 iPhone 13 mini photo |
Yesterday, the Easter Bunny (a.k.a. BFF Jenni) delivered an Easter basket to my house. She usually sneaks it onto my porch and slips away unseen. However, yesterday, I was working in the garage and had the garage door open, so I caught her. So, besides the basket, I got the added treat of a nice little chat with my dear friend. Such a good day!
Going with some spring vibes with birds and flowering trees.
This was a pretty good week. Work was fine. The effort to take walks during my workday has been good, and I'm happy with it. It seems like it makes me feel better through the day, and I'm hoping it helps with a little endurance, even though the walks are fairly short. I didn't get any fiction writing done, but I did do pretty steady work on my book reviews. I'd hoped to read a bit more, but what I did was okay. Didn't have a chance to play games much, so I'm hoping to get back to that a bit more next week. I really did a pretty decent amount off my list.
Goals for the week:
- I did finish reading The Fellowship of the Ring (and forgot to check it off ;_;)
- I did pay toward my hospital bill
- I did pay my imaging bill, for the CT scan that was apparently only partially included in the hospital's billing
- I finished my March book reviews
- I did not work on my WIP outline
- I did not read These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart
- I did clean up my table and drawer, finally
- I did not work on my reading page
- I did water my plants
- We did not pay rent - have to wait until Monday
- I did set up the rest of the tracking grids for this notebook
- I did post my April writing goals
- I did my
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
getyourwordsout check in (9547 words, ytd: 34828) - We did go get crickets
- We gave Bella a bath, which she of course loved (she did not)
Tracked habits:
- Work - 5/7
- Household Maintenance - 2/7
- Physical Activity - 7/7 - the walks at work have been steady and nice
- Wrote 500/1000+ Words - 0/7
- Non-fiction Writing - 6/7 - 2 days of over 1000 words, 4 days of over 500 words, 1 additional day of less than 500
- Meta Work - 5/7
- Personal Writing - 3/7
- Other Creative Things - 1/7
- Reading - 7/7 - I finished reading The Fellowship of the Ring, finished Our Bloody Pearl, my ebook side read, and started Game Changer; Alex and I read some of The Luminous Dead
- Attention to Media - 7/7 - Sunday watched some game videos in background; Monday had explore and game videos in the background; Tuesday - Friday was also background game videos; Saturday was paranormal and game videos. Basically all just stuff on in the background.
- Video Games - 2/7 - Played some more Hades
- Social Interaction - 6/7
Total words written: 5609 mostly on reviews, some on writing plans
Starting tomorrow, I'll have a full week and change where every day has some obligation or appointment, one Tuesday to another. Movie tickets, dentist visits, concerts, a whole bunch of stuff. Making a cake, too, though that's more within the bounds of my apartment and doesn't require me to show up anywhere besides the grocery store, and even then it's just to buy some fresh ingredients.
Is it strange I'm looking forward to it? There's parts that are going to be slightly inconvenient, and I'm looking forward to some things more than others, and overall I'm liking the idea of having places to go, things to do. Things to get done, really.
I started the at-home cataloging gig today. I didn't do much, just a few entries, because I wanted to touch base with the client as soon as was possible within the timeline of the project. I'm waiting on a response to let me know if it's what he wants, or what he wants changed. Certainly having other things to occupy my time is going to make waiting for an email or a phone call that much easier. There's only going to be so much Lunar live footage before they have to come back to Earth.
Is it strange I'm looking forward to it? There's parts that are going to be slightly inconvenient, and I'm looking forward to some things more than others, and overall I'm liking the idea of having places to go, things to do. Things to get done, really.
I started the at-home cataloging gig today. I didn't do much, just a few entries, because I wanted to touch base with the client as soon as was possible within the timeline of the project. I'm waiting on a response to let me know if it's what he wants, or what he wants changed. Certainly having other things to occupy my time is going to make waiting for an email or a phone call that much easier. There's only going to be so much Lunar live footage before they have to come back to Earth.
April Iconathon—a multifandom prompt fest for icon making
Apr. 6th, 2026 04:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
likealighthouse posting in fandom_on_dw
![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
NOTE: This is a living document and will be updated in response to changes and new types of spam as observed by OTW volunteers.
