halloranelder | Network

10trueloves - 5/10 posted / 6/10 written

~ 4th chapter of Divining Destiny written, 5th planned

~ May not write the Retrieval Sequel or another chapter for Closing Up Shop, but they're still in my documents.

~ Likewise for the RexSoka time travel that steps into the RotS plot about the time of the Opera.

sovay

For her eightieth birthday observed, we celebrated my mother with a three-tier almond cake layered with marzipan icing and raspberry and rose hip preserves, frosted in rose-toned whipped cream, and decorated with pâtes de fruits into the central one of which was socketed the candle to grow on. It looked like a charlotte russe from the Geometric period in slices. We gave her books, cards, balloons, a banner of cats, a pendant like a bronze-pronged sun of creamy golden sapphire on a leather cord. My niece ran around all day with the twins. I am not ready for Daylight Saving Time. I have enough trouble with the regular kind.

Current Music: Universal Hall Pass, "Six-Step Dragon"

petra

Anxiolytic bugs me. Every time I look at it, I have to remember that it means "relieves anxiety" instead of "causes anxiety."

I suppose you could say it makes my temper [in]flammable.

This post brought to you by learning that someone I know has recently been prescribed Cymbalta without any of the "Quitting this might suck beyond the telling of it" warnings.

Current Mood: anxious
Current Music: Sturm und drang ain't the half of it my friend

jadelennox

I was writing up a navel-gazing post about grief (tl;dr turned out I think "oh MM would like that!" more often than I would have suspected) and it somehow spiraled into how I could make beautiful and accessible no-Javascript footnotes CSS given the Dreamwidth CSS restrictions. This resulted in me, among other things, reading the DW codebase to see all the CSS restrictions, and then finally after a couple of hours getting my perfect CSS, even though it's completely useless because it will only work when reading in my journal style.

(ETA: That's only because I'm being a perfectionist about placement for the purposes of this exercise, and DW doesn't allow absolute positioning in inline HTML.)

(Also even making this post resulted in me reading the code for Perl's Text::Markdown since I couldn't remember which code block syntax it used.

Hyperfixation FTW!

( CSS, FWIW )

oursin

Imagine! a good old fashioned scam without embedded link to dodgy site or anything, wow, the nostalgia is nostalgiaful, eh?

My humble greetings,
I feel the need to approach you securing and moving my late father fund. It's just My urgent need for a foreign partner/investor. I have a significant fund to transfer. My Whatsap [---] for more details

Awwwww.

This had a charming naivety lacking in yet another solicitation to become involved with some academic journal, in this case:

Given your expertise and contributions to medical and surgical research, we believe your involvement would greatly strengthen the journal’s academic quality and reputation.

It's bad enough when some predatory publisher cites My Important Work and it's actually a 500-word review, but this is above and beyond WHUT.

Plus they not only want a CV they want a photo. Tempted to send them one of the photobooth efforts I got done for passport purposes, which have 'inmate of criminal lunatic asylum, c. 1880' vibes.

***

In other nostalgic news, apparently the annual eight-day Thomas Hardy fest still occurs.

***

And I was utterly charmed when finally flicking through the pages of the most recent Travel Which to discover Madison WI rated one of the top less-visited North American cities (cannot find this online), bless, with particular mention of the Monoma Terrace.

Though I am honestly boggling a bit at the decision to run an article on North American cities as touristic destinations at the present time, even if a significant proportion of the actual recommendations do turn out to be in Canada.

celli

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denise posting in

dw_volunteers

Noting here for posterity that I'm doing another of my "whenever I remember to do it" sweeps of all privs that have been granted, to remove privs from people who aren't currently actively volunteering with the thing that needs that priv. If I accidentally yanked something someone is using (the interface is hella janky and I would not be surprised if I do accidentally at least once), just holler and I'll add it back! Likewise, if you're still doing one thing but have privs for another thing you aren't using, you can let me know by replying here so I can remove those too.

