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Stuff I Love: Top Ten Edition Challenge 2

Make a Top Ten list for your favourite series and tell people exactly why you love it. This can be in any format - tv series, book series, radio plays, movie sequels, something else not mentioned here. Your series can be as short as two vaguely linked pieces of media and as long as... well, the sky is your limit. Whatever you like!

Alright! I wondered a bit if I should restrict by genre or by theme, and then remembered that on another website I'm celebrating femslash february, so
Top 10 of serial media where I ship the main(-ish) canon(-ish) f/f romance :D

( Details under the cut )

Current Mood: accomplished

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writing: poetry

Poetry: Knight in Shining Ardour

Knight in Shining Ardour
by

adore

My rage clawed out of my chest
And stood looking around fiercely for the enemy.

He was a radiant boy,
Never allowed to be anything else.

He blazed so that my eyes were drawn to him, fascinated.
Avidly, I watched him for what he would do next.
He didn't disappoint.

When he destroyed something, I was satisfied.
I had always wanted to be rid of it.
But I'd had too much guilt or too little courage.

When he screamed, I fell in love with his voice.
He was my rockstar.

When he cried, I collected his tears in a shot glass and cheered
Before downing them in one go.
They were a tonic.

What he killed made him more alive.

He was my knight in shining ardour

And I loved him best
When he crawled back in my chest

To recover in the warm dark quiet.

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Heated Rivalry rec

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romancing mcshep 2026

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Picture Book Monday: Only Opal

I was quite excited about the picture book Only Opal: The Diary of a Young Girl, as I’ve been low-key obsessed with Opal Whiteley for years, and what could be better than a book about Opal illustrated by Barbara Cooney?

For those of you who don’t know, Opal Whiteley came to national attention in 1920 when the Atlantic Monthly published her childhood diary, in which young Opal wrote lyrical descriptions of nature and her animal friends, who have Lars Porsenna (the crow) and Brave Horatius (the dog). Some people were and remain bowled over by the beauty of her nature writing. Other people accused Opal of making up the diary wholesale. Would any kid really name a crow Lars Porsenna? It’s just too too precious.

I believe that the diary was real, though. Opal was an extremely bright child, and extremely bright children sometimes do things that strike people who don’t know them as completely unbelievable. She also suffered from a very unfortunate accident of timing, in that she fit perfectly a cultural archetype that was just coming under attack when she published her diary. A child of Nature, growing up in poverty but learning from the trees and the flowers and a few good, solid books (traditionally the Bible and Shakespeare, but in Opal’s case a book of historical figures).

After World War I this whole “child of nature” idea came to be seen as an offshoot of a sickeningly naive vision of human nature that had been exploded by the war. And then here comes Opal Whiteley, presenting to the world this diary supposedly written when she was five and six, which completely embodies this discredited vision. Well, it’s much easier to say “She’s a fraud!” than to wonder “Is there something in the child of nature idea after all?”

Unfortunately, as I recalled as I began to read the picture book, although I find Opal as a person very interesting, I can’t stand her diary. I think it’s a real diary, truly written by Opal as a child, but even in the immensely abridged form of a picture book, it does strike me as too too precious. “One way the road does go to the house of the girl who has no seeing” - good gravy, Opal, just say she’s blind. You named a mouse Felix Mendelssohn! I know you know the word blind!

But of course Barbara Cooney’s illustrations are lovely as always. I particularly liked the picture of the mouse Felix Mendelssohn asleep on a pincushion under a little square of flannel. Just the right level of precious.

Current Mood: creative
Current Music: Fleetwood Mac - Dreams

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FANFIC: clean hands (Severance)

Totally forgot to post this yesterday. Oh well ^^U

Title: clean hands.
Fandom: Severance.
Pairing: Helena Eagan & Helly R. & Jame Eagan.
Summary: written for the prompt: "any, any female character, every woman is allowed to commit patricide."" in the Three Sentence Ficathon.
Word count: 200.

read more

-

When Helena startles awake, the last thing her eyes caught on were the elevator doors closing on their way to the severed floor, and the first thing they see now are the tiles on her father's kitchen floor; the second, him, gasping, desperate, choking on his own blood, the offending device in his hand; the third, the knife in her own blood-soaked hands.