LAST UPDATED: March 30, 2026
As AO3 continues to grow, there has been an increase in the amount and variety of spambots that attempt to harass or scam users. Spambots may try to imitate other users and even AO3/OTW volunteers to appear more realistic. This post shares a brief update on how we’re working to combat this issue, what types of spam we’ve seen, and what you can do if you encounter spam comments on AO3.
What We’re Doing
Protecting our users from scammers and bots targeting AO3 is important to us, and we are actively working to combat spam on the site in a variety of ways—both visible and not. We will not share a detailed list of every change we’ve made (so as to not provide spammers with information about how to circumvent these measures), but some examples include introducing comment rate limits for logged-in users, changing the default comment setting on new works to “Registered users only”, spam checking comments and comment edits from new users, and making a variety of improvements to the admin tools used by our Policy & Abuse volunteers to handle reports and remove spam comments.
We continue to consider and undertake additional technical changes to help prevent and improve our response to spambots. However, it is important to us that any anti-spam measures we implement do not substantially harm users who are browsing or attempting to comment normally. Many more aggressive anti-spam measures would make AO3 less accessible, particularly for users using assistive devices such as screen readers.
In addition to taking technical steps to help address the issues, we continue to post updates about spambots and other important changes to AO3 on our Tumblr, Bluesky, and Twitter/X. We encourage you to follow us on these platforms to stay informed about what’s going on.
Types of Spam Comments
Below is a list of different types of spam comments that have been posted on AO3 over the last year. We intend to maintain this list and add new types of spam to it as they are identified; however, this list may not include every type of spam comment that could possibly be received. We encourage you to remain vigilant and follow internet safety best practices.
If you’re not sure if something is a spam comment, you’re welcome to contact Policy & Abuse for assistance. Before doing so, we encourage you to click through the links below to learn more about each type of comment and use your best judgement to determine if a comment appears to be genuine or could be a scam.
- Art Commission Spam: These comments come from both guests and registered accounts who pretend to be artists who want to make comics or illustrations for your fanfic. They may ask questions or praise your work to try and get you to reply to them, before convincing you to contact them off AO3 (often via Discord). They will try to scam you into paying for their art, which is either AI-generated or does not exist at all. (First reported August 2024, news post published December 2024)
- Deprecated Fandoms Spam: These guest comments claim that AO3 will be “deleting works to conserve server space”. There is no such thing as a deprecated fandom and there is no limit on the number of fanworks that can be posted to a specific tag. (First reported May 2025, Tumblr announcement May 2025)
- AI Use Accusation Spam: These guest comments will accuse you of using AI in your work. They may mention a particular AI generator or AI detection service, or claim that they “saw you remove the AI prompts from your work”. (First reported April 2023, Tumblr announcement November 2025)
- Harassing Spam: These guest comments will accuse you or another user of promoting discriminatory beliefs, deceiving fans, or similar behaviors. They often suggest that you “consider adding more diverse characters” to “repair the trust you’ve lost with your audience”. (First reported October 2025, Tumblr announcement November 2025)
- Praise and Unsolicited Suggestions Spam: These guest comments will compliment your writing but then offer ridiculous suggestions for how to make your work better. Similar to the harassing spam, they may ask you to add a minority character to your work or threaten to publicly expose you if you don’t do what they want. (First reported October 2025)
- Special Character/Keysmash Spam: These comments are usually long and consist entirely of emojis or nonsense, keysmash-style sequences of characters from a variety of non-Latin scripts or languages (e.g., Chinese, Cyrillic, Thai, etc). (First reported November 2025)
- Reporting To Authorities Spam: These guest comments threaten to report you or your work to the authorities or your employers. They also may allege security concerns like your email being compromised or spyware on your computer. (First reported December 2025, Tumblr announcement December 2025)
- Disparaging Spam: These guest comments insult you or your writing, claiming that you “wasted your talents” or “have no life”. They may also threaten suicide or tell you to delete your work. (First reported December 2025)
- PowerShell Spam: These comments present you with a piece of code to enter into your computer’s terminal/command line. While they claim that the purpose of the code is for your protection or security, the code in these comments would actually delete all documents from your hard drive. (First reported January 2026)
- Doxxing Threat Spam: These guest comments claim that they know where you live, have seen you in person, and/or threaten to meet you face-to-face. They often say that they have or will post your personal information (name, address, etc.) online or that they are stalking you in real life (e.g. “left a gift in a briefcase near your house”). (First reported January 2026, Tumblr announcement January 2026)
- Spam Impersonating OTW Volunteers: These guest comments claim to be AO3/OTW volunteers and say that there has been a data breach or that AO3 and other sites (such as Reddit) have been sending out fraudulent password reset emails. (First reported January 2026, Tumblr announcement February 2026)
- Downtime Spam: These guest comments claim that the March 2026 AO3 downtime was caused by hackers and AO3 has a virus that will destroy your device, and encourage reformatting your device or deleting all your works. (First reported March 2026)
None of the accusations these spam comments make are true. The bots are merely spamming false accusations in order to alarm or harass AO3 users. It is generally safe to ignore these comments once you’ve removed and/or reported them as outlined below.
