flamingstumpy | Network

Going to be a very short & to the point blaug paust today, because the weather is really fucking me up and I don't have enough braincells lmao. So here's the quick rundown:

Wplace has been working again with no server issues today, so, with Noah's help, I was able to finish Eusine!!! Yippee!!

I don't know what my next project is going to be... Someone at the town nearby is drawing a bunch of Pokéball sprites so maybe I'll do more Pokémon stuff there lol. I also kinda wanna draw stuff where I used to live...

My Pokémon Starters clique is officially released! Technically my fanlistings collective is also (I added it to my index/nexus, even) because I finally finished copying over my fanlistings, cliques, etc, but I still need to sign up for everything I selected, lol. Maybe I'll actually be able to sign up at TFL this week after all!

I remembered to sign up for the hAPPy birthday flash exchange on the very last day, and I'm glad I did, because not only have I already finished my assigment, I already have a gift... 👀 Very excited to see it...

That's about it..!!!! I need to start my FIAB letter... ZZZ... I realized while watching a video today that I should have nominated 3Dwisc 😔 ah well... Hope everyone reading this is dealing with the heat as best they can!

Or if it's not that hot where you're at, please keep us in your thoughts as we suffer... 😢

Current Mood: tired

Fandoms: Beauty & The Beast, Chicago Fire, Country Comfort, Daredevil: Born Again, Dead Boy Detectives, DOC - Nelle Tue Mani, Good Trouble, Gotham Knights, Hawkeye, How To Get Away With Murder, Kevin Can F*** Himself, Nancy Drew, The Sandman, SkyMed, Warrior Nun, XO, Kitty, Young Royals

rest HERE @

mundodefieras

Our little flock of poults with mom have continued to visit the past week or so.

I've spotted a molting Cardinal and Blue Jay this week too. It has also been another warm week here in Rhode Island.

Current Mood: hot

Today is mostly sunny, humid, and hot.

I fed the birds. I've seen a mixed flock of sparrows and house finches.

EDIT 8/12/25 -- I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 8/12/25 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 8/12/25 -- I did more work around the patio.

EDIT 8/12/25 -- I potted up 4 asparagus berries from the Charleston Food Forest.

EDIT 8/12/25 -- I did more work around the patio.

EDIT 8/12/25 -- I did more work around the patio.

EDIT 8/12/25 -- I did more work around the patio.

.

Current Mood: busy

Book Info

Topics: Nonfiction, Feminism, Environmental Activism, Climate Change

LibraryThing: https://www.librarything.com/work/book/291465827

Acquired from: Little Free Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA [see visit log]

Started reading: August 9, 2025

Finished reading: August 13, 2025 (DNF’d)

Reading Updates

Page 0: Picked this book to read next because it’s the heaviest— I don’t want to have to worry about trying to pack it and take it with me!

It’s a relatively new book (published 2023) and is basically a collection of interviews with climate activists.

Came with a bookmark from the Ann Arbor District Library (Seed Sampler, which promotes their seed library!). It’s a really nice bookmark and I’m probably gonna keep it for my collection.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

Crossposted from Pixietails Club Blog.

Went on a re-visiting circuit of Little Free Libraries from the first log, and found a new library! Plus some more good books.

Was a really nice walk, too, though I was sweating by the end because it was like 80F by 8am yeesh.

On another day, I went into the main downtown part of Ann Arbor and visited two LFLs that’re near the Farmer’s Market, though I didn’t find any books to take with me.

New LFL visited:

LFL #167052 – Jones Community Garden Library – Ann Arbor, MI
LFL #189363 – Ann Arbor, MI (not listed on the map somehow)
LFL #198908 – Detroit Street Filling Station – Ann Arbor, MI

Dropped off Moby-Duck, Seasons of the Wild and Climate Resilience!

Obtained Into the Wild, Granta issue 138, The Forest Unseen, Sweet Days of Discipline

( Photos under here! )

🌟 All LFL Visited / All LFL Visit Logs

Crossposted from Pixietails Club Blog.

On Mastodon they have various hashtags with various writing-related questions, and today, a question on one of the hashtags was "On a scale of from 1 to 10, how safe is your world?" (by which they meant the world of your writing project).

Several people pointed out that you can't really average out safety over a whole world, and still more people pointed out that safety is always going to be a matter of "for whom?" No matter what genre you're writing, if you have multiple characters, they can't all have the same level of safety. A bacterium is a different level of threat depending on the strength of your immune system; oppressive politics always have a favored exempted few, etc.