We thank everyone for their time and help, and anyone who's had privs removed, you are welcome back any time you'd like! We operate on a "principle of least access" basis for privs for security reasons, but that doesn't mean we don't appreciate everything folks do, even if you're limited by that mythical land called "real life". ❤️

muccamukk

Watch on YouTube

I guess the joint tour is going well. This is the most wholesome fucking shit I've ever seen.

in_the_pipeline_feed

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/dupeless-reeducation

Here’s a really interesting (but rather unnerving) look at the state of “big data” in biomedical science. The author had been working on some software tools to find copy-pasted blocks of data in large data sets as a method of fraud detection. Such duplications have been the subject of controversy in papers from the Südhof lab at Stanford (and you can get two different sorts of perspective on that case with those links) and also with the Pruitt lab at McMaster. Both of these have been pretty widely covered.

But what happens when you turn such software loose on databases that no one is questioning? A part-volunteer effort has now examined 600 such data sets, and from one perspective, the news is pretty good: 97% of them were pretty unremarkable. But that leaves 18 that were serious-looking, and here you can see an examination of three of those. (One of the others had already been retracted!)

This Parkinson’s paper from 2016, for example, made a splash with evidence that gut microbiota have a profound influence on Parkinson’s disease. Unfortunately, in the data supporting these conclusions there are duplications in the data that would indeed have affected the results (they make up a significant part of the data in each case). There’s another case on evolved resistance to toxins that has a number of data points that are hard to explain, although it’s also not easy to explain why they would have been altered (as they do appear to be on first reading). A third case seems less problematic - that’s a 2017 study looking for individual behavioral traits in clonal populations of fish. There are four-fold repeating values that seem to have arisen after the merging of two data files, with data being assigned to the wrong rows thenceforth. In this case, the authors of the study readily worked out and admitted to the mistake, and have corrected the published data set.

I’m glad to see that the Dryad repository has been supporting this effort by helping to contact journals and authors about the problems that have emerged. The post says that an effort to scan the other Excel-based data sets on the Dryad site (around 24,000 of them!) is up next, and it will be worth finding out if that 3% figure holds. As well as finding out what percentage of those will turn out to be in the “Oops, honest mistake” category versus the “We don’t really see the problem here” one, and especially versus the “How dare you” category. Stay tuned!

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/dupeless-reeducation

oursin

What We Lose When We Gamify Reading, well yeah, but this is someone who considers Middlemarch 'a slog'. I'm also, of course, thinking about previous allotropes of this kind of thing - actual libraries you could buy of The Best Books - and of course display them on your shelves - and I'm also recollecting The Provincial Lady who can never manage to actually read That Book That Everyone Is Talking About. Of reading as something that is not, reading that thing that you want to read, when you want to read it, at the speed that seems fit (which may involve stopping and starting and hiatuses).

***

If not a smaller, a more connected world than people maybe think: How likely is it that Alfred the Great sent two emissaries to India in the ninth century?:

Alfred’s embassy to India thus appears to be entirely historically plausible: India, with its Christian community and shrine of St Thomas, was probably always the intended destination, and its remoteness from early medieval England the very point of the embassy.

***

This feels like yet another story that might perhaps account for Why Are There So Few Women In [X] Field which is not down to actual aptitude and drive: There’s a long and embedded history of abuse in chess.

***

Home Free: Vivian Gornick, interviewed by Chandler Fritz

Everything depends on the writer’s relation to the first-person narrator. Some writers are released into storytelling through the fictional narrator; others are released by the nonfictional “I.” The first become novelists, the second memoirists. It’s all a matter of what kind of narrator lets you tell the story. When I was young I kept telling these stories about my mother and our neighbor Nettie, and everyone said, “That’s a novel!” But when I tried to write a novel the material just lay there like a dead dog: I couldn’t bring it to life. When I realized it was a memoir and the narrator was clearly me, suddenly I was home free.

***

The Cold War and the Soviet KGB's Same-Sex Entrapment Operations in the 1950s and 1960s: The Perpetrator in Focus. Intriguing. When I was employed in an institution which at the time came under the aegis of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office I was obliged to attend an FCO Induction Course. This had very little relevance to my job, and among the proceedings were cautionary films about being got at by Soviet agents. In one case although the surface level involved the patsy being lured by publication in a Red journal his relationship with the tempter seemed to have definite homoerotic undertones.

vass

Anyone know why Private Mode might be failing to clear cookies when I close the browser?