What You Can Do
Do not engage in conversation with spam commenters. Do not provide your email or social media contact information to a commenter who asks for it. Scammers try to get you to talk to them privately, because it is often easier to deceive or manipulate people in a one-on-one conversation.
Do not click on any links, run any code commands on your computer, or search out and harass any users named in these comments. Scammers often copy the username of a real AO3 user on their guest comments to make them look more real. Pay attention to the “(Guest)” indicator which will appear next to the name of anyone who comments while not logged in.
For spam comments on your own work, the best way to handle them depends on whether they are from registered accounts or guests. Refer to the instructions below on how to handle Spam from a Guest User or Spam from a Registered Account.
If you see a spambot comment on someone else’s work, you can report the comment as spam to Policy & Abuse (even if it’s a guest comment) as you would a comment on your own work. You can also let the creator know the comment is from a bot and that they should mark it as spam.
Please don’t report comments that have already been deleted. As part of handling a report about spam comments (whether from guests or registered accounts), we will remove other comments made by the same bot. If the comments have been deleted, the bot has already been actioned and no further reports are needed.
Spam from a Guest User
If you receive a spambot comment on your work which is posted by a guest:
- Go directly to the comment on your work, either by clicking on the link in your email or in your AO3 inbox.
Note: The “Spam” button only appears when viewing a guest comment directly on your work. This is because the AO3 comment inbox is merely a copy of the work’s comments—deleting a comment from your AO3 inbox does not delete the comment from the work itself.
- Click on the “Spam” button to mark the guest comment as spam, remove it from your work, and help train our automated spam-checker to reject similar spam comments in the future.
Note: Marking guest comments as spam does not submit a report to the Policy & Abuse committee, but unless you are receiving dozens of guest spam comments in a short time period, there is no need to submit a separate report.
To prevent future guest spam comments, you may also want to consider disabling anonymous commenting or restricting your work to registered users only.
If you are reporting multiple guest comments, please submit only one report and include all comment links in your report description. (You can get the direct link to a specific comment by selecting the “Thread” button on the comment and copying the URL of that page.)
If you are receiving dozens of guest spam comments in a short time period, we recommend turning on comment moderation and providing us with a link to the unreviewed comments section of the affected work(s) instead of reporting the comments individually.
Spam from a Registered Account
If the spam comment is posted by a registered AO3 account:
- Select the “Thread” button on the spam comment. This will take you to the specific comment page.
- Scroll to the bottom of the page and select Policy Questions & Abuse Reports.
- In the “Brief summary of Terms of Service violation” field, enter “Spambot”.
- In the “Description of the content you are reporting” field, enter “This is a spambot, their username is USERNAME.” (replace USERNAME with the account’s actual username)
- Optionally, you may also choose to block or mute the account.
Please don’t report multiple spam accounts in one report. Each account is actioned separately and listing more than one account per report delays our response to you.
Closing
In general, please follow internet safety best practices and be cautious of unsolicited advertisements or harassing comments on your work. For some advice on other ways you can protect your AO3 account, take a look at this internet security guidance from our Policy & Abuse volunteers.
Sting - "Shape of My Heart" (Live)
I think this is the first Sting song I ever heard. Still sounds good.
I think this is the first Sting song I ever heard. Still sounds good.
I'm just coming to the end of a fantastic four-day weekend, and I'm not ready for it to be over. I never travel over the Easter weekend — it always comes at exactly the point in the year when I need a lot of rest and recovery — and so, other than day trips, I stick fairly close to home. My rule is that I go the furthest away on the Friday, and then stay progressively closer and closer as the four days continue, and I find that this works well.
