marcicat | Network

So along the lines of you miss 100% of the shots you don't take, I'm sending in my Overlook story in a few minutes as soon as the submission form opens. I had thought I'd titled and formatted this and had a cover letter.

I didn't.

I searched everywhere but all I had was the edited copy but nothing else.

Huh. Mentally breaking the lenten promise of not talking bad about myself.

So no science saturday today because I had to spend hours, formatting, title conjuring (which I hate and I was SURE I had a title for this and that ELD had liked it but neither of us remembered what that was) and making the cover letter.

Weirder, the online places I saved for this no longer had links to the form. To the open call yes but only as a secondary source. I KNOW I had the link to the main source. I did finally find it googling around but damn. It's like this is cursed.

I know I don't have much of a shot not with all the big name horror in this thing already but there is a tiny chance and I'm taking my shot. Say a little wish for luck for me. thanks

Otherwise today was...disappointing because it was beautiful and I wanted to hike and had no one to go with so I didn't (to be fair to myself it would have been insanely crowded) Heck even Jackson was so crowded I had to cut thru housing plans just to keep moving to where I needed to be.

Mom sensed I was depressed today (and funnily enough she had sent me a witches ball set in Weirton this coming October)

Also had a weird dream that my former coworker L was yelling at me for not picking up my phone and I said it was off and I didn't realize it. Why? Your mother keeps calling me. Your father is in a coma. Mom doesn't have L's number and dad is fine just fyi. Thanks for more nightmares brain

Current Mood: hopeful
Current Music: The Mummy

highadrenalinemod posting in

highadrenalineexchange

Good morning! Good afternoon! Good evening!

The signups period has passed, and signups have now closed. Matching has been run, and our two currently unmatchable participants have been emailed and have 24 hours to get back to me before we proceed to send the assignments! (There will be no potential cascading, so no other people have been emailed.)

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Hap's current plan appears to be building a giant coffee machine in preparation for assignments dropping sometime in the next 24 hours. I'll just go wish them luck with that.

musesfool

Last night, I logged off work and got into bed for a proper nap, none of this half-assed falling asleep on the couch business, and I thought I'd set an alarm so it didn't go more than an hour or so, but it turns out that all I did was open up the clock/alarm app on my phone without setting it, so I woke up at 8:30 pm all befuddled. I decided at that point that fuck it, we ~~ball~~ sleep, so I brushed my teeth, changed into my jammies, and went back to bed. And slept pretty well! I woke up once or twice but had no real trouble getting back to sleep, and then I woke up for good around 7:45 am, so it was like a FIFTEEN HOUR night. Which is bonkers, but I guess I needed it?

Anyway, I did a very small recs update today for February:

unfitforsociety has been updated for February 2026 with 7 recs in 3 fandoms:

* 5 Heated Rivalry and 1 Heated Rivalry/Sesame Street crossover
* 1 The Pitt

Maybe once I finish my DCC reread, I will get back to reading more fic, idk. It's just very hard to pay attention to anything these days, thanks to *gestures* everything.

*

Current Mood: hot
Current Music: Fade Into You - Mazzy Star

aurumcalendula

I've been curious about early (VCR era) femslash fanvids and it just occurred to me to see if anything's on ebay. I found a VHS of Xena fanvids, so here's hoping it arrives safely and cooperates with my VCR player!

hannah

Someone moving out of their apartment's always cause for investigation, and sometimes, I get lucky: a couple folding baskets for my closet that replace the cardboard boxes that had been there since I moved in. I'd never gotten around to replacing them with anything, and after a while, just adjusted to their presence and got attached to them.

I'm trying to ask myself why I'm unwilling to let go of certain things I'm not using, like old pajamas. It's an unpleasant inertia. They're not even particularly nostalgic. I think some of it's just me bristling at the idea of getting rid of things, even though I know better. At least a little is there not being good places for fabric to go. If there were some, knowing that would certainly help a bit with conceptualizing not having them anymore.

