Challenge #79: Pride!

It's Pride month once again in the USA and many other places, so that's our theme for June. You can draw or paint LGBTQ+ characters from canon or fandom, original characters representing some aspect of Pride, key historical LGBTQ figures, art based on the colours of the Pride flags, rainbows - wherever your imagination takes you!

It's fine to depict slash, femslash, trans, poly, ace etc. characters and relationships beloved of fandom, whether or not they're explicit in canon. Or show your favourite characters taking part in Pride activities like parades, marches, or parties - anything linked with Pride and the LGBTQ+ community.

A round-up post for submissions to this challenge will be done at the end of June.

(round-up from Mermay coming shortly)

 

Monday evening Jason and I walked to the bowling alley a little over a mile from our house. We ate dinner there, played in the arcade a bit where Jason won me a weird alien duckie because he is unnaturally skilled at crane games, then walked back home. A lovely outing with perfect weather.

Jason and I are now looking into virtual walk programs, like the Lord of the Rings "walk to Mordor" one that records how far you walk and tells you when you've "arrived" at key locations in the book. There are loads of different themes. We might even pay for one that gives you a physical medal to award yourself when you reach your goal.

Closer to home, crafty day was a success. I got caught up on my travel gluebook (not a major achievement given that the only outstanding trip I had was my birthday Baltimore excursion) but also did a lot of work on my general ephemera gluebook. This is something I don't touch very often, though I have a huge bin of assorted paper scraps I've collected over the years for just such a book. So it was nice to have this concentrated chunk of time that basically forced me to work on it.

I found a lot of stuff I'd forgotten I had, like anime convention badges from 2007, my HMMWV license (expired in 2012), my swimming class completion certificate from Camp Wa-Ha-Na-Ha (dated 1991). Pictures of cats long gone: OD, Snowball, Tabitha, Echo. Clippings from magazines and comic books and college brochures (yes, kept since high school), made humorous by being removed from their original context. I like leafing through these pages full of memory and weirdness; I should put more effort into filling my books. Inspired by this, I went looking for my other finished gluebooks and seem to have misplaced them. I'm not too bothered about it; I'm sure they're around here somewhere.

My coworker Larry just learned the other day that I draw. He was really surprised, given that we've worked together for five years, but why would it have ever come up? In this case, it did because I was excited about signing up for a caricature workshop in Bethesda in September with a MAD Magazine artist whose blog I enjoy, so I was telling him about it. Larry commented on what a varied life I've led, and I suppose he's right. There have definitely been eras: the powerlifting era, the BS/OD era (when Bill and I hawked our wares at assorted conventions), the Markeroni era, the TDY era (when I was working for Night Vision and doing regular field tests in the middle of nowhere), the diary comics era, the Celtic music festival era. These days I seem to mostly be in my barbershop and D&D eras. Occasionally I despair of how many interesting things I used to do - powerlifting, classical piano, solo road trips to weird places - but I do a fair amount of interesting things now, too. There isn't time to do everything, after all.

Six months in, and I'm still persevering in my quest to re-learn Russian grammar while currently working my way through three textbooks in parallel, from the 1930s, the 1960s and the 1990s. Extra textbooks = extra exercises = more practice... and also alternate ways of explaining things, some of which may make more sense/prove more memorable than others.( Back-formations of imperfective verbs )

I managed to reach Part II of the 1930s book, meanwhile, which consists of 'every-day' period English conversations ( Read more... )
I'm able to spot a few fairly obvious typoes here and there, which is gratifying: Проставте Ваме имя is pretty definitely an error for Проставте Ваше имя (possibly the author's handwriting ;p) And I'm interested to see the 'poetic' instrumental endings in -ою and -ею in apparently everyday usage here (за едою, которую мне дают по утрам); I wonder when they went out of fashion. (It's a useful distinction, the absence of which I rather regret, since it means that *all* the feminine oblique case-endings are now basically the same; good for fudging things while composing answers in Russian, but not good for understanding the function of words in a sentence!)