And I had to laugh at our current age's fascination with quantification. On a scale of 1 to 10, sure.

My tutee has a green card. This makes her situation a lot safer than that of the dozen new employees I was in the company of the other day who were from Haiti. They all have a card showing temporary protected status. ... We know how secure that status is ... But for the time being at least, it makes them safer than people with no legal status at all.

I love what people do with the power of imagination: we create all sorts of things; we can create elaborate shared worlds called things like "the economy" or "nation-states." We joint-roleplay these so intensely that it becomes our reality. It's like a picture book I remember from childhood called Conrad's Castle, where a boy throws a stone up in the air and it sticks there, and then another and another, and soon he builds a whole castle up there. It all falls down when a hater says "Hey, you can't do that!" ... But then he says "I can too," and rebuilds it.

The larger shared worlds we imagine, like the various nation-states or the rule of law, or principles of humanitarianism--they can fall down just like Conrad's castle, and suddenly your status changes. We know this. We're seeing it all the time. For the shared worlds we want to flourish, we have to keep saying "I can too." As for the ones we don't like so much, we can maybe take out the stones one by one to build something we prefer.

Current Music: Deus King: Why

https://xkcd.com/3128/

Hey, so did you ever finish your video series about Cassie and the caterpillar morph? I loved the first three, but never ... no, sorry, I get it, this isn't the place. Sorry! Sorry.

https://xkcd.com/3128/

This is your weekly read-in-progress post for you to talk about what you're currently reading and reactions and feelings (if any)!

For spoilers:

<details><summary>insert summary</summary>Your spoilers goes here</details>

<b>Highlight for spoilers!*</b><span style="background-color: #FFFFFF; color: #FFFFFF">Your spoilers goes here.</span>*

This novel is structured as a woman's reminiscences of her life, beginning in the 1990s at an elite boarding school she attended in England. The students are told that they are special and important, and that it is an extreme privilege to attend this school, but they aren't given a clear understanding of why this is or what makes the school so different from others. Throughout the first few chapters, it becomes increasingly apparent that something strange and ominous is going on. The students have close friendships with each other, but nobody ever mentions family or going home for holidays. The teachers are cagey about the nature of the situation, and some seem distressed by it, as if their hands are tied.

What is really going on is stated outright a quarter of the way into the book. The rest of the book is spent exploring that premise and looking at how the characters are shaped by and respond to their circumstances. I don't know whether the author intended to present the premise as a secret or not, but the book has been marketed as though it's a secret, and whether it's a spoiler is subjective. (Thank you all for your input on the poll!)

The premise and my thoughts on treating it as a spoiler

The premise is that the students are clones who are being raised to serve as organ donors. They have limited rights compared to non-clones, and the expectation is that they will die from having their organs harvested sometime in young adulthood.

I knew the premise going in because I saw it discussed years ago, and I suspect it wouldn't be that hard to figure it out even before it's made explicit. But I'm sure it also depends on what your expectations are going into the book, if you're looking for a "twist" and how broad you think the scope of possible twists is. Personally, I think it does the book a disservice to coyly market it as literary fiction, if that's the reason the premise has been treated as a secret. For people who like both litfic and specfic equally maybe it's fine, but that's not everyone, so you're asking for people who only want litfic to be annoyed by the bait-and-switch, and for some proportion of people who would like the book to never pick it up because they think it's not for them (or to be aggravated by the implication that we're not calling it specfic because it's "serious literature" instead). I knew it was speculative fiction and I enjoyed it as speculative fiction, and I think dancing around the genre is unnecessary. So that's where I sit with it.

My thoughts which assume you know the premise but don't necessarily assume you've read the book

Anyway! I really liked the book! Based on the three Ishiguro books I have now read, (this, Klara and the Sun, and The Remains of the Day, I've come to appreciate his skill in writing characters who have a perspective on the world that could be considered "limited" in that the reader and the other characters understand things the POV characters don't, but it's very clear that their lived experience has validity and their inner emotional landscape is as rich as anyone's. No matter how small a person's world may look from the outside, to them it is everything.

Kathy and the other clones see things from a certain angle because of the way they've been raised and what they've been taught to believe. They don't automatically perceive the horror of their existence the way we do because they aren't us, they don't know what we know about how things ought to be. But within their own frame of reference, they live their lives and make choices according to their own understanding of who has authority and what the inevitable facts of life are. Their experiences, memories, feelings, insights, and relationships matter even if we can see how constrained they are by their circumstances. After all, we are also bounded by what we perceive as inevitable facts of life, and we also don't know whether we perceive that correctly.