This time around, Matthias and I went out on the train to Bury St Edmund's on Friday. We pottered around in town for a bit, had lunch at this place (excellent), then wandered across the road to a pub that was having a mini beer festival, and sat around outside for a bit, although it was windy and cold and I had to ask them to turn on their outdoor gas heaters to keep me warm! Bury is fairly close, but I feel as if I've rarely gone there, in spite of living in this part of the world for many, many years now.
On Saturday, we had a day out in Ely — cheese platter for lunch this place, sushi for dinner at the fancy sushi restaurant, and more wandering around in between. It was again a bit too cold to be outdoors much, but the river was as pretty as ever, and dotted with various groups of people having cups of tea or rounds of drinks in the houseboats.
Yesterday we didn't leave the house at all. I did a bit of gardening, read, did yoga, and spent most of the day slow-cooking an Indonesian curry for dinner. The garden is slowly springing back to life. I have to spend much of my time chasing the wood pigeons away from the cherry trees, as if they're left to their own devices, they'll eat all the flowers and shoots and we won't have any fruit. The seedlings in the growhouse are coming along nicely, and I'm particularly pleased at the prospect of being able to make my own pickles from cucumbers I've grown myself this year.
Today began with a fairly slow start: the last of the hot cross buns, laundry, cleaning, more communing with the garden, and then a little walk through the park that rings our part of the town. After lunch, we went and sat out in the courtyard garden of our favourite cafe/bar for a bit, then picked up the first gelato of the year from the place that is only seasonally open (I think the owners go back somewhere warmer and more Mediterranean over the winter) on the way home. Once I've finished off this post, I'll gather in the laundry, do a last sweep of the garden, and start winding down.
You can see from this weekend photoset that I started out with some extremely ambitious reading plans, and I'm pretty pleased that I made it through five of these books. Five out of seven isn't too shabby! Those books were a wonderful mix of new-to-me and annual reread favourites, fiction and nonfiction, short stories and novels.
I started off with Is A River Alive?, Robert Macfarlane's latest. This is nature writing about rivers (including some of the world's last remaining chalk streams around the corner from my workplace in Cambridge), but also a look at the global movement to grant legal personhood to the natural world — in particular rivers — and the people and organisations fighting to make that happen. As with any nonfiction writing about the state of the environment, it's pretty bleak in places, although the relentless energy (and enthusiasm they have for frogs, fungi, beetles, snakes, bodies of water, etc) of the various people Macfarlane encounters is infectious.
Next up was Death and the Penguin, Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov's most famous work. Having familiarised myself with Kurkov through both his historical mysteries and his war memoirs, it seemed only fair to pick this one up when I could, and I'm glad I did. It's a blackly comic, surreal look at the chaos and disorientation of Ukraine in the early years of independence from the Soviet Union, with a hapless struggling author protagonist who winds up working for a newspaper as an obituary writer, only to realise that his obituaries (which, as is the case for all newspapers, are written in advance of their subjects' deaths) are serving as a hit list for organised crime. One of Kurkov's strengths as a writer is his talent for observing and cataloguing the minutiae of everyday life in very specific times and places, and this is on full display here in his evocation of 1990s Kyiv and the people who inhabit it.
Another author who excels at observing the specific is Elena Ferrante, whose third book in the series of novels about two girls growing up in inpoverished circumstances in post-WWII Naples, and their subsequent adult lives was next on my reading list for the long weekend. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay picks up the story in the early adult years: Lenu, the narrator, has graduated university, published her first novel, and is about to marry her university boyfriend, who comes from an educated upper middle class background, and much of the novel deals with the sense of anxiety and imposter syndrome she feels having achieved social mobility — out of place among the educated elite, but ill at ease whenever she returns to her childhood home. Meanwhile, her childhood friend Lina is dealing with the consequences of a series of spectacularly bad decisions made in the previous book. Marriage and motherhood is difficult for both women in different ways, and the book is particularly good at conveying the pain of being sort of disappeared into those roles, with no outlets for their restless, hungry, wide-ranging intelligence. As with previous books in the series, this third outing is also a vivid snapshot of a very specific time and place, although it moves beyond one single neighbourhood in Naples to take in the sweep of political and cultural change in late 1960s Italy as a whole — as the characters' worlds open up, so their view (and that of the reader) becomes wider. There's just one book left in the series, which (so far) really does live up to the extremely well deserved hype.
