Community Recs Post!

Oct. 30th, 2025 10:17 am
glitteryv: (Default)
[personal profile] glitteryv posting in [community profile] recthething
Every Thursday, we have a community post, just like this one, where you can drop a rec or five in the comments.

This works great if you only have one rec and don't want to make a whole post for it, or if you don't have a DW account, or if you're shy. ;)

(But don't forget: you can deffo make posts of your own seven days a week. ;D!)

So what cool fancrafts/fanart/fics/fanvids/podfics/other kinds of fanworks have we discovered this week? Drop it in the comments below. Anon comment is enabled.

BTW, AI fanworks are not eligible for reccing at recthething. If you aware that a fanwork is AI-generated, please do not rec it here
glitteryv: (Default)
[personal profile] glitteryv
Underskin is MY kind of beauty channel: in that they (I don't know what kind of pronouns the person running it uses, so I'm defaulting to "they") look at the creativity, business, and popularity angles. Everything is well-reseached, so even if the titles might be a tad clickbait-y, there's v. little (if any) room for weird/doubtful claims.

They've got videos on a lot of brands (from Fenty to Max Factor, r.e.m beauty, and more.) Here are some of my faves:



This is one is super fascinating to me. Particularly cuz I was a teenager when The Body Shop was considered a good-to-upscale indication at USA malls. In addition to that was the marketing (appealing to cruelty-free and environmentally-centered products at a time where such labels were only a few years from total hippie-dom.) In any case, I love how deep of a look Underskin takes into the implosion of this once super popular brand.




I do consider this video part 1 of why Pat McGrath as a brand has fallen out of favor within the beauty product world. Personally, I've liked some of their earlier products, but (v. mild spoiler for the video essay) I do agree with Underskin in that there's been a v. sad/unfortunate decline on the launches.

One thing I appreciate is how the video focuses on the brand itself and NOT Pat McGrath herself. She remains a v. talented MUA.




And this is what I consider part 2. As the theme has to do with the Louis Vuitton x Pat McGrath collabo (launched back in late August this year. A controversial line that included $160 lipsticks. And there's the (alleged) shared PR packaging which FUCKING YIKES.




I don't want to end this post on a downer/ragebait-y note, so I'm posting abt this cosmetic brand instead. It's also interesting in seeing a brand bounce back after a rather ho-hum, sort-of-plateau moment.

Seven Deadly Book Sins

Oct. 29th, 2025 11:07 am
lucymonster: (books)
[personal profile] lucymonster
Snagged from [personal profile] osprey_archer, because who can resist a good book meme?

1. Lust, books I want to read for their cover.

Star Wars: The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire has a badass cover. I assume it'll prove to be yet another tedious canon-rehashing moneygrab, but that very Star Wars typical style of unsubtle symbolism always gets me somehow.

2. Pride, challenging books I've finished.

Oh, this one has me stumped! I've read plenty of books that I guess could be considered challenging in terms of length/prose/vocab - Dostoevsky, Joyce (though I've never attempted Finnegan's Wake or Ulysses) and some of the earlier Gothic literature all spring to mind - but I only ever really read for pleasure; if I'm enjoying something then it doesn't feel hard, and if I'm not enjoying it, I just give it up and pick something else. I did read a bunch of untranslated Latin and Greek during undergrad, including the whole first book of the Iliad, which definitely qualified as a challenge. But I didn't read the whole Iliad in Greek, so that feels like a cheat answer.

I also wouldn't call The Lord of the Rings unduly challenging for an adult reader, but it probably counted as a pretty big challenge when I finished it (and memorised big chunks of the poetry, and forced my parents and grandparents to attend tedious recitations thereof) at age eight. I was a weird kid.

3. Gluttony, books I've read more than once.

SO MANY. I go through long, regular phases where new stories feel too hard and I just want to wallow in things I already know I'll enjoy because I've enjoyed them before. Just the other day I finished a reread of Star Wars: Bloodline, and a bit before that I did Pride and Prejudice. I tend to revisit my favourite SFF series a lot in dribs and drabs: Murderbot, the Imperial Radch, Tolkien, Narnia and Harry Potter (the latter not so much these days) are a few I've reread often enough to have largely committed to memory.