Static in her ears, a quiet serenity washes over her; she takes in the scene with a dispassion that more closely resembles shock than her usual put-on self-assurance —all rapid breaths, trembling hands, the decision to watch as her father dies instead of do as he all but orders her to in wordless, panting pleads, is less a decision and more of an euphoric state of paralysis.

Helly is wild, dangerous, a force to be reckoned with —the resurgence of the hurricane of a child the man on the floor once slaughtered and shaped into a fawning daughter, now filling the starved husk left behind—, she's action where Helena is inaction; that's why Helly brandished the blade and Helena stands, motionless, until her father's eyes turn glassy and his mouth blissfully silent, as Helena herself finally screams.

-

Author's note: This illustrates a scenario I thought about during/after the season 2 finale. I've pondered whether to write it, but swamped as I am with both fandom and IRL projects I don't know that I'd be able to... so I jumped at the chance to indulge in it a bit, thanks to this anonymous prompt.

Did I understand most of the lyrics? No, but it was amazing

Four months ago Bad Bunny (who is actually named Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, no relation to AOC)
let people know that pretty much all of his Super Bowl half-time show would be in Spanish.
https://lauradi7dw.dreamwidth.org/994875.html

I detest American football (wikipedia puts it in a category of gridiron sports) with a fiery passion, but had a relative text me when it was time for the show, so I used my new antenna and tuned in, without having to view the game.

Watch on YouTube

Here's an article from wired this morning about all the set-up arrangements to turn a football field in California into part of Puerto Rico in a few minutes without hurting the grass on the field.
https://www.wired.com/story/bad-bunny-super-bowl-halftime-show-behind-the-scenes/

There was music beforehand as well. All of it was good, but there were a couple of oddities with the broadcast - in addition to "America the Beautiful" and "The Star Spangled Banner," there was "Lift Every voice and sing," which was not shown on TV, as far as I could tell. It's on youtube. The announcer gave us the names of the ASL interpreters but they weren't shown on camera. Maybe people in the stadium could see them on big screens? Just before those, there was a short set by Green Day.
I don't use the I word as a pejorative because of its history, but was relieved in a way that Green Day was allowed to sing Don't want to be an American (i word).

I'm a fan of Charlie Puth, who was advertised as the singer of the national anthem. He was, but there was also an orchestra and a fabulous choir, unnamed on the screen.

Watch on YouTube

I don't know who won. The world will probably let me know.

Tuesday update: Patriots lost, 36 hours ago or so. I had an inkling yesterday when there was no talk about a parade, but I didn't get the news from anybody I knew.

LLMs are Getting a Lot Better and Faster at Finding and Exploiting Zero-Days

Posted by Bruce Schneier

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/02/llms-are-getting-a-lot-better-and-faster-at-finding-and-exploiting-zero-days.html

https://www.schneier.com/?p=71569

This is amazing:

Opus 4.6 is notably better at finding high-severity vulnerabilities than previous models and a sign of how quickly things are moving. Security teams have been automating vulnerability discovery for years, investing heavily in fuzzing infrastructure and custom harnesses to find bugs at scale. But what stood out in early testing is how quickly Opus 4.6 found vulnerabilities out of the box without task-specific tooling, custom scaffolding, or specialized prompting. Even more interesting is how it found them. Fuzzers work by throwing massive amounts of random inputs at code to see what breaks. Opus 4.6 reads and reasons about code the way a human researcher would—looking at past fixes to find similar bugs that weren’t addressed, spotting patterns that tend to cause problems, or understanding a piece of logic well enough to know exactly what input would break it. When we pointed Opus 4.6 at some of the most well-tested codebases (projects that have had fuzzers running against them for years, accumulating millions of hours of CPU time), Opus 4.6 found high-severity vulnerabilities, some that had gone undetected for decades.

