Hudson, and we could feel the rain roll in and fall down onto us. We felt it keep on coming, harder, and we started to hear the rain and not just the thunder. Then it hit. It wasn't a gullywasher as I'd call one because I saw it come in, so it wasn't as sudden as all that. But it was definitely a downpour.

It was something of a disappointment to look up and see it'd cleared up and the sun was shining. I'd been enjoying all the sounds. It was close to an inch of rain in under an hour, so it'd be a gullywasher as others would call such a storm. But I can't, since I saw it come in and touch down.
petra: Barbara Gordon smiling knowingly (Default)
[personal profile] petra
I caught up with all the requests at my Donate for a Drabble post.

If you have recently donated 25 USD or the local equivalent to a food bank/pantry, the ACLU, or a Pride-related organization that includes trans-positive outreach, hit me up and I'll write for you!

I have just edited Project Hail Mary (book or movie) and The Pushcart War into my fandom list.

*

Ways to say "I love you" (100 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: due South
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalski
Characters: Ray Kowalski, Benton Fraser
Additional Tags: Drabble, Headaches & Migraines
Summary:

Ray wears his sunglasses at night.


*

Real vampires don't sparkle (100 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Slings & Arrows
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Darren Nichols & Geoffrey Tennant
Characters: Darren Nichols, Geoffrey Tennant
Additional Tags: Dracula References, Drabble
Summary:

Geoffrey disagrees with Darren about the cosmetic choices in his production of Dracula.

Dear Crossworks Author

Jun. 12th, 2026 12:29 pm
beatrice_otter: Me in red--face not shown (Default)
[personal profile] beatrice_otter
I use the same name everywhere so I am [personal profile] beatrice_otter on AO3. Treats are awesome.

I would rather get a story you were happy with than "well, she said she liked x, so I guess I have to do x even though I don't like x and/or am not inspired that way." This letter is long with lots of suggestions and preferences if you find it helpful, but feel free to ignore it if it is not helpful. I'm fairly easy to please; I've been doing ficathons for a long time and am usually very happy with my gifts.

The most important thing for me in a fic is that the characters are well-written and recognizably themselves. Even when I don't like a character, I don't go in for character-bashing. If nothing else, if the rest of this letter is too much or my kinks don't fit yours, just concentrate on writing a story with everyone in character and good spelling and grammar and I will almost certainly love what you come up with.

I have an embarrassment squick, which makes humor kind of hit-or-miss sometimes. The kind of humor where someone does something embarrassing and the audience is laughing at them makes me uncomfortable. On the other hand, the kind of humor where the audience is laughing with the characters I really enjoy.

General Likes and Dislikes )

Early 20th Century

Regency

Modern Day

Modern Day--Apocalypse/dystopia

Robots!

Wormholes and War

Modern Day: Hope and Community

Dealer's Choice

Grab Bag

(no subject)

Jun. 12th, 2026 09:37 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] ase!

Gig list - June 2026

Jun. 12th, 2026 03:14 am
gentlyepigrams: (music - tickets)
[personal profile] gentlyepigrams
A very belated version of this list. We missed the Taco Fest because of weather and other stuff but I did go to the Stewart Copeland show which was the first show I'd seen since November.

Under the cut to protect your flist )

I bought tickets to a bunch of things with my friend E who is interested in a lot of shows. Also we are starting to plan our November trip to Portland for ACUS. Which, with airline prices being what they are, is going to be the most expensive thing we do this year. (Thanks, TFG!)

Stewart Copeland at the Kessler

Jun. 12th, 2026 02:10 am
gentlyepigrams: (music - celestial victrola)
[personal profile] gentlyepigrams
Stewart Copeland at The Kessler Theater. June 11, 2026.

Michael and I were supposed to go with our friend E but for reasons he was unable to join us. We had a lovely pre-show dinner at Norman's Japanese and made it over to the Kessler not long after the doors opened. I realized afterward that I don't think I've been to a live show since November, which is way too long.

Copeland is touring as a raconteur, not a musician, this time. He talked for about two hours, plus an intermission, about his childhood (his father was a spy whose best mate was Kim Philby and he grew up in Cairo and Lebanon), his career in music before the Police, the development of the Police through to their first hit, his film score work, his operas, and the 2007 tour, which I saw in Pennsylvania.

He's a hell of a funny guy and a great storyteller. I could easily have listened to another two hours of the sort of thing he was doing, and I had a ton of questions I wanted to ask him (about growing up abroad, about adjusting to the UK school system, for two). There's a book coming out later this year about him, and while it's not on sale yet, I'm sure I'm not the only person who looked up when it was coming out. I also had no idea he'd scored the silent version of Ben Hur, which I now want to see.

This tour is going on for quite a while and I recommend it to anyone who's even vaguely interested in Copeland and/or the Police.

The Legend of Vox Machina

Jun. 12th, 2026 12:25 am
settiai: (TLoVM -- settiai)
[personal profile] settiai
The next three episodes of The Legend of Vox Machina dropped yesterday, but what with work, babysitting, and D&D I didn't have any time to watch them. So let's fix that!

Spoilers for 4x04 under the cut. )

Spoilers for 4x05 under the cut. )

Spoilers for 4x06 under the cut. )
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