(Saving this draft then closing the app to see whether I can reproduce it on Dreamwidth. Yup.)

That's the bug.

in_the_pipeline_feed

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/i-hadn-t-bet-diazos

I’ve written a number of posts here about weird natural products (and another such roundup is in the works), but I couldn’t resist highlighting this paper. The compounds discussed (which have been found to be produced in bacteria, specifically one human-pathogenic species, Nocardia ninae) are not huge and bewilderingly complex. Natural products have plenty of those kinds of structures, but these are very small molecules indeed. They’re just really unlikely ones.

That’s because they’re diazo compounds - yep, like good ol’ diazomethane, the methyl-ester-seeking-chemist’s friend. The diazo group (as you can see at left) is a funny beast. It has one nitrogen with a formal positive charge and another atom with a formal negative charge, so net neutral. You can put the negative charge either on the terminal carbon or the terminal nitrogen, but the truth is kind of in between. It also really looks like something that could find it in its heart to change to plain old dinitrogen gas. And so it does! Unless stabilized by adjacent functional groups, diazo compounds are known to be reactive and touchy, properties that are most on display with the smaller members of the series.

You don’t get much smaller than diazomethane, and that one is famous for reacting with carboxylic acids to more-or-less instantly form the corresponding methyl ester (and bubbles of nitrogen gas, if you’re working on a large enough scale, and if you are I would consider your life choices carefully). It does a lot of other interesting reactions, but you will always want to have it in dilute solution when you’re trying those, because it is sensitive to friction, heat, strong light, acid, and all sorts of other things, and it will most definitely explode if you push your luck.

It will also poison you without exploding, and this is something that not enough people realize. That’s even more true for the more shelf-stable version (trimethylsilyldiazomethane) because that stability (and the commercial availability of solutions of it) have led some to think that it has correspondingly lower toxicity. This is not the case, and there have been fatalities to illustrate it.

Here, the authors demonstrate that this species of bacteria (and likely many others besides) can produce this functional group through the actions of a cluster of enzymes. You start from lysine, and a series of steps goes through a hydroxylamine, disubstituted hydrazine, hydrazone, and then diazo. The authors have recapitulated these steps with isolated enzymes and shown that they occur as a gene cluster as well. The weirdest one (Dob3) is at that final step, and it has an unusual di-iron catalytic center that seems to accept a variety of hydrazone substrates.

By trapping with a cyclooctyne, the paper demonstrates that both 4-diazo-3-oxobutanoic acid and diazoacetone are produced by the bacteria. These would be unlikely to be detected directly in most analytical protocols due to the low amounts and the overall sensitivity of the diazos (see above). Now, just why the organisms are producing these things remains an open question. They are certainly unusual reactive species and might be used in further biosynthetic pathways, or they might deter other bacteria from getting too close and messing around. Maybe both! What’s for sure is that considerable metabolic effort goes into making them, so there must be some reasons that have worked out evolutionarily. We shall see.

So any of you who had diazoacetone on your list of Likely Natural Products, stop by the customer service desk and collect your winnings. The rest of us will be over here shaking our heads and wondering what’s next. . .

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/i-hadn-t-bet-diazos

celli

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senmut

AO3 Link | Divining Destiny: Flight for Freedom (1050 words) by Merfilly
Chapters: 3/3
Fandom: Forgotten Realms, The Legend of Drizzt Series - R. A. Salvatore
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Characters: Vierna Do'Urden, Zaknafein Do'Urden, Drizzt Do'Urden, Ensemble
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Typical Violence, Fratricide, Murder, flashfic, Cross-Posted from Archive Of Our Own (AO3), Time Travel
Summary:

Vierna is Betrayed

Divining Destiny: Flight for Freedom

Vierna came alert from the dream with a chill on her spine. Things had been going so well ever since she had managed to give Drizzt a chance to live elsewhere.