The details of how Claude Opus 4.6 found these zero-days is the interesting part—read the whole blog post.

News article.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/02/llms-are-getting-a-lot-better-and-faster-at-finding-and-exploiting-zero-days.html

https://www.schneier.com/?p=71569

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Interesting Links for 09-02-2026

Current Mood: devious

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sunday check-in

Sunday Check-in

Working on an unexpected Miami Vice fic that hit me today, and I'm almost finished with the rough draft. I watched a really angsty episode, and decided, yeah, I need to make it worse. 😉 Now when I started writing it, I had no idea how it would end. There were three possible outcomes, one happy, one unhappy, and one a mix of both. That's the fun of writing for me, the being surprised at the endings. Turns out it's the unhappy one, but it has to be that way, for several reasons. I have some points to make about the characters and their relationship, and the time they lived in as well. Things that have been bouncing around in my head for awhile.

I wrote a slashy episode post about it on Tumblr, as well. Because, wow, these two throw me for a loop sometimes I can't believe what I'm seeing. I don't even think it's subtext anymore, not when it's so difficult to think of a non-slashy reason for some of these behaviors...

Oh, and I also made my first 'short'. I recently discovered a secret (shh!), that some of the mass-produced box sets that are put out by companies that aren't the studios... don't have copy guard. So, you can extract them to a hard drive. So, if I ever get the patience and experience, I could actually make songvids... I've always wanted to! But I have zero patience.

So, I haven't been writing any more Three Sentence Fics. I did a couple earlier in the week but haven't posted them anywhere else yet, haven't had a chance.

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media: movies

Horror movies, Australian edition

It feels strangely awkward watching movies about people who talk and behave like me! I know I’m not alone in that; Australian cultural cringe is a well studied phenomenon, and we don't exactly have a local equivalent of Hollywood churning out all-Aussie blockbusters on a regular schedule. When I think of Australian cinema, I think of boring arts grant dramas that no one wants to watch and culturally hyperspecific comedy that we don't want anyone else to watch lest the world know us for the bunch of dags we really are. Fun, tropey genre films are supposed to be about Special Fake Movie People with accents I've never heard in person and manners that are upside down from mine.

And yet, as I'm learning through my local library's streaming service, there's some really good Australian horror out there. I couldn't tell you exactly where to find these overseas, but at least some of them appear to have had international releases, so for all I know, they're on Netflix for you guys. I'd be so thrilled to hear what people without my cultural biases think. :D

The Tunnel (2011): This is a mockumentary about a news crew who fall foul of a mysterious subterranean killer while investigating a lead related to Sydney's network of abandoned train tunnels. The tunnels are real, and I vaguely remember hearing spooky rumours about them during the early 2010s, which I'm now thinking may have been part of a guerrilla marketing campaign for this film, lol. Anyway, this one scared the everloving shit out of me. The vibes are fantastic, the mockumentary gimmick is executed flawlessly, and most of all everything was just so familiar. I used to get everywhere I ever needed to go on those exact Sydney trains. The characters are completely normal, relatable Aussies of the kind you could meet everyday on the street. The actual plot is a bit thin but I was happy to overlook the silly bits because it was just such a damn enjoyable viewing experience. And the monster was SO FUCKING CREEPY. Pick this one if you like mockumentaries and/or wish to know more about ya girl from dreamwidth's old commute.