Current Mood: discontent
Current Music: nothing now

ysabetwordsmith

March's book is The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher over at

bookclub_dw.

Current Mood: busy

princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: enthralled

astrogirl

Looky, I've finally finished with my

genprompt_bingo card for last round! Maybe eventually I'll even manage to start on the current one. And perhaps that will involve less of me writing about things like eating spiders or fantasizing about killing children, but, hey, I also wrote about baking cookies and a girl and her uncle being sweater buddies and watching Shrek, so, eh. It all evens out, right?

Title: Some Children to Make into Corpses
Fandom: Gravity Falls
Characters/Relationships: Bill Cipher, Bill's hatred for Dipper and Mabel
Rating/Warnings: Teen. I've used "Creator Chose Not to Use Archive Warnings" on this one, because I feel like not giving it a "Major Character Death' warning would be wrong, but giving it one would be misleading. But this does feature deaths of alternate versions of the kids, as well as versions in Bill's imagination, and while it's not super gory, if children dying horribly isn't something you want in your psyche at all, now's the time to bail out.
Tags: Bill Cipher in the Theraprism, POV Bill Cipher, Bill's All-Seeing Eye, The Multiverse, Bill hates those kids, Descriptions of violence against children, Descriptions of child death
Length: ~1100 words
Summary: There aren't any universes where he wins.
Author's Notes: This was written for Gen Prompt Bingo, for the prompt "child endangerment." The prompt got me thinking about that page in TBOB where Bill declares that there's only one universe in which the kids survived the summer, and the question of whether that's true or not... which led me to further questions I've pondered about the nature of the multiverse in GF and Bill's place in it, which in turn led to this. Whatever this is.

Some Children to Make into Corpses

troisoiseaux

Read Home Sweet Homicide by Craig Rice, an absolutely delightful 1944 murder mystery in which the three precocious children of a widowed detective novelist go meddling in the murder investigation next door, while - as a side project - trying to set their mother up with the lead detective on the case.

Read Beowulf! I just saw a one-man show called Beowulf, A Retelling in a pop-up bar at a local arts center, which was a very good introduction to Beowulf, since it was literally just a guy telling the story in his own (conversational, compelling) words, weaving in references to modern heroes and villains* as a sort of touchstone for how parts of the story would have resonated in ye olde days and using instruments for sound effects, like a violin bow across the strings of an electric guitar for Grendel's dying screech. It was very cool! Obviously then had to actually read Beowulf (the Francis Gummere translation; it was the first one available) and I'm glad I had the crash-course version first; it helped to know the shape of the story and have something to mentally translate it back to. (Plus, if I'd had to figure out how to mentally pronounce Healfdene and Ecgtheow on my own, I think I simply would have not.) What really struck me was the sheer sense of time of it all— the oldest known Old English poem, and possibly a story that was hundreds of years old by the time it was written down, and still there were recurring mentions of "heirlooms", which might be a quirk of translation but does suggest the weight of history behind this story that's already really, really old!, and also I found myself reading/listening to it like, okay, yes, I can see what Tolkien got from this. Is this where the idea of dragons hoarding gold comes from?

( footnote )

Current Music: Grendel's Mother - The Mountain Goats

chazzbanner

We were supposed to get 1-3 inches of snow today, but the system moved south of the Cities, and we had none. I'm not complaining! However, let me complain about the temperature swings. Yesterday it was 50F/10C, and today 19F/-7.22. I took a very careful walk - drat those melty spots that froze again!

Tonight I struggled with balancing my checkbook. Insane. I found a subtraction error.. but still, I ended up going online to find the current (rather that statement) balance, and dealt with those numbers.

I think try paying cash for awhile, until all debit card payments have his my bank account. (This would be local, like the co-op and Lunds.)

I'm a bit weary from being rattled, if you know what I mean. I still have an odd memory to post, but I'll leave it for later. You know, the post I planned for yesterday!