I was, however, pretty puzzled by the appearance of sporadic hard signs after the preposition в, also presumably an archaicism. ( I couldn't work out any pattern )

Meanwhile I'm exceedingly perplexed by my own historic marginal note in the 1990s textbook reading, cryptically, adverbs like noble gases...! ( Read more... )

So, I've been struggling with some existential despair-like feelings in recent days, and instead of telling you about THAT, I am going to tell you all about Words I Wish Existed In English! (Part I - I'm sure I'll come up with more, tbh)

So, in my translation project, I often myself feeling frustrated that I have to find an approximation of what is being said, which, you know - makes sense! Languages are very much NOT one-to-one, in any way, and so while some words exist across a lot of languages, some seem specific to either a group of languages or even one language, maybe - idk, I'm neither a polyglot nor a linguist, but that's sort of the sense I've gotten.
( WORDS )

ANYWAY. That is it for now, thank you for coming to my Ted Talk! Sorry this is basically what's taking up a large percentage of my brain that isn't busy setting itself on fire with anxiety! So this is where I shall stay for now. I will probably be back.

Quick note that post-by-email and comment-by-email is (sometimes?) failing silently without actually posting right now! I'm pretty sure this is related to last night's shenanigans and will be fixed once Mark can finish the full fix for it, which he's working on, but if you've posted or replied by email in the last 24 hours, fish it out of your sent folder to check if it posted!

EDIT: This should be fixed as of around 7AM EDT! We *believe* everything that was stuck in the plumbing has been sent along to your journal or the comment thread it was meant for; it's definitely not where it was stuck anymore, at least.

All the material available on the Internet emphasises the importance of addressing your 'book pitch' to a individual named literary agent; "no Dear Sir/Madams please, they go in the bin", one agent says adamantly.

But the actual agencies I'm looking at have a single submissions@agency address for all the agents working there -- the first one I emailed gave specific instructions to put the name of the person you were trying to contact in the title of the email, but the current one doesn't say anything of the sort (on the contrary, it says "If you would like *us* to consider your manuscript, please send *us* the following"). So while I do have an individual agent in mind, I'm not at all clear that I'm supposed to be the one picking and choosing in advance, as opposed to them deciding who, if anybody, might have any interest in my project... which means I either give offence by presuming to say whom I am and am not prepared to deal with, or by failing as a result to address a specific partner by name :-(
(And to be honest, all the people in the London office, apart from the one specialising in Japanese literature, sound like a possible potential fit anyway, even though I was only given the one name as "actively seeking to expand their client list"...)

In the (geeky) circles I move in, you don't normally put "Dear So and So" at the top of an email message in any case, any more than you put the date or your street address -- but I don't have any experience of business emails :-(

Robby has managed to put in a temporary fix for the site errors and things failing to refresh or not showing up where they should! The permanent fix is going to need Mark's experience, and unfortunately -- seriously, this literally never fails -- Mark has been on an international flight all day, because of course he has. (Never. Fails. He and I are not allowed to both take vacation at once.)

The site will work just fine with the temporary fix in place, things just might be a little slow here and there. We'll keep you updated.

We're aware of site traffic issues and are working to fix them for the people who are having problems! (The tactics the damn bot traffic uses are endlessly shifting, and they're really good at looking like real traffic, sigh.)

Title: Eel Guy has a snack
Artist: leecetheartist (lineart), mekare+BB (colouring)
Rating: Gen
Fandom: original work
Notes: This is the Mermay art for May 27th made by leecetheartist. BB and I had a lot of fun with markers this weekend!

So the last day of MerMay it seemed like everyone at Swancon 50 wanted to talk, for me to get them things, and to bump the table. But me and the Kakimori and the bottle of Rainbow Scarab got through it all.

I am amused by observing the process of Russification of gamer slang in Project Zomboid: having adopted English terms the language proceeds to add all the relevant suffixes etc to them as if they were ancient Slavonic monosyllabic roots, until you end up with something that is almost totally divorced from any Englishness at all and nicely assimilated into the language :-D

So to 'loot', for example, takes on a verb ending to become the Russian verb лутать, and then acquires a corresponding perfective verb form полутать so that it can form a future tense, and you end up with reflexive expressions like полутаемся немножко -- "Let's go and do some looting" -- in which the original basic syllable 'loot' has become almost entirely buried in Russian accretions!