Her Lord was the only reason she dreamed at all, which meant the dream was a portent that she had to divine the meaning of quickly. With a flicker of her will, she sent her current messenger spider, one of the line from her father's gift to her so long ago, to fetch him to her. While she did that, she cleared her mind to take up the spells of hiding that she had lived under, ever since the Masked God chose her as His priestess.

Zaknafein was waiting when she came up from the prayers, sitting calmly opposite her — and a barrier to anything else that would have dared enter the Matron's chambers.

"Something has shifted, and we are now in danger," Vierna signed to him. "Invite your lover to take those of our people he wishes. You and I, any you trust explicitly, will use the gathering paths to leave this city."

"You are certain?"

Vierna's mouth set in a grim line for a long moment. "Only that the hiding spell is known to me from childhood allowed me to take it, I think. She is seeking His influence in the city now."

"Be at the portal by the time for evening meal; I will have all things in motion," Zak told her firmly.

For better or worse, House Do'Urden in Menzoberranzan would be abandoned to the Spider Queen, but personal survival was prized above all else, for most drow, and Vierna was typical in that regard.

Dinin sat in the safe house of Bregan D'Aerthe with his head in his hands, still mulling over everything. He was grateful to the Weapon Master for making this opportunity appear, but he was at a loss for what would be expected now that he was without a House.

Jarlaxle, leader of the mercenary company, sat beside him, uncovered eye surveying those few men he had chosen to bring into the band. He wasn't very pleased; Vierna Do'Urden had been opening avenues to the cunning man for years now.

"It is done."

"She — they did make it out, yes?" Dinin asked, looking over.

"That actually matters to you," Jarlaxle said, and he looked pleased with that awareness. "Yes, they did. And to spare the rest, their meal was laced with poison, courtesy of my sense of mercy."

Dinin pondered that. When the Matrons of the ruling council moved to end the heresy, they would have tortured the commoners to learn all they could. The loyalty of the fighters would have pushed them to fight even without knowing where their matron was. The changes that Vierna had brought about in the House had made them all stronger, but…

… it was the kind of strength that was not allowed.

"Send me to one of your outposts, with some of my people and any of yours you trust to keep me under your eye." Dinin drew in all of his own cunning, ambition, and pride. "I live, and serving you is damn sure better than being dead or in the clutches of a different House."

"I have just the place for you," Jarlaxle said, smiling. "And I think you will thrive in our network."

Zaknafein inspected the house that had been procured in Rilauven, checking it over for any and all possible traps. When he at last came to Vierna, who was just settling back from prayer, she looked fatigued but content.

"With only ten to support us, it's not the most defensible place, but we can make it work," Zak told her.

"We will have more in time," Vierna promised him. "We still have enough gems to set ourselves on the path of growth."

"Once I am satisfied one of the fighters is able enough to defend in my absence, I will take up the offered contract at their school."

"Mother's manner of salves are unknown here, from all I can learn. That is another avenue of income." Vierna reached for his hands, and he gave them. "Thank you, for having faith in me."

"Nothing else to do when my own daughter proved she was not lost," he said quietly. "Will you be able to scry Drizzt now?"

Vierna sighed, shaking her head. "I had no luck, but then the prayers are still shrouded."

Zak frowned, but if the gods wanted to war on each other, he didn't care; he'd rather they left drow alone. "At least you being so high in favor, even with Him weakened, means you shouldn't be tested too soon."

"So I think, yes."

Vhaeraun sighed melodramatically as Eilistraee finally managed to pull the poisoned chelicerae out of His abdomen.

"You should have made it clear You wished aid long before now," Eilistraee scolded, putting the large pincers into the waiting darkflame to destroy them. "What happened?"

He considered how to answer as Her hands moved back to the wound, bringing healing and soothing the unending agony He had been inflicted with since the attack.

"One of the junior clerics My priestess had sent to learn in Her temple betrayed My priestess by thought. I managed to warn her, just before My realm was swarmed by Her abyssal spiders.

"I believe She'd already glimpsed My influence building." He grimaced with distaste for losing the first real foothold He'd made in that city.