I think the book reflects how we are socialized not to talk about (let alone question) uncomfortable societal truths. I was struck by Kathy's observation that as the students were growing up, the teachers drip-fed them bits of information that they were not quite old enough to understand. She realizes this may not even have been consciously planned, but it had the effect of making them feel they had "always known" what they were and the life that had been chosen for them, even though they had no specific memories of being told. I think this is a bullseye description of what it feels like to be socialized to accept injustice.

Children don't just learn from what is directly stated to them, they learn from what isn't said, from adults' discomfited grimaces, annoyed dismissals, vague contextless remarks, and awkward changes of subject. The school setting (which was a choice on the part of the characters, to structure the clones' residence as a school—it's not like these kids know what schools are really like in the outside world) to me drives this point home. The adults are trying to educate the students for reasons of their own that we learn later, but the primary lesson they're teaching isn't on the curriculum.

Some specific thoughts that reveal details from much later in the book

Once we got the full explanation of what the school really was, that they were trying to "prove" the clones had souls, I found it just as disturbing as the concept of organ donor clones in itself. Miss Emily's goal wasn't to prove the clones' humanity so they could be liberated and the hideous practice of organ harvest put to an end, it was to prove their humanity so they could be treated a little bit better before the slaughter.

The fact that she is able to tolerate this cognitive dissonance speaks volumes about what she has been indoctrinated to accept, and points to the modes of thought underpinning the broader dystopian world. This, for me, was the true horrifying reveal, and it's all the more horrifying because it is entirely mundane: The belief that a class of people is subhuman can withstand knowledge that disproves the belief, provided that abandoning the belief is inconvenient enough.

By the same token, Miss Emily's description of how public opinion turned against her ideas and led to the closure of Hailsham is so deeply unsettling because it is so familiar and plausible. A push for expanded rights for a marginalized group, even an incremental push, is a precarious thing that can be derailed by a poorly-timed scandal or a negative association, even if the connection is tenuous. As in our own world, clearly many people's beliefs are not based on reason, on consistent principles, or even on a blunt assessment that saving some people justifies sacrificing others. They're based on how much of the truth you can convince yourself to dismiss. If you're looking for a reason to discredit calls for justice, you'll always find one, and you'll find plenty of people happy to validate your conclusion.

Emily's story doesn't spell this out. As always, it's between the lines as she skips over assumed context that Kathy and Tommy don't share. And they're not even looking for justice, only a temporary reprieve from the fate they've already accepted. But they can't get that, not even when they ask nicely. (Does it ever work to ask nicely?)

My biggest takeaway from the book is how difficult it is to independently invent the idea of a just world when that concept has been denied to you, and when even the people who come the closest to being your allies don't actually want justice—they want injustice with the sharpest of its vulgar edges politely sanded off.

Creator:

andersenmom
Title: On Watch
Rating: T
Type: Fic
Size/length/word count etc.: 1109
Prompt: 006: Lust
Fandom/Ship: The Kingdom, Yang Dongsik | Louis, Shim Youngjoon | Hwon
Notes/Warnings: None
Summary When Dongsik wakes up, he reveals that his fall wasn't an accident.

Find the table with the list of fics here

Current Mood: exhausted
Current Music: Out the Door - Got7

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I am spending a TON of time on this round of Cursed Witch editing at the moment, and loving it. It's still hard work, and it was hard work getting to the point when I could do this, but it's all coming together and feeding into each other and that's a great feeling. The worldbuilding is being refined even further, leading to new ideas that magically solve other problems I had on the backburner, so my brain was likely working on it the whole time even without my active input.

It's still all a bit strange. At first, going on yet another round of structural editing after so long felt like ghostwriting someone else's story. Then because the changes started getting smaller, and generating more ideas of their own, it felt like creating fic for it, haha. Now, I don't know, I work on it in the morning and at night and the story and world and characters are constantly living in my head, in a "love you guys" kinda way rather than the "OH MY GOD I AM SO SICK OF THIS STORY" way I had reached last year. I always had a vague idea for 2 potential sequels, a one-line summary ready for each which was interesting but apparently not enough to actually make me really plan to ever write them. Now I'm adding more details to that "Sequels ideas" file once or twice (or thrice!) a day, peppering little hints of foreshadowing, sometimes even bits that work in layers so that (I think) one can think are related to the current story, but should someone care enough to re-read later after knowing what happens in book 2 or 3, then some sentences take on a completely different meaning. And I'm thinking maybe I'd quite like to take a stab at book 2 once I've handled the Soul Thief structural edits? I also had a "fatal flaws" file about a couple of points I thought made the story broken at a fundamental level, but I believe I managed to smooth or fix that to an acceptable degree to me anyway :D