I also read Spot Bakes A Cake roughly ten times a day at the moment, but that's not by preference and probably not what the creator of this meme had in mind.

4. Sloth, books on my to-read list the longest.

...also SO MANY. I think the award probably has to go to Madame Bovary, which was assigned reading back in one of my Year Eleven English classes and the only book in my whole educational career for which I ever resorted to Cliffnotes. Fuck, I hated that book. But ever since then I've been meaning to go back and finish it, to wipe the red stain of that youthful defeat (and semi-fraudulent essay) off my ledger.

5. Greed, books I own multiple editions of.

I have three editions of Shakespeare's collected works. My favourite is quite delicate, won as a prize by my mum in school and printed on Bible-thin paper; the second, not too much less nice, belonged to my father-in-law I believe; the third is a rather tatty lump of a book that I picked up cheap at a secondhand store for the sake of owning a Shakespeare I actually feel safe reading. Speaking of Bibles, I also own three of those: my pretty little clothbound NRSV for regular reading, my big chunky NIV Study Bible, and a copy of the New Testament in the original Koine Greek.

I have two collected Blinky Bills floating around, one paperback sized and one larger with bigger pictures for the kids. As a household we also have a few duplicated marital assets: both my husband and I were gifted copies of (the exact same edition of) The Lord of the Rings by our respective fathers, and we both have our childhood copies of Harry Potter. I think husband also has a second copy of The Silmarillion floating around in his office somewhere, though I'm not sure why, because he hasn't read it any wouldn't like it.

6. Wrath, books I despised.

[personal profile] osprey_archer reminded me that I hate His Dark Materials. Not for any handwringing religious reasons - I just found the whole thing about children being severed from their daemons too upsetting, even as a kid without the massive child cruelty squick I nurse today. And I think I've always been a hard sell on multiverses; from memory, the characters were going through some kind of portal into modern England around the time I gave up. It all felt like a disappointing mirror version of C.S. Lewis.

7. Envy, books I want to live in.

I'd love to live in the Tolkienverse, provided I could be incarnated as a Hobbit and stay put in the Shire eating cheese while my biggers and betters did all the adventuring.

Having just finished The Incandescent by Emily Tesh, I kind of wouldn't mind living in her magical reality. I loved how structured and academic the system of magic was, and that anyone could in theory learn it regardless of natural aptitude.

movies!

Oct. 27th, 2025 08:39 pm
snickfic: art of Mary Poppins flying with her umbrella (mary poppins)
[personal profile] snickfic
Battle Royale (2000). A high school class is selected to murder each other in a game of survival until the last one wins. I can definitely see the comparisons to The Hunger Games, not just in the general concept but some of the specific mechanics, like having the island being broken up into zones that occasionally become "dangerous" and the updates over speakers throughout the island.

Overall, this was fine? The friend I went with said it was much funnier in Japanese. I thought our main two characters were pretty but dull, and I was much more interested in the take-no-prisoners girl with the makeup and the guy with the bandana, who it turns out is a survivor of a previous game. I wanted more of them.

--

Crooked House (2017). An adaptation of a Christie novel about a PI asked by an old flame to investigate the death of a family patriarch, who might have been killed by any number of his live-in children and attached family members, who all hate him and each other.

The cast here is stacked: Glenn Close, Gillian Anderson, Julian Sands, Christina Hendricks. The family is moderately terrible, although not as extravagantly as one would hope, and not nearly enough time is spent on them. Instead we spend way too much time with the PI and his relationship with the old flame, and I truly cannot tell you how little I cared about him or them together! Stop this dumb romantic tension and take me back to the family full of character actors!

Even aside from that problem, the movie dragged in places and felt poorly paced. It was even worse because this is one of the very few Christie novels whose endings I still remember, so I didn't even get any suspense.

--

Frankenstein (2025). A doctor is determined to defeat death and goes to monstrous lengths to do so.

The picture you have in your head of what Del Toro doing Frankenstein looks like is pretty much what this movie is. It's beautiful, gothic, indulgent, and there's a sympathetic monster. There aren't any surprises, IMO. This feels like Del Toro playing it very safe, and I would rank it as mid-tier Del Toro. It also feels like it borrows heavily from Crimson Peak, especially visually, although weirdly enough I find that one much more horrific on several axes than I do this one.