Relic (2020): A mother and daughter drive out to a small town in rural Victoria to check on grandma, whose neighbours haven't seen her in days. She is missing when they arrive, but reappears in the house days later, unwilling or unable to explain where she's been. Her stately country house is covered in what looks like black mould and there's a terrible black bruise on her chest. This is a heartwrenching film about the grief of losing an elderly parent to dementia, and also a fantastic haunted house story full of dark family secrets, unanswered questions and unexplained paranormal phenomena. The creaky old house and the damp, miserable evergreen forest surrounding it threw me back to the days of visiting my own grandparents. It really does capture the highly specific atmosphere of a certain kind of well-off but precipitously ageing rural town in southeastern Australia; I swear I could almost taste the air. For whatever it's worth, the Russo brothers are credited as executive producers; I don't know much about movie production and have honestly never been sure what kind of role an executive producer plays, but hey, those were two names I recognised. Take or leave the name recognition, though - I loved this movie either way.

Talk To Me (2022): A group of South Australian teens acquire an embalmed hand that lets them summon dead souls to temporarily possess them. But one of their séance parties goes too far, and a malevolent spirit decides it doesn't want to leave. This is a mix of paranormal and psychological horror that's as much about grief (the protagonist lost her mother to a very obvious suicide that her dad won’t admit to her was suicide) as about bloodthirsty ghosts. I am not sure why reviewers chose to bill a movie this thoroughly depressing as "fun" - it was fun at the start, sure, but by the end it had descended to a truly tragic place. I liked it a lot! But it definitely belongs on the downer end of the mood spectrum.

You'll Never Find Me (2023): In an isolated trailer park in the middle of the night, a young woman knocks on an older man's door to beg shelter from a violent thunderstorm. The woman is desperate, drenched, and seems unable to get her story straight about how she got there or where she came from; the man is withdrawn and antisocial and was drinking alone before the woman arrived. They both seem frightened of each other. Something about the situation is unmistakably off, but what it is exactly, the film plays close to its chest for the first exquisitely slow hour. This is a quiet, cagey movie that ratchets up the tension through unnerving not-quite-normal dialogue and uncomfortable just-barely-off-centre close-ups so that when things finally start going overtly wrong at around the hour mark, it feels almost like a relief - pain is easier to bear than the anticipation of it. I don't often enjoy trippy, "what the fuck is happening here" type stories and I REALLY don't often enjoy stories that end in the particular kind of twist this one used, but in this case I was absolutely sold on everything. Brilliant movie. Raised my blood pressure so high I had to flop on the couch and just breathe for like half an hour afterwards. No notes.

concert review: Oregon Symphony

Yes, I’m in Portland, and this concert in the large and old-fashionedly ornate (it doesn’t have restrooms, it has “lounges”) Schnitzer Concert Hall downtown turned out to be the perfect way to spend a rainy Sunday afternoon. Music Director David Danzmayr led his crackerjack orchestra through Anna Clyne’s Color Field, a typically imaginative Clyne work with some evocative open harmonies, and concluded with a thoroughly robust rendering of the Ravel orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, in which the tuba struggled a little in “Bydlo, “ but there were otherwise no problems. The orchestra has newly acquired a custom-made bell, and this clanged out like nothing you’ve heard before in the grand conclusion.

But the highlight of this concert came in between: the Bruch Violin Concerto, and it wasn’t the highlight just because the estimable Gil Shaham was soloist. I just heard this concerto last month from San Francisco, and the soloist was smooth-toned but rather characterless, while the orchestra was even bland and dull. Not this time. Here we heard why this is one of the most popular concertos in the repertoire. The orchestra was as burstingly robust as they would be in Pictures, and Shaham, though I’ve heard him perform wonders before, was simply amazing, a standing rebuke to plainer soloists. Every note had character, and his mostly high and dry tone varied tremendously, including some of the tenderest soft passages that could still be heard over the orchestra. Thrilling.

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Best of '25: Icon Voting

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→ Each maker will get their own poll.
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This post contains polls for

picnicnic,

reeby10, &

sheliak

( Let's vote! )

Current Music: Rose Betts, "Running"

If I'm hoping, then I'm hoping for the frost

I am feeling non-stop terrible. I took a couple of pictures in the snow-fallen sunshine this afternoon.