Easter is always the time for my annual reread of Susan Cooper's Greenwitch, my very favourite of her Dark Is Rising series. Seaside holidays, 200-year-old Cornish smuggling history bubbling up to haunt an entire village of the smugglers' descendants, weird children's folk horror, women having emotions near the sea, and the sea having emotions right back at women: what's not to love?
Finally, I've been reading my way through Seasons of Glass and Iron, Amal El-Mohtar's short story (and poetry) collection. I think I've read pretty much every item previously, as there is no new work, and most of it was published in online SFF magazines, or on El-Mohtar's own website, but it's lovely to see it all brought together in one place. As with all short fiction collections, I enjoy some stories more than others, but in this case everything works as a coherent whole. You can see her coming back time and time again to the same ground: language and multilingualism, the natural world (especially birds and bodies of water), books and writing and folk tales, cities and cafes and migration, and relationships between women in all their myriad forms. It's as if she picks up an idea, polishes it into an exquisite, self-contained gem, and then returns to pick it up some years later to polish again into a slightly different gem when she realises she has more to say, or a different understanding. There are few authors whose work I feel finds its most perfect expression in shorter form, but Amal El-Mohtar is one of them. This collection represents about twenty years' worth of fiction (it was interesting to see her talk in the afterward about the vanished world of SFF publishing/aspiring author Livejournal, and how this incredible community shaped her as a writer and nurtured so many of these stories into existence; I witnessed this from the periphery and it feels that this particular alchemy is an impossibility in a much louder, more crowded and fast-moving internet), and it's my fervent hope that we can look forward to a similar collection — with the same favourite themes and imagery explored with even greater richness.
This time around, Matthias and I went out on the train to Bury St Edmund's on Friday. We pottered around in town for a bit, had lunch at this place (excellent), then wandered across the road to a pub that was having a mini beer festival, and sat around outside for a bit, although it was windy and cold and I had to ask them to turn on their outdoor gas heaters to keep me warm! Bury is fairly close, but I feel as if I've rarely gone there, in spite of living in this part of the world for many, many years now.
On Saturday, we had a day out in Ely — cheese platter for lunch this place, sushi for dinner at the fancy sushi restaurant, and more wandering around in between. It was again a bit too cold to be outdoors much, but the river was as pretty as ever, and dotted with various groups of people having cups of tea or rounds of drinks in the houseboats.
Yesterday we didn't leave the house at all. I did a bit of gardening, read, did yoga, and spent most of the day slow-cooking an Indonesian curry for dinner. The garden is slowly springing back to life. I have to spend much of my time chasing the wood pigeons away from the cherry trees, as if they're left to their own devices, they'll eat all the flowers and shoots and we won't have any fruit. The seedlings in the growhouse are coming along nicely, and I'm particularly pleased at the prospect of being able to make my own pickles from cucumbers I've grown myself this year.
Today began with a fairly slow start: the last of the hot cross buns, laundry, cleaning, more communing with the garden, and then a little walk through the park that rings our part of the town. After lunch, we went and sat out in the courtyard garden of our favourite cafe/bar for a bit, then picked up the first gelato of the year from the place that is only seasonally open (I think the owners go back somewhere warmer and more Mediterranean over the winter) on the way home. Once I've finished off this post, I'll gather in the laundry, do a last sweep of the garden, and start winding down.
You can see from this weekend photoset that I started out with some extremely ambitious reading plans, and I'm pretty pleased that I made it through five of these books. Five out of seven isn't too shabby! Those books were a wonderful mix of new-to-me and annual reread favourites, fiction and nonfiction, short stories and novels.
I started off with Is A River Alive?, Robert Macfarlane's latest. This is nature writing about rivers (including some of the world's last remaining chalk streams around the corner from my workplace in Cambridge), but also a look at the global movement to grant legal personhood to the natural world — in particular rivers — and the people and organisations fighting to make that happen. As with any nonfiction writing about the state of the environment, it's pretty bleak in places, although the relentless energy (and enthusiasm they have for frogs, fungi, beetles, snakes, bodies of water, etc) of the various people Macfarlane encounters is infectious.