Even more assimilated is the verb to 'check', which has been adopted as чекать and then apparently acquired a thoroughly Russian irregular perfective form, чекнуть, presumably by analogy with such verb pairs as прыгать/прыгнуть...

( Splitting up nasturtiums and marigolds )

( Towel-tomatoes )

The Gypsophila elegans has just opened its first spray of little white flowers( Read more... )

The chive pot is now very much dominated by self-sown flax, plus a self-sown Linaria (both in flower, so I am reluctant to pull them out). And, ironically, there is *also* something that looks to me rather like a seedling yellow Cambrian poppy that has established itself in the chive tub while I wasn't looking -- after all the years and years when I tried and failed to get a single one of the hundreds and hundreds of yellow poppy seeds to germinate, or even to successfully transplant the parent plant out of the miniature rose pot! Well, we shall have to see what it turns into...

I likewise have a strong suspicion that I have what is an extremely miniature sweetbriar seedling underneath one of the elderly pot marigold plants ( Read more... )

I also separated the two chillies, though it turned out that they hadn't really developed enough root yet to be entangled; it will make life easier later on in any case. For the record, they are currently two inches high and nice bushy (but very small!) little plants.

Discovered today that every single one of the four chillies, dozen or so basil seedlings, and unknown number of marigolds that I had donated for sale had been eaten by slugs :-(
One likes to imagine donated plants going to good homes elsewhere, but of course the probability is that a lot of them simply die in the hands of inexpert recipients: 100% mortality is a bit depressing, though. Especially as almost all of the basil that I kept for myself also died.

I watered everything at 8am this morning, and the marigolds and rudbeckias were already starting to wilt (still need repotting) by the time I went out to take these photos when I got home at 1pm...

As always, click through for full-size photos:
( Read more... )

Title: Mating Spiral on AO3
Artist: mific
Rating: Teen. Not entirely SFW, but suggestive rather than explicit.
Fandom: Heated Rivalry
Characters/Pairings: Ilya Rozanov/Shane Hollander
Summary: Shane's a mer, and Ilya's a tentacle monster.
And of course they're wearing sunscreen - Shane made sure of it.
Notes: Made in Procreate.

The other day Jason and I watched a video of someone claiming to have photographic proof of an Ogopogo, which is a Canadian cryptid reminiscent of the Loch Ness monster. The photo in question was a very clear depiction of a creature's head looking at you from underwater. To my untrained eyes it looked like a hippo but given its geographic location I think the many commenters who said it was a moose were probably correct. Anyway, the point of this story is that Jason then declared me to be a cryptid - as I am the perfect woman, loads of people spend their lives looking for me, and most people believe I don't exist.

He is such a sap and I am so here for it, you guys.

Been a while since I last posted (as usual!) but there hasn't been much to report either. The biggest news is probably that we got a new car! We'd been looking to replace Jason's old Ford Fusion for a while since Wyatt plans on finally getting his license this summer and he'll need something to drive. We wanted something a bit larger and more comfortable, and after a bit of research ended up getting a Hyundai Santa Fe hybrid. It's got all kinds of bells and whistles and safety features. Very fancy. It'll be great for GenCon and our honeymoon. It was already great for hauling books to and from the Gaithersburg Book Festival a couple weekends ago.

Speaking of GenCon, event registration was a couple weeks ago. We unfortunately only got one DCC event that we'd signed up for - watching Matt Dinniman and Jeff Hays and others play the new RPG live. We'd hoped to participate in a game ourselves, but they all sold out. Oh well. We'll just have to wait until our preorders ship in October. It'll still be a super fun trip.

My beloved parent organization, Sweet Adelines International, recently announced a surprise rebrand to SingUnited International. I didn't watch the announcement but my guess is that the change is because 1. nobody sings that song anymore, 2. it's old and we don't wanna seem old, and 3. if you've never heard of the song then it's not immediately obvious that we're a singing organization. The new logo is supremely terrible but that's my only real complaint. They'd been teasing a Big Announcement for weeks and I'd been afraid they were going to announce a merger with BHS or Harmony Inc, so this dumb name change honestly came as a relief. Still, I'm sure there's plenty of angst - we've been Sweet Adelines for 80 years and apparently nobody knew this was coming outside the international board of directors and their staff. And also there's an existing group in the UK called Sing United which tells me that despite years of planning, nobody bothered to do a simple google search. I do wonder how they plan to assist the hundreds of choruses who now have to update all their marketing materials.