I am so excited. Obviously, working/editing at the current pace would not be sustainable, but I'm just making a big push while all that motivation and excitement are bursting at the seams. And I know this is all flowing relatively well thanks to all the thinking and prep work I did, even if it felt like it was taking forever. I had to summarise my summaries of beta-reader comments because it was still too long to easily reference XD But I think this kind of exercise is what's helping keeping as much as possible in my head.

May this energy last until I finish this round of editing, too...!! Haha. One can hope. Back to it, now.

To-day is the day oh my pumpkin! comes out! We have two more members of the senbatsu to talk about before the month ends, and I sadly know nothing of their groups at all yet having only been in BNK48 sister group CGM48 since passing auditions in 2022, Pimlapas Suwannoi, nicknamed Lookked, is already standing shoulder to shoulder with members of AKB's Kami 7! If that's not a success story, friends, then I really don't know what is!

Lookked!

Lookked and fellow member Arunya Kaewmalai, also of Team C, hold the record as being the two fastest promoted members across both Thai groups. With CGM's debut announcement in 2019, they weathered the storm brought on by the sudden pandemic whilst other contemporary groups such as the Indian DEL48 and Vietnamese SGO48 collapsed and went on to announce their second generation in 2022, of which Lookked was a member. You could argue that the prior existence of BNK helped shore the group up during the plague years, making investors perhaps a little less nervous given the older group's track-record and the transfer of former AKB member, Izuta Rina, now a force to reckon with in her own right, but however it happened, CGM, with only single under their belt at the time, Chiang Mai 106, an adaptation of NGT's Max Toki 315-gou—guess my two favourite members in that video, folks!—CGM endured.

Less than nine months after the announcement of the second generation and Lookked was in Team C, appearing in the senbatsu for fifth single, 2565 just several months later. By this time, Izurina was being created as co-producer alongside Akimoto Yasushi for CGM's releases. I don't know if she will have any say over the matter of the senbatsu, I wouldn't have imagined so, but it's nice to think that Izurina would have been especially looking out for future members who might make an impact. Whatever the case, Lookked definitely made an impression as she has remained in the senbatsu with her latest appearance being in Totsuzen Do love me!, a HKT cover, in which she acts as the song's centre. Along with the release of the AKB48 original in which Lookked appears, to-day also marks the release date of the international versions of oh my pumpkin! including a CGM only version with Lookked as centre!

Already one of the most prominent members of her group, I hope that oh my pumpkin! helps draw Lookked even more attention amidst both the Japanese and overseas audiences! As a former member of Thai pop group, ASTER, and with a sister also having been a member of another group, DAISY DAISY, it feels as if Lookked has both the experience and talent to really make an impact—and CGM now have announced its fourth generation as of March this year, so I feel the same can also be said for the group as a whole!

I'm holding off on listening to the new song until I have the CDs in my hand, but I really can't wait to hear how all these different members of different groups will come together for this anniversary!

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: somewhere
Current Music: Cataplexy - Lifelessdawn

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Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Biri Biri Be-lie-ving

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Current Mood: needed a breather after prev

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Current Mood: angry

...I feel like there's no point to me writing on my blog, or anywhere else, because I don't respect or trust my own thoughts and feelings. I don't feel like i have anything meaningful to say. Anything I ever could say has probably been said by someone smarter, more experienced, more disciplined, with firmer morals or better poltiics, more articulate and well-read. I don't feel like I have any unique experiences that would confer novel enough insights to compensate for my deficiencies as a person.

Someone can say that they like something I wrote, but that's never enough to make me feel like it had value on its own. General positive regard is a nothingburger; people can feel it about something that has nothing new or interesting to say, soley because it's by a person they like, or about a topic they like, or it's written in a style that garners Big Emotion and hits certain simplistic buttons in their brain (nostalgia, coziness, righteous anger, lust, etc) that override deeper critical thinking. it says nothing about quality of content. it says nothing about if i've actually raised good points or opened a discussion worth having. it doesn't say if anything i've said has value - intellectual or ideological or artistic or else-wise.

i don't understand how general positive regard can be "enough" for anyone. it's so detatched from anything specific about what makes you or the things you make worth their time. people feel it all the time about "essays" that are just fluff with no coherent argument, about fiction that's trite and banal because it happens to contain some tropes they enjoy, about kinkade paintings and funko pops of a guy they remember from a movie.