I do think it shows a Robert Eggers influence; I don't think we get precisely this film without almost a decade of Eggers preceding it.

I was not as into Jacob Elordi as I wanted to be. The creature's design/makeup/prosthetics never stopped feeling fake to me, and I'm a lot less interested in childlike innocence than Del Toro is. OTOH Oscar Isaac was great, and to my surprise I actually preferred the early half of the movie focused on him the best, especially since it also featured most of the really dramatic visuals.

Overall: meh.

an Oasis anniversary post

Oct. 26th, 2025 08:33 pm
snickfic: Oasis: Liam and Noel Gallagher, text "Some Might Say" (Oasis)
[personal profile] snickfic
In late 2019, I:
- Watched Todd in the Shadows's video on Be Here Now
- Fell in love with "D'You Know What I Mean," opening track of Be Here Now, and listened to it about fifty times via the Youtube music video (you know the one, with the actualfax helicopters)
- Found Cerberusia's Yuletide prompt for Oasis omegaverse
- Listened to their first two albums. I liked the second album a little better, and on the second or third loop of it playing on Youtube in the background (because I hadn't even subscribed to Tidal yet), I went hey, this song's neat, I wonder what it's called? Friends, it was Wonderwall.
- Watched Supersonic, their two-hour documentary/extremely high-end marketing film.
- Watched a bunch of archive interviews on Youtube, read a bunch more. Fell alllllll the way down the rabbit hole. Collected all the links in a giant word doc that I maintain to this day and which formed the basis of the primer I posted a few months later.
- Wrote 5k of Oasis omegaverse porn. (Got an approving comment on it from one of the OG omegaverse writers!!)

Six years!! I can't believe all that's happened since. 2019 was the absolute nadir of their relationship, and now they hug on stage every night while grinning at each other like soppy adoring idiots. (You see what I mean.) I've written almost 120k of fic and stuck around more or less continuously for longer than I've been in any other fandom. I've seen Liam solo three times, Noel once, and Oasis twice. These gigs have taken me to London, Manchester, and Dublin (twice), after only having been to Europe once before, and have led me to meeting up with a bunch of friends while overseas, some for the first time IRL. After first seeing Liam in 2022, I also started going to see other live music, and some special favorites have been Garbage, Lord Huron, and Saint Motel.

Meanwhile the world in general and I personally have gone through a lot of shit that continues unabated. It's been a very long six years.

The weather here has turned wet and cold, just as it was when I first listened to What's the Story Morning Glory on repeat in 2019. I put the album on in car this weekend, and the big wailing guitars and Liam's voice, helped along by the same grim autumn weather in which I first heard these songs, took me straight back to that original thrill of discovery.

We take our joy where we find it. I have found a lot of mine the past few years in this band and especially these two guys.

halloween icons

Oct. 26th, 2025 12:51 am
svgurl: (stock: pumpkin)
[personal profile] svgurl
I made 22 Halloween related stock icons for the [community profile] seasons_of_fandom "Happy Halloween" challenge.

icons )

Fic title alphabet meme

Oct. 26th, 2025 12:08 pm
lucymonster: (rukia hnn)
[personal profile] lucymonster
I am currently back in bed again with a virus that just WILL NOT QUIT, so here's a meme yoinked from [personal profile] fiachairecht that is pretty much all I have brainpower for.

I have 238 works currently posted on my main AO3 account and obviously a lot of alphabetical overlap, so I've chosen which titles to link with the ulterior motive of making myself look like a diverse writer and not like someone who's spent the past decade writing enormous volumes of Reylo and very little else. (That said, there are some fics on my account that based on title alone I truly could not tell you what fandom they're even for. No memory! Not even a vague sense of deja vu!)

Rules: How many letters of the alphabet have you used for [starting] a fic title? One fic per line, 'A' and 'The' do not count for 'a' and 't'. Post your score out of 26 at the end, along with your total fic count.