Next up was Death and the Penguin, Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov's most famous work. Having familiarised myself with Kurkov through both his historical mysteries and his war memoirs, it seemed only fair to pick this one up when I could, and I'm glad I did. It's a blackly comic, surreal look at the chaos and disorientation of Ukraine in the early years of independence from the Soviet Union, with a hapless struggling author protagonist who winds up working for a newspaper as an obituary writer, only to realise that his obituaries (which, as is the case for all newspapers, are written in advance of their subjects' deaths) are serving as a hit list for organised crime. One of Kurkov's strengths as a writer is his talent for observing and cataloguing the minutiae of everyday life in very specific times and places, and this is on full display here in his evocation of 1990s Kyiv and the people who inhabit it.
Another author who excels at observing the specific is Elena Ferrante, whose third book in the series of novels about two girls growing up in inpoverished circumstances in post-WWII Naples, and their subsequent adult lives was next on my reading list for the long weekend. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay picks up the story in the early adult years: Lenu, the narrator, has graduated university, published her first novel, and is about to marry her university boyfriend, who comes from an educated upper middle class background, and much of the novel deals with the sense of anxiety and imposter syndrome she feels having achieved social mobility — out of place among the educated elite, but ill at ease whenever she returns to her childhood home. Meanwhile, her childhood friend Lina is dealing with the consequences of a series of spectacularly bad decisions made in the previous book. Marriage and motherhood is difficult for both women in different ways, and the book is particularly good at conveying the pain of being sort of disappeared into those roles, with no outlets for their restless, hungry, wide-ranging intelligence. As with previous books in the series, this third outing is also a vivid snapshot of a very specific time and place, although it moves beyond one single neighbourhood in Naples to take in the sweep of political and cultural change in late 1960s Italy as a whole — as the characters' worlds open up, so their view (and that of the reader) becomes wider. There's just one book left in the series, which (so far) really does live up to the extremely well deserved hype.
Easter is always the time for my annual reread of Susan Cooper's Greenwitch, my very favourite of her Dark Is Rising series. Seaside holidays, 200-year-old Cornish smuggling history bubbling up to haunt an entire village of the smugglers' descendants, weird children's folk horror, women having emotions near the sea, and the sea having emotions right back at women: what's not to love?
Finally, I've been reading my way through Seasons of Glass and Iron, Amal El-Mohtar's short story (and poetry) collection. I think I've read pretty much every item previously, as there is no new work, and most of it was published in online SFF magazines, or on El-Mohtar's own website, but it's lovely to see it all brought together in one place. As with all short fiction collections, I enjoy some stories more than others, but in this case everything works as a coherent whole. You can see her coming back time and time again to the same ground: language and multilingualism, the natural world (especially birds and bodies of water), books and writing and folk tales, cities and cafes and migration, and relationships between women in all their myriad forms. It's as if she picks up an idea, polishes it into an exquisite, self-contained gem, and then returns to pick it up some years later to polish again into a slightly different gem when she realises she has more to say, or a different understanding. There are few authors whose work I feel finds its most perfect expression in shorter form, but Amal El-Mohtar is one of them. This collection represents about twenty years' worth of fiction (it was interesting to see her talk in the afterward about the vanished world of SFF publishing/aspiring author Livejournal, and how this incredible community shaped her as a writer and nurtured so many of these stories into existence; I witnessed this from the periphery and it feels that this particular alchemy is an impossibility in a much louder, more crowded and fast-moving internet), and it's my fervent hope that we can look forward to a similar collection — with the same favourite themes and imagery explored with even greater richness.
Look at her big fancy DCAT ribbon! :D
Bella got to do two more FastCATs this weekend, semi-unplanned.
So, she got her DCAT, which is the intermediate title for the event, back at her event in February. Back when she got her BCAT (the first-level title), she got a big fancy ribbon the same day. This time, they took down her information, but said she'd get her fancy ribbon at the next event. (At the time we assumed that they had to wait for the new runs to be officially tallied with the AKC.)
Her next event was the one from last weekend... but at that event they said oops, it was supposed to have been mailed to us! We could pick it up in person, as long as it was at an event sponsored by the same organizers as the one she titled at. (
Alex hadn't known about that one, so he entered her for Friday.
She almost broke ten seconds again. So close! (Ignore that she apparently got cheese crumbs on her ribbons, lol.) Also ignore the date on the ribbons - this did actually happen on the 3rd.
But when Alex asked about her DCAT ribbon they said, oops, the lady who has them isn't here for the Friday event, only Saturday and Sunday. *grumble grumble*
So just to make it worth the drive, Alex entered her again for today.
More pretty average times for Bella! Haha.
Look at how fancy her ribbon is! It's even personalized, which explains why she didn't get it same-day.