Memorial Day weekend went so fast. I think I had too many plans. Saturday morning the chorus gig at the Burke farmer's market was cancelled due to weather but I still had quartet practice. From there I drove down to Michelle's for the afternoon to help her sort her pin collection, snuggle all her animals (three cats and two dogs, all super sweet), and do a wine tasting at the vineyard where she got married. All very fun. Sunday afternoon I had a quartet gig that was about an hour away so it took a big chunk out of the middle of the day. We sang for this gentleman's 96th birthday last year and he enjoyed it so much the family invited us back for his 97th. It was a little awkward because Beth kept trying to get us to woodshed songs we didn't know in keys we couldn't handle (because they were men's arrangements), but once we got to songs we actually knew we were fine. And Monday we had our regular gig singing at the Fairfax Memorial Day Ceremony. It felt nice to get "great job as usual" from a few people, showing they remembered us from previous years.

I took the day off yesterday. I started by dropping off dry cleaning. I was proud of myself for doing it the same day the clothes went in my car (usually I have to drive them around for a few months) but given that my wedding dress was among items to be cleaned, I can't brag too much about my promptness. From there I went to the genetics follow-up appointment. We didn't have much to talk about since I tested negative for all the cancer markers, but the nice doctor very lovingly bullied me into taking care of myself, so now I have a mammogram, a breast MRI, and a gynecologist visit on the calendar. I also did one of those fancy body composition scan things. I hadn't done one since my powerlifting days and was surprised to learn that my body fat is now 12 percentage points lower. Granted, I'm also about 30 pounds lighter, but it's still unexpected. My overall body composition is actually pretty good in terms of cancer prevention. Could be better - could always be better - but I'm doing all right.

Afterwards, I took the dog for nice long walk. I think Titan was feeling a bit tired - he did a lot of slow moseying directly in front of me, weaving back and forth across the sidewalk. Made me a little bit insane. Dog ownership is supposed to be really good for your health and while it certainly can make you walk more regularly, the aerobic benefits of those walks are diminished greatly when your companion spends more time standing around than moving. The cleaners were already there when we got home, which would have been fine except they'd brought the trash up from downstairs and Titan immediately got into it, dragging out a half-empty can of rotten cat food to snack on. He was exiled to the backyard. I joined him soon after and spent a lovely hour or so reading/dozing under the awning. Then I had my quarterly call with my financial advisor. He kept apologizing for it being so "anticlimactic" but I assured him that I do not want my finances to be exciting.

I had an honor flight after work today ('tis the season), then tomorrow I'm hosting crafty day with Six, Ixy, and Sophia. (Kate's got church stuff all weekend so she can't make it.) I'm looking forward to some chill time with good people.

( Spring onions, basil and pak choi )

( Tomatoes, peas and strawberries )

We now have Gypsophila vaccaria, pink Linaria, cornflowers, Mesembryanthemums and flax in full bloom, along with the field and oriental poppies, and the white flowers from the 'purple mix' -- oddly enough none of the cornflowers in that mix seem to have come out the dark red colour this time round. None of the California poppies have produced white flowers this year, even though I didn't think any of the old plants had died, so I'm not sure what happened there...
( Sweet peas )
The two chillies that I kept from the pot of six are still tiny, but have put on considerable growth. I have sowed some more basil seed, from the 2025 bag this time :-)

Title: Mermay
Artist: mekare
Rating: G
Fandom: One Piece
Characters/Pairings: Chopper, Nami, Luffy, Zoro, Usopp
Content Notes: ink and watercolour on my new round watercolour pad.

Clicky Preview:

MerMay 29th of 2026.

Title: Eel Guy has a snack
Artist: leecetheartist (lineart), mific (colouring)
Rating: Gen
Fandom: original work
Characters: Eel Guy, fishes etc.
Notes: This is the Mermay art for May 27th made by leecetheartist who created this excellent drawing as a colouring page for us to play with. I've done it digitally, in Procreate, after removing the background in Photopea. Click through for full size.