"She will be on guard for reprisals," Eilistraee mused. "You must be careful, My Twin."

"When am I not, My dear Sister?" he asked in mocking tones, before lying back to let Her finish the healing He needed. She let Him rest, considering all of this, and how it might backlash upon Her own people.

"My priestess is safe, with her father, in one of the cities I hold more strongly," He said. "I chose well with her, even if this did not work the way I wished."

"Just don't go becoming enamored of her, Brother. My Nephew is enough trouble."

Vhaeraun laughed, bitterly, but nodded at the warning. He did enjoy such pleasures, but this priestess was too important, in His limited foresight, to risk that with.

lightreads

Time of the Cat

3/5. Sci-fantasy time travel about the future scholars paired with talking cats to romp through history.

Connie Willis, but make it way zanier. I picked this up the day our cat went into the kitty ER (he’s fine, he ate approximately four feet of ribbon but they got it back out without surgery). It was good for that day spent waiting, but after that exhausted/worried interval there was still more book, and it went weirder and more spaghetti splat than I wanted. Like there was so much happening in this book simultaneously, and all of it – the zany talking cat parts and the far future parts and the multiple factions parts and the romance parts and the trying-to-be-serious memory loss parts – were all treated with the same cheerful rush, which left me unsatisfied.

A good head empty no thoughts day book, but otherwise, kind of a frenetic mess. Also, I genuinely don't know why the protag was still into the love interest by the end, she did not sell me on that in the slightest.

Content notes: Memory manipulation.

sharpiefan

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lassarina

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oursin

So, I may have mentioned I would be giving a paper in one of the Fellows' Symposia of the Institution with which I am now affiliated, coming up over the horizon very soon. And I had originally intended to revisit some research I did Before Events Intervened and Do Something with that, but it has not been coming together as I should like, needs more percolating I think. So I am instead returning to a project I put aside when other things supervened and demanded my attention, for which I did a preliminary paper or two, and can spruce up and get, I hope, some feedback on, and maybe kickstart this back into action.

Meanwhile....

I think I mentioned being solicited to give an entertaining and instructive talk on the history of johnnies/baudruches some months hence, which I have a fair amount of material already on hand for. However, what the organisers would like is An Image for publicity purposes, fairly soonish, and REALLY. One is tempted to go with the Dudley Hoard which require a good deal of imagination to reconstruct for their original purpose.

Younger scholar whom I have been somewhat informally mentoring has now submitted their PhD thesis and would like me to read it, and think of what might come up in viva.

The project which I was involved in for some considerable while which went very weird last year, with me being somewhat accidental being left out of the loop for some months due to error in email address, so I never really got the full story, is being revived in a smaller and more defined way as a journal special issue edited by Old Friend and Me.

Meanwhile I am in the process of getting the latest volume of the Interminable Saga prepped for publication.

marginaliana

Various:

--My mother tripped on her way to a concert (again) and fractured the bridge of her nose (again) and got up and went to the show anyway and enjoyed it while holding a plastic bag full of ice from the bar to her face (AGAIN). On the one hand I want to rage about her choice to just fucking carry on to the show, except on the other hand that's absolutely what I would do because I'm just as stubborn as she is, but back on the first hand she is seventy two years old and I am ~~in the prime of my youth~~ not. So I will just allow myself to be a little bit of a hypocrite about it, thanks.

--Melodifestivalen final is on Saturday. The lineup is mostly not terrible! I have no idea what the ultimate Eurovision pick will be, however, because I have given up on predicting the ~~mystery~~ that is the collective mind of Sweden (affectionate).

--I have been writing a deeply lemon-chicken fic for my new fandom but I'm fairly sure all the members of this fandom are too young to understand what it would mean if I tagged it lemon chicken. But I can glory in the tag in my mind. (Also I might not even finish it because there's no fun in writing an actual plot when I can just write my blorbo being hard done by.)

oursin

Happy birthday,

afuna and

katharine_b!

gwyn

A few weeks ago, we lost

spikedluv suddenly, and now we've suddenly and tragically lost

minoanmiss. It's always devastating to lose anyone in our community, but it seems even worse when it's people who have such a presence within it and bring so much joy to it. My heart really goes out to everyone who was close to them, and to their families.