Alex said that as soon as her fancy ribbon photoshoot was done, she wanted to run around for several more minutes, haha. Apparently even two events isn't enough to burn through all the energy!
Every three months, I swap my sheet set. Living alone and showering daily means I don't need to change my sheets more than once every two weeks, and they get swapped out for the next set every three months. Four in total. It's not quite one-to-one with the seasons, but the sentiment's close enough.
In doing the laundry, I found out two of the machines were broken. Someone else was trying to use them, and without either of us knowing what was happening - the spin cycle's not working for the moment - I suggested she try seeing if it'd work to press the main "on" button again. It ran through another cycle without paying, stopping at the point it'd otherwise spin. I'd suspected as much, so I came prepared. I went to the laundry room with an extra roll of quarters because I know how much of a pain in the ass sopping laundry is, and any feelings of having even accidentally contributed to that to someone were ones I wanted to banish through direct action. Which was why I had the extra roll: I gave them to the person who'd been unfortunate enough to use the machine a second time, on my suggestion. She was agog, astonished, and after loading up a working machine, offered to give me back the $3.25 she hadn't used.
"Buy yourself a cup of coffee," I said.
In doing the laundry, I found out two of the machines were broken. Someone else was trying to use them, and without either of us knowing what was happening - the spin cycle's not working for the moment - I suggested she try seeing if it'd work to press the main "on" button again. It ran through another cycle without paying, stopping at the point it'd otherwise spin. I'd suspected as much, so I came prepared. I went to the laundry room with an extra roll of quarters because I know how much of a pain in the ass sopping laundry is, and any feelings of having even accidentally contributed to that to someone were ones I wanted to banish through direct action. Which was why I had the extra roll: I gave them to the person who'd been unfortunate enough to use the machine a second time, on my suggestion. She was agog, astonished, and after loading up a working machine, offered to give me back the $3.25 she hadn't used.
"Buy yourself a cup of coffee," I said.
Another Round has come and gone...please treat yourself to a refreshment and tell us all about it! Huge shout out to our Mod Squad:
xandromedovna, WerebunniesBane
lilly_c, Clumsy Rhino
desertvixen, Guardian of Deadllines
glinda, Supreme Tea Temptress
There was a THREE-WAY TIE for Champion Usurper this Round with 18 posts apiece, but the crown goes tolilly_c for pulling off an uninterrupted 13-hour streak, which may be some kind of record!
xandromedovna, WerebunniesBanelilly_c, Clumsy Rhinodesertvixen, Guardian of Deadllinesglinda, Supreme Tea TemptressThere was a THREE-WAY TIE for Champion Usurper this Round with 18 posts apiece, but the crown goes to
lilly_c for pulling off an uninterrupted 13-hour streak, which may be some kind of record! I don't understand the purpose behind most of those 'shorts' music videos people make, especially on TikTok. I mean, the music/lyrics they use almost never has anything to do with the scenes used. It's nonsensical to me.
Today I saw one to Eric Carmen's "Hungry Eyes' -- and the photo they used was a guy with sunglasses on so you couldn't even see his eyes.
Of course, the ones that are unintentionally slashy are fun. Where you know they didn't mean it that way, because the songs almost never have anything to do with the scenes, but they put some romantic song with clips of two guys or girls.
If I was going to make some (and I'm considering it, because I don't have the patience to do an entire songvid), the song lyrics I match with the scenes are going to make sense.
A long time ago, back in the days of VHS tapes, I knew of a fanvid maker who seemed to do this with regular length songvids. The song choices just didn't seem to have any connection to the scenes. I love songvids, but I couldn't get into these at all. Maybe it's just me.
Today I saw one to Eric Carmen's "Hungry Eyes' -- and the photo they used was a guy with sunglasses on so you couldn't even see his eyes.
Of course, the ones that are unintentionally slashy are fun. Where you know they didn't mean it that way, because the songs almost never have anything to do with the scenes, but they put some romantic song with clips of two guys or girls.
If I was going to make some (and I'm considering it, because I don't have the patience to do an entire songvid), the song lyrics I match with the scenes are going to make sense.
A long time ago, back in the days of VHS tapes, I knew of a fanvid maker who seemed to do this with regular length songvids. The song choices just didn't seem to have any connection to the scenes. I love songvids, but I couldn't get into these at all. Maybe it's just me.