I don't want to be liked without a coherent reason. I don't want to have anything I say be liked without a coherent reason of having provoked something meaningful. I want to provide value, usefulness, something, and even when people seem to enjoy my company, I don't feel like I'm anything more than another mediocre soulless pseudo-intellectual who only mimics real thinking and creativity through imitation of their betters.

Today is partly sunny and sweltering.

I fed the birds. I've seen a flock of sparrows and house finches.

EDIT 8/12/25 -- I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 8/12/25 -- I potted up 12 sweet cherry seeds.

EDIT 8/12/25 -- I did some work around the patio.

EDIT 8/12/25 -- I did more work around the patio.

EDIT 8/12/25 -- I watered some plants on the old and new picnic tables that were wilting, then did the telephone pole garden and a few of the savanna seedlings. I'm annoyed that some plants are wilting so soon after copious watering, because I can't haul that hose around every day, or even every few days. >_<

I've seen a skunk on the patio.

I am done for the night.

Current Mood: busy

The release of the new Logseq app, introducing the database version of Logseq, is supposedly right around the corner. The current app has been basically abandoned up until recently in order to develop the new app, so the fact that a release is coming up is exciting and relieving. There have been many doubts about the likelihood of the new app making it to release. However… as I think about migrating to a new app, I’m not sure I want to continue using Logseq at all.

My initial belief was that the database version would completely replace the Markdown version. In that case, the only supported syncing solution would be through the upcoming subscription service. Since I self-host my file syncing using SyncThing, I thought that this would be incompatible with my current setup. This doesn’t actually seem to be the case. Apparently the new app will support an alternate mode for Markdown files that can be synced as before.

This should have been a relief, because it means my notes and setup should transfer cleanly, but the scare left me with some lingering concerns about the future of Logseq and my notes.

( Read more... )

I’ll try out the new app when it releases. Even if it’s a smooth transition, I don’t know if it’s a good choice in the long run. I’ve been using Obsidian for the past few days and it’s going well. Converting notes from Logseq is a pain,² but I’ll probably have to do it eventually, so this might be the right time to start.

2: I have a main vault where I’ve recreated my workflow in a more Obsidian-compatible way, and a second vault for testing converted notes before merging them in.

Current Mood: sad

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Page Summary

javert - miniblog
wickedgame in fandom_icons - multifandom icons.
ribirdnerd in birdfeeding - Turkeys continue
ysabetwordsmith in birdfeeding - Birdfeeding
tozka - 📖 reading log: climate resilience by kylie flanagan
tozka - lfl visit log (2)
asakiyume - Temporarily Protected and other statuses
xkcd_feed - Thread Meeting
geraineon in cnovels - Read-in-Progress Wednesday
pauraque - Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)
andersenmom in 100ships - 006: Lust; Kingdom; On Watch (Yang Dongsik | Louis, Shim Youngjoon | Hwon)
sincereously in fic_promptly - Wednesday, August 13th - Oaths
vriddy - Diving into edits, prep work paying off
sonofgodzilla - AKC Courtneyyyyyy Culture Festival #190: Pimlapas Suwannoi
linky - Even More Yapping For Blaugust
minoanmiss - Chocolate Frosting
minoanmiss - This is not a political plan
malymin - Anhedonia
ysabetwordsmith in birdfeeding - Birdfeeding
biteshelter - Leaving Logseq (Maybe)

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this is some other stuff

friends and junk

Network

miniblog

multifandom icons.

Turkeys continue

Birdfeeding

📖 reading log: climate resilience by kylie flanagan

Book Info

Reading Updates

lfl visit log (2)

Temporarily Protected and other statuses

Thread Meeting

Read-in-Progress Wednesday

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)

006: Lust; Kingdom; On Watch (Yang Dongsik | Louis, Shim Youngjoon | Hwon)

Wednesday, August 13th - Oaths

Diving into edits, prep work paying off

AKC Courtneyyyyyy Culture Festival #190: Pimlapas Suwannoi

Even More Yapping For Blaugust

Chocolate Frosting

This is not a political plan

Anhedonia