There are still a few days left in the FTH 2026 auction, if you'd be interested in bidding on my fic-writing services. My entry is here, or you can use that to find other people in the auction. I hope this year will produce a lot of money, god knows we need it now.

Current Mood: sad

in_the_pipeline_feed

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/i-hadn-t-bet-diazos

It will also poison you without exploding, and this is something that not enough people realize. That’s even more true for the more shelf-stable version (trimethylsilyldiazomethane) because that stability (and the commercial availability of solutions of it) have lead some to thing that it has correspondingly lower toxicity. This is not the case, and there have been fatalities to illustrate it.

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/i-hadn-t-bet-diazos

oursin

What I read

Finished A Slowly Dying Cause and she does seem to be grinding these out rather. Also I didn't actually check the details but there were some descriptive passages of places that seemed very similar, or least deploying the same epithets - 'the demilune beach' I think was one - that seemed a bit cut and paste. Also maybe more Havers, but when she finally appeared did we want that plot development??? And something entirely new (or rather, old and heritage) for Lynley to angst about.

Then read the latest Slightly Foxed.

Then onto GB Stern, The Woman in the Hall (1939), which it is longer since I last read than I thought. Still v good but not sure that I will be reccing it for the book group.

Then this already discussed - further thought that it was rather like hearing somebody tell one about book they have read - at least this bore a fairly close resemblance to the original, was not like that scene in one of E Nesbit's Bastable novels in which they talk about Charlotte Yonge's The Daisy Chain and all appear to have been reading entirely different book.... But still left a lot out.

On the go

After that I actually started Nicola Barker, TonyInterrupter (2025), Kobo deal/sortes ereader, which I was quite enjoying, and then -

Arrival of Barbara Hambly, Death at the Palace (A Silver Screen Historical Mystery Book 4) so am currently immersed in that.

Next up

And after that, imagine it will be straight on to Cat Sebastian, Star Shipped, which also published yesterday. Then maybe back to TonyInterrupter.

sovay

Diameter of mental blast crater not diminished. Outside is absurdly springlike following the double-tap of winter that required me to shovel my mother's car out twice, once for the unexpected four inches of snow and then for the glacial swamp the succeeding sleet turned the driveway into. In the process I seem to have inherited the Bat, the stupidest motorcycle jacket I have met in my life. It doesn't have sleeves so much as it has patagia. It is covered with snaps that open into flaps and none of them into pockets. The total design suggests that it may be so heavily constructed because otherwise in a sufficiently stiff gust of wind its owner could achieve accidental unpowered flight. It looks like an opera cape with ambitions of fetish night. My mother insisted on it because I had run out to shovel the first time in my flannel shirtsleeves and the second time my corduroy coat was obviously not adequate to the slush-fall, but it was a present to my father from my grandparents about forty years ago and it looks functionally mint because he has spent most of that time avoiding ever wearing it. In its defense, it is extremely warm and also I look like a tire. There will be no photographs.

Current Music: PJ Harvey, "Memphis"

scaramouche

I am 114 episodes into 189, and as a twist in this exercise, I found out that the previous playlist I thought was deleted, is back up! Since all the stats are there I would I guess it was set to private and then un-privated. Whatever the case, it is back, and I have those lovely stats and lovely English summaries and all the comments, but on that last one, it turns out I no longer have the patience to go through the comments, because...

I hate Adrian. As a character, as a love interest. Since I hate him, I feel like I'm tripping balls when I read the comments and they're full of Adrian love, of how Adrian is the best, of how Aryana and Adrian are so sweet together. Fiction is subjective and this is far from the first time I've bounced off a character I've seen so much love for, so what can you do. One consequence of this is that I don't read the comments as I did before, and another consequence is that my interest in Aryana's storyline is dipping. Not all the storylines, mind! Just Aryana's.