( And be the roots that make the tree. )

spatch sent me a 1957 study of walking directions to Scollay Square. Researcher's notes can be unnecessarily period-typical, but the respondents themselves are wonderful. "You're a regular question-box, aren't you?" It turns out to be part of the basis for a seminal work of urban planning and perception. I like the first draft of the public image of Boston, including its conclusion that it is a deficit to the city not to be thought of as defined by the harbor as much as the river.

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Movies: The Housemaid, Iron Lung, Whistle

The Housemaid (2025). A recently released felon (Sidney Sweeney), takes a job as a housemaid in hopes of stabilizing her life, but lady of the house Nina (Amanda Seyfried) is abusive and unstable, and things escalate.

This is once again Paul Feig directing a dumb enjoyable trashy thriller about woman, following the Simple Favor movies with Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively. Glad you found your niche, dude! Keep it up! I think parts of this might be even dumber than A Simple Favor, and it didn't matter at all. The plotholes are gaping, and we do not care, because we are here for women who Survive and ultimately Fuck Shit Up, and that is what we get.

Also like A Simple Favor, there's a husband, although at least here he's plot-relevant.

( spoilers for that )

In addition to being dumb as fuck (affectionate?), I will say this movie would have been better if maybe 20 mins of it had been cut. The middle kind of dragged.

Interestingly, this was a slow burn success at the box office; I think it's up to about $335M worldwide, which is huge for a little thriller like this. I foresee a sequel in our future, and honestly I'm here for it.

--

Iron Lung (2026). An adaptation of an indie video game, this is about a convict sent below an ocean of blood in a tiny submarine to look for... stuff.

This movie was self-funded, directed, and edited by Youtuber Markiplier, who stars. For all that, it's a pretty credible first effort. There's a lot of great atmosphere, and things go full Sam Raimi in the end in a way I enjoyed.

OTOH, I felt it really struggled with pacing and flow of information. Sometimes I had to infer key facts (like "what is his objective through the entire middle of the film") from stuff said way after the fact. Even worse, nearly all the exposition is delivered via distorted radio, and it was very frustrating to have the sense there was important stuff that I wanted to know that I straight up couldn't hear properly. There's also just too much plot and backstory and lore here for a movie with this little dialogue. The video game is barely an hour and has no characters; we don't need most of this!

Fellow youtuber hbomberguy (of the James Somerton plagiarism video fame) posted quite a long letterboxd review and made some points I appreciated, especially that Markiplier probably feels a certain personal connection to the idea of sitting in a small room trying to do an ill-defined job while unsure of one's purpose. Overall, though, my feelings align more closely with my charts guy Dan Murrell's take.

Anyway, I hope this movie is a gateway to more people discovering indie horror films. There's so much stuff out there, and a lot of it's good and weird and trying new things, like this is.

--

Whistle (2026). Some teens, including newcomer Chris (Dafne Keene) and future doctor Ellie (Sophie Nelisse) blow an ancient death whistle that causes their fated deaths to happen early, one by one.

That description does not make it sound like a good movie, and in fact it isn't, but it was trying harder than these kinds of dumb supernatural slashers often are. The cast is all very charming; I have a huge crush on Nelisse, it was great to see Keene again, now all grown up (she was Laura Kinney in Logan), and honestly all the main teens are likable, even the obligatory asshole jock. Nick Frost and Michelle Fairley are also here! Frost in particular is very fun and I wanted more of him.

There are various notes (Chris's past drug use, cousin Rel's nerdy comics obsession) that clearly were trying to add up to something. With several more rounds of script edits, this could have been this year's Clown in a Cornfield: a surprisingly charming teen slasher, greater than the sum of its parts, and with a sweet queer romance. For the first forty minutes or so, I had real hope! The setup was good!