-

merryfortune posting in

polyamships

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lb_lee

Mori:

witchpoetdreamer asked us about a list of our favorite zines. FOOLISH FOOL HAS ACTIVATED MY TRAP!

For this post, we are using "zine" here to mean "a floppy booklet (lacking a spine) that is either self- or small-published, and also NOT from an academic journal NOR just a comic." It can have comics IN it, or mash-up image and text in other, more experimental ways (such as the classic cut-and-paste style of zine), but it can't be primarily comics or we will be here for all eternity.

HERE WE GO! ALL ABOARD THE ZINE MACHINE, Y'ALL!

( ZIIIIINESSSS! )

Current Mood: dorky
Crossposts: https://lb-lee.insanejournal.com/19111.html

cosmolinguist

Thanks to otter for sharing this video the other day: Emotional Neglect: Healing from the Hidden Trauma of What Didn't Happen

I got around to watching it and it hit me so hard I needed to write this huge long thing about it. It's mostly transcript of the parts of the video that I wanted to make a note of, because it's not very accessible to me otherwise. But my thoughts are sprinkled around the block quotes of course.

( Emotional Neglect )

( Emotions Draw Our Attention to What Matters to Us )

( Shame, and Phobia of Inner Experiences )

( Existential Loneliness )

( Unconscious Self-Abandonment )

( Sensitivity to Rejection )

( Using Emotions to Connect Your Inner World to the Outer World )

soc_puppet

I think I may have walked five miles today in while playing Pokémon Go, and my legs are not going to be happy about it tomorrow.

I am trying desperately not to care about the shameless money-grab that is special backgrounds, but alas, it's not working very well.

Anyway, Happy Pokémon Day/Weekend/What-have-you, the trailer for Pokémon Winds and Waves also got to me more than I wanted it to, Nintendo clearly has my number on speed-dial.

Current Mood: exhausted

cosmolinguist

I started getting a migraine halfway through lift club this morning.

I ignored it of course -- just the aura, at that point -- knowing that I'd have a while before it got, y'know, debilitating.

I enjoyed the rest of the exercises. I did nearly fall both at the beginning and the end of the escalator I took to get from the tram to the train, oops. But also I got home fine, via B&M for medicinal snacks -- mostly sugar, which I often crave during migraines, but also one particular 59p instant ramen thing that I suddenly needed, and enjoyed very much for my lunch.

It was that rare rough day for the whole house: D's IBS was playing up and he had to make his brain work on paperwork so much this afternoon that when he finally emerged I wondered if migraines were contagious (luckily he perked up a little after eating something). V slept through all their alarms and so has been off-kilter all day. I slept for four hours this afternoon and after that reached the point where I felt okay unless I tried to move or even think too hard.

Then we watched a Starfleet Academy episode and as soon as Sam mentioned Our Town I was like ...you come to me, on the day of my migraine, and now I'm gonna have to cry? (Crying is fine but a physically unenjoyable experience for me at the best of times. Which, we've established, today is not.) (I got a tear in my eye, but even that was only at the very end.)

Like I've said here, Our Town is largely responsible for why I write almost every day here. "I can't look at everything hard enough" fucking haunts me (of course we heard that line in the episode), and it's important to me to look at things as hard as I can while they are happening.

tl;dr: People are actually bad at predicting how much they'll enjoy reading back what they've written about their lives! Writing about the ordinary experiences of your life can be even more cheering to you when you go back and read them than the extraordinary ones.

A nice reminder on an excessively ordinary day.

bluapapilio

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Current Mood: tired

heathercoxrichardson_feed

Posted by Heather Cox Richardson

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-27-2026-5cb

cosmolinguist

I slept like ass again, but if I'm gonna wake up at 6am it was nice to wake up to good news: the obvious bigots of Reform didn't win, and the more normie bigots of Labour didn't win either -- the Greens won!