Because now Aryana has legs again we're back to mostly-mundane school shenanigans but with a third love interest in the mix, and I think it's a problem when a female character who's the lead of a show, has significantly more male love interests than female friends. It didn't feel as obvious when there were just Marlon and Hubert, but now Adrian is there, Aryana's social interactions are overwhelmingly with boys. And she doesn't even hang out with the one female friend she does have! Bebet is only Aryana's friend at school! And then Aryana's family, i.e. her mother, grandmother and uncle, haven't had much to do with her in this arc beyond listening to her boy woes (I was also startled when I realized hadn't seen Ofelia in any significant way for a few episodes in there).

Did viewers not like Marlon because he's too whiny and not like Hubert because he's a pushover? And so they created an assertive third love interest who physically grabs Aryana's arm when she tries to get away from him, and doesn't listen when Aryana begs him to stop, and doesn't believe Aryana when she says she's not interested, because we're apparently doing the thing where no means yes and Aryana is into it actually and all her yelling at Adrian is flirting actually? Shut up!! I do not like this!! I can acknowledge romantic comedy tropes and telenovela tropes and still not like it!!!!

I thought I understood the reason for Adrian, in that Hubert and Marlon both know Aryana's secret, so adding a boy who is NOT in the know shakes things up. BUT THEN Adrian learns Aryana's secret like five episodes after he first meets her, and what are we doing, show. Why are you suddenly going breakneck speed when you teased Marlon finding out and Hubert revealing HIS secret for dozens of episodes, but it takes two episodes for Adrian to find out Aryana saved him and another three to find out she's a mermaid. What the heck. The intensity of the show's interest in Adrian, and giving him top billing of the three love interests despite being a new addition, it feels like they shoved in a hail mary character to revitalize the show, which may indeed be the case and I simply do not know the dynamics of the viewing audience at the time to understand.

Anyway I'm more invested in Megan's storyline now.

Current Mood: bitchy

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Page Summary

senmut - Projects and Bunnies
sovay - Keep mending broken lines
petra - Words I need to learn: Anxiolytic
jadelennox - ADHD with the knockout 🎉
oursin - Whiffle whiffle
celli - updaaaaate
denise in dw_volunteers - Periodic priv tidy
muccamukk - Music Friday
in_the_pipeline_feed - Dupeless Reeducation
oursin - Cluster
vass - Firefox for Android
in_the_pipeline_feed - I Hadn't Bet On Diazos
celli - Fandom Trumps Hate: podfic from me!
senmut - Divining Destiny: Flight of Freedom
lightreads - Time of the Cat by Tansy Rayner Roberts
sharpiefan - In which I ramble about writing and other fandom stuff
lassarina - What Are You Playing (Thursday)
oursin - Like buses in a bunch
marginaliana - baby hornet
oursin - (no subject)
gwyn - No one can predict the wheel of fortune as it falls
in_the_pipeline_feed - I Hadn't Bet On Diazos
oursin - Wednesday offers condolences
sovay - In Memphis, on Valentine's Day
scaramouche - Aryana (60.3% completed)

Page generated Mar. 8th, 2026 05:16 am

Desert Rose

I dream of rain
I dream of gardens in the desert sand
I wake in vain
I dream of love as time runs through my hand

I dream of fire
Those dreams that tie two hearts that will never die
And near the flames
The shadows play in the shape of the man’s desire

This desert rose
Whose shadow bears the secret promise
This desert flower
No sweet perfume that would torture you more than this

And now she turns
This way she moves in the logic of all my dreams
This fire burns
I realize that nothing’s as it seems

I dream of rain
I dream of gardens in the desert sand
I wake in vain
I dream of love as time runs through my hand

I dream of rain
I lift my gaze to empty skies above
I close my eyes
The rare perfume is the sweet intoxication of love

I dream of rain
I dream of gardens in the desert sand
I wake in vain
I dream of love as time runs through my hand

Sweet desert rose
Whose shadow bears the secret promise
This desert flower
No sweet perfume that would torture you more than this

Sweet desert rose
This memory of hidden hearts and souls
This desert flower
This rare perfume is the sweet intoxication of love

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Aryana (60.3% completed)

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March 2026

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Desert Rose

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