Unfortunately this movie didn't get those edits, so it sort of tries to say something about dying and living, but also people's "deaths" are disfigured versions of themselves gleefully chasing them to ground like cats playing with their food. The cousin feels like three different characters in a trench coat. There's a time paradox thing going on with Chris's future death that just confuses the issue. It does have a queer romance, and you could argue that seeing Keene and Nelisse finally kiss is worth the price of admission, but I found it underbaked. There's also a drug dealing youth pastor with a switch blade for some reason.

Unlikely as it is with a premise this dumb, this could and should have been better.

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Six Sentence Sunday

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Current Mood: tired

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🔊 Daily music

Watch on YouTube

@ Spotify

I could play the doctor, I can cure your disease
If you were a sinner, I could make you believe
Lay you down like one, two, three
Eyes roll back in ecstasy
I can smell your sickness, I can cure your (Cure)
Cure your disease🎵
Lady Gaga - Disease

Current Mood: discontent
Current Music: Hudson & Rex

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Writerly Ways

I was listening to this the other day about endings

Watch on YouTube

And had several thoughts: 1. I suck at ending things. I never want to say goodbye to the characters. If I don't finish it I have to say goodbye. But that's not the problem mentioned above. That's for people who finish things

2. Have I been guilty of any of them?

3. I might be guilty. My 1980s monster hunter toes the line for the unearned happy ending. Maybe. Sort of.

It's hard to talk about it without spoiling the ending and it probably IS something that would be better if a beta reader looked at I could discuss it with them.

So why am I worried? there are multiple monster in this (maybe too many, that's a problem for another time). One monster is there at the end but it also did the work for the heroes and I'm wondering is that a good pay off? Dan and Howell (the two characters with issues that need to be resolved) get to their ending so there's that. It's probably not as bad an ending as I worry it is.

How about you? Have you worried about your endings?

Open Calls

Trollbreath Magazine Speculative fiction, poetry, and non-fiction of all kinds with a particular fondness for slipstream and fabulism in all their delightful forms

What Elegant Stars: Queer Tales of Impossible Style Space opera stories involving style, fashion, and society with a queer theme.

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Tea or Coffee, Stars, and Gravity Stories must include the 3 title elements: 1. Tea or Coffee, 2. Stars, 3. Gravity.

Nine Manuscript Publishers Open to Submissions in February 2026

40 Themed Submission Calls and Contests for February 2026

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Does Your Novel Just…Stop? What Makes a Good Ending (I swear I didn't plan this but the article is here...)

How to Write a Book Pitch That Gets Replies (With Examples).

Metaphor Fatigue: When Imagery Stops Working

From Betty

Words pull us through to the future

Five Ways Gods and the Afterlife Change a Fantasy Setting

How to Craft a Satisfying Reveal

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Six Ways to Keep Characters in the Danger Zone

The Dos and Don’ts of Blogging for Writers

Think Music As You Write Words

Seven Decisions That Can Crash Your Story Onto The Rocks.

Five Things I’d Go Back and Tell New Writer Me

Is Single or Multiple Viewpoints Best for Your Story?

Bookshop.org Teams with Draft2Digital

When Should You Stop Querying a Book?

How Writers Should Take Advice: Knowing When to Play It Safe and When to Take Risks.

Finding Inspiration to Write: How Body, Mind, and Soul Work Together

Publishing Paths for Writers: Understanding Vanity Presses Before You Sign

Why Writers Should Take a Daily Walk to Boost Creativity and Writing Output

Story as Cosmology: Understanding Story as a Framework for Meaning

The Greengrocer Writes a Fantasy Novel

So Random

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Multifandom: Unsent Letters - An Epistolary Exchange

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finish line,
wwm

Finish Line February 8!

FINISH LINE

YOU MADE IT!

I hope your weekend treated you well, but even if it didn’t, we’re here to celebrate your marathon achievements!

Please reply with your numbers for the weekend–word count, number of pages edited, outlining work–whatever you accomplished. Include what you feel should be included, but please remember that we love numbers almost as much as words.

Thank you for writing with us this weekend!