I don't really care what this means for Labour or Keir Starmer -- it has never in my 20 years of living here made much tangible difference who the Prime Minister is -- I'm just glad to have an MP who might not be totally useless because I've had enough of that the last couple years! We've had a functionally useless MP in Gorton and Denton since Gwynne lost the Labour whip and his ministerial post but kept voting along with Labour anyway. Worst of both worlds: he couldn't really advocate for us any more but still voted like he would've before. Not that he was much use as public health minister: my hopes were high when he first got the position, especially as he was open about his Long Covid (which I think ended up being why he had to resign on health grounds), but he was a real disappointment to people I know who have ME or LC who'd also expected him to help, and he wasn't interested in advocating for clean air in public places or anything that would help with the ongoing pandemic, and my attempt to explain to him the public health implications of transphobia-as-policy (like the totally-predictable spike in teen suicides) didn't get anywhere either.

And more widely, of course, this is making some people feel more hopeful than we have in a long time. My queer and community-defense group chats were full of relief, congratulations to the volunteers we know who knocked on doors and did other thankless work for this (in the rain! even for Manchester it's been rainy lately), and a little bit of giddy meme-making.

There's all kinds of speculation now on what this means for the upcoming local elections in England (and devolved government elections in both Wales and Scotland, but they get to have nationalistic parties to vote for there too), as well as for Labour and Reform and so on.

But for now, there's a lot of hope in a lot of people who didn't have much (I caught a link to this video and watched it before I realized it's Owen Jones, heh), and that is a great gift.

yourlibrarian posting in

marchmetamatterschallenge

Welcome to year 6 of the Meta Matters Challenge! I'm your moderator,

yourlibrarian.

These posts will be used for us all to check-in with one another, offer encouragement and answers to questions, and maybe tips we come up with as we copy our work to another location.

Before we begin, some reminders. Please look over the FAQ as there are some important bits for everyone to follow, namely: ( Read more... )

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rolanni

Saturday. The almost-full moon is casting tree-shadows over the snow in the Long Back Yard.

I wrote new words today! And did actual Brain Work on the WIP. And changed the bed, and did a load of laundry, and one's duty the cats; made lunch and was able to eat it, after.

Yes, we have reached the part of the whole pain thing where -- POOF! All gone. Just joking. You may now carry on with your life until I decide to randomly take five freaking days and fill them with pain and despair.

Sigh.

The cats were very happy that I joined them in Steve's office to work today. It really is the preferred space for serious endeavors, though the comfy chair in my office is, of course, very nice.

I made the Executive Decision to join Cook Unity, and have ordered in four meals, which will be delivered on Friday. This means I am guaranteed to have four (hopefully) good meals to eat, and will take the whole Cooking Angst off of my Angst Plate, which is currently overfull with Deadline Angst. I'm viewing this as a short-term thing to lower the overall anxiety in the household. Since they say I can cancel or put it on hold at my discretion, as soon as the book's turned in, I'll be doing that. Yes, I need Staff. Also, probably, a keeper.

Looking forward to next week -- we have Rookie's second birthday on Monday, March 2. All of Tuesday is reserved for errands, with needlework in the evening. Wednesday, Thursday, and most of Friday I am Free to Write, and on Saturday?

I'm going to a magic show.

So, I'm really, yanno, happy, that my back has decided to return to normal.

Yes, I've seen the news.

How's everybody doing?

Oh. Here's a picture of Rook helping me make the bed.

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February 2026

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Page generated Mar. 1st, 2026 05:08 am

The Marci Rating System

Network

Taking my shot

Signups Closed, Matching Run, Two Unmatchables Emailed

i look to you and i see nothing

(no subject)

Accumulations.

Books

Heated Rivalry rec

At Last, A Bingo!

Recent reading

ack!

Fics: Femslash February Round up [Meroron/Purirun/Uta, You and Idol PreCure)

LB's favorite zines!

My introduction to "emotional neglect"

Tired

Ordinary days

🌈BL Manga Check-in: "Aien Catharsis"

February 27, 2026

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March Meta Matters Challenge, Check-in No. 1

Same as it ever was...

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February 2026

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