A — After the World Ends (Star Wars Sequels, Poe/Finn/Rey/Ben)
B — beauty is power; a smile is its sword (Chronicles of Narnia movies, Susan/Caspian)
C — Chateau d'Yquem (Marriage Story, Charlie/Nicole)
D — Desert Flower (The Hurricane Wars, Talasyn/Alaric)
E — Every Item Has a Soul (MCU/Tidying Up with Marie Kondo RPF, Bucky & KonMari)
F — Friends Don't Know the Way You Taste (Descendents, Evie/Mal)
G — got no heroes 'cause our heroes are dead (The Rise of Kylo Ren, Ren Prime/Kylo)
H — have to live before you die young (Star Wars Sequels/Solo, Qi'ra/Kylo
I — It's Not Rocket Science (Bleach, Ichigo/Rukia & Renji
J — Jacen Syndulla and the Bendu's Word (Star Wars Sequels/Rebels, Hogwarts AU)
K — Kalikori (Star Wars Rebels, Hera/Kanan & Jacen)
L — Limited-Edition Space Invader Barbie(TM) from Mattel (Captain Marvel, Maria Rambeau/Minn-Erva)
M — Mind the Gap (Venom, Eddie/Symbiote)
N — Need a Teacher (Star Wars Sequels, Finnreylo & Poe)
O — Outgunned and Outclassed (Bleach, Byakuya/Renji/Shutara Senjumaru)
P — Playing the Long Game (Star Wars Sequels, Kylo & Baby Yoda)
Q —
R — Rose Tico's Charity Home for Wayward First Order Scum (SW Sequels, Phasma/Rose & Reylo & Finnpoe)
S — shall I compare thee (The Love Hypothesis, Adam/Olive)
T — time will be the judge of what you deserve (Star Wars Sequels, Finnlo)
U — Unless Acted Upon (Star Wars Sequels, Reylo)
V — Victory Day (Star Wars Sequels, Hux/Leia)
W — Welcome Home (The Love Hypothesis, Adam/Olive)
X — XXX (Bleach, Byakuya/Renji)
Y — Yeah, Nah (Star Wars Sequels, Australian AU)
Z —

Only two letters - Q and Z - unaccounted for! I'm kind of tempted to write two ficlets specifically to fill in those last gaps in the alphabet. I've fallen behind on my [community profile] fandom_empire bingo card recently, so maybe I can tie the new vanity project in with a couple of fills for that.

Here's the textbox for anyone else who'd like to play:

fannish stuff

Oct. 25th, 2025 09:16 am
snickfic: (Yuletide)
[personal profile] snickfic
+ Random icon generator knows what it's about!!

+ For Yuletide I got brave and offered a canon I've been wanting to write for a while, as well as a variety of other goodies. A lot of things I haven't offered before. Shaking things up! However, some of the noms I was especially excited about in the tagset didn't get requested, whomp whomp.

+ I knew not many people saw Red Sonja, but I didn't realize it was a "0 Yuletide offers and the only request is mine" number of people. :(

+ I got an extension on the bulk of my FIAB assignment and swapped part of the remaining for a pinch hit, and they're both due next weekend. I'm over halfway to the minimum on the longer fic (but probably not halfway through the story lolsob) and have a start on the shorter fic. Point being: this weekend I have got to make some words. Overall I have about 5500 words towards my 10k goal, which feels... not terrible, all things considered.

+ Today I'm driving up to the city to see Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein! Exciting!! Del Toro should always be seen on the big screen, and also I'm very into Jacob Elordi and cannot wait to see what del Toro does with him as the sympathetic monster. I wish Netflix was giving it a wider release. There are only two theaters in my entire region showing it. >:(

+ After a month's break, Oasis are in the middle of their very short leg in Asia. They continue to be having a grand old time, it seems. Some evidence:
- Walk-on in Tokyo. So much to say that they're still saying it while literally walking on stage with their hands joined!
- Has anyone ever been as obsessed with their sibling's ass as Liam is with Noel's?
- And he thinks we all should be obsessed with it too! Especially notable because, like, it's barely there. A nearly non-existent ass. Noel Gallagher must sit on SOMETHING but...

Database maintenance

Oct. 25th, 2025 08:42 am
mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)
[staff profile] mark posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance

Good morning, afternoon, and evening!

We're doing some database and other light server maintenance this weekend (upgrading the version of MySQL we use in particular, but also probably doing some CDN work.)

I expect all of this to be pretty invisible except for some small "couple of minute" blips as we switch between machines, but there's a chance you will notice something untoward. I'll keep an eye on comments as per usual.

Ta for now!

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