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delphiFandom 50 #23
Untitled Daisuke and Monty by Julia Stark
Fandom: Dimension 20: Cloudward, Ho!
Relationship: Daisuke Bucklesby/Monty LaMontgomery
Medium: Art
Length: 1 piece
Rating: SFW
My Bookmark Tags: slice of life, happy ending, established relationship, then and now, clothing, nostalgia
Description:
( Very Minor Spoilers for Episode 6 )
This piece is just so sweet. The whole "getting the band back together" element of Cloudward, Ho! has been right up my alley, and I like that their separation was more about losing something that was holding them together rather than a big falling-out that created any ill will. It's made for a great story so far about some highly competent older characters reuniting warmly with old friends and working well together because of their shared history.
I love how the artist has captured this. The flashback looms large over the two men, creating a sense of those past conversations fuelling their present ease with each other and shared direction. It spot-on conveys Monty's wonderful attentiveness to people and suggests a lot in imagining the usually laconic Daisuke so engaged in talking to him. As someone who loves the aesthetics of this season, I'm also very much here for the details in their outfits and the little ways they've changed over the years.
Untitled Daisuke and Monty by Julia Stark
Fandom: Dimension 20: Cloudward, Ho!
Relationship: Daisuke Bucklesby/Monty LaMontgomery
Medium: Art
Length: 1 piece
Rating: SFW
My Bookmark Tags: slice of life, happy ending, established relationship, then and now, clothing, nostalgia
Description:
Two full-colour images of Daisuke and Monty, one in the present and one in flashback to their younger days. The first is fully saturated and features the two walking close together with Monty in the lead. Daisuke's hat is tipped forward over his eyes as he looks down with a faint smile and puts away his flask. Monty is watching him over his shoulder, likewise smiling and seemingly mid-conversation with him. Above them, larger and more faded out, is a memory of them sitting together decades ago, Daisuke speaking while Monty watches him with soft-eyed attention.
( Very Minor Spoilers for Episode 6 )
This piece is just so sweet. The whole "getting the band back together" element of Cloudward, Ho! has been right up my alley, and I like that their separation was more about losing something that was holding them together rather than a big falling-out that created any ill will. It's made for a great story so far about some highly competent older characters reuniting warmly with old friends and working well together because of their shared history.
I love how the artist has captured this. The flashback looms large over the two men, creating a sense of those past conversations fuelling their present ease with each other and shared direction. It spot-on conveys Monty's wonderful attentiveness to people and suggests a lot in imagining the usually laconic Daisuke so engaged in talking to him. As someone who loves the aesthetics of this season, I'm also very much here for the details in their outfits and the little ways they've changed over the years.
wednesday update
Jul. 9th, 2025 07:00 pmisisI don't have much to say about books or TV, because I am still in the middle of my current read and current show. But! For those of you who casually enjoyed the podcast The Strange Case of Starship Iris, the third (and final) season is coming out now. There are a couple of "mini-sodes" which will help you catch up to what's going on, and two regular episodes, and the third will be out soon (it's out to high-dollar Patreons but I am a low-dollar contributor). I listened to the mini-sodes when they came out, and today on my run I listened to the first two regular episodes. Again, I kind of feel like I'm using dystopian fiction about authoritarian regimes as escapism from actual authoritarian regimes...
But the real reason I wanted to post was to say that I'm a bit more than 55% through Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, and there's a 30% discount for it in the Steam sale which ends tomorrow, so - if my post last week intrigued you, I encourage you to buy it, it's inexpensive, it's captivating, it's sophisticated and spooky and atmospheric with occasional touches of humor, fourth-wall smashing, and weird supernatural stuff, and the puzzles are clever and thinky and (mostly) fun. As I mentioned, I told my brother about it and he bought it - and he finished it last night! He admits he got so into it that he put in way too many hours too quickly, but he really loved it.
If you do buy it, the hints page at https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3249636035 is really great as it is nudge-y rather than sledge-y; it points you in the right direction (or tells you what a wrong direction is) which for me is mostly all I have needed.
Also, there are in-game espresso machines.
But the real reason I wanted to post was to say that I'm a bit more than 55% through Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, and there's a 30% discount for it in the Steam sale which ends tomorrow, so - if my post last week intrigued you, I encourage you to buy it, it's inexpensive, it's captivating, it's sophisticated and spooky and atmospheric with occasional touches of humor, fourth-wall smashing, and weird supernatural stuff, and the puzzles are clever and thinky and (mostly) fun. As I mentioned, I told my brother about it and he bought it - and he finished it last night! He admits he got so into it that he put in way too many hours too quickly, but he really loved it.
If you do buy it, the hints page at https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3249636035 is really great as it is nudge-y rather than sledge-y; it points you in the right direction (or tells you what a wrong direction is) which for me is mostly all I have needed.
Also, there are in-game espresso machines.
What I'm Reading: Ew, It's Beautiful: A False Knees Comic Collection by Joshua Barkman
Jul. 4th, 2025 04:20 pmdelphi✓ kingstoken's 2025 Book Bingo: Non-Human POV
(I checked this square off my bingo card last time, but this new release arrived with perfect timing, so I'm doubling up.)
Ew, It's Beautiful is the newest collection of cartoonist Joshua Barkman's webcomic False Knees. It contains around 120 short comics, the majority of which were new to me, separated into sections for winter, spring, summer, and fall based on their setting.
The stars of False Knees are usually birds, but there are some cats, insects, and at least a couple of beavers in the mix here. Barkman's art is legitimately beautiful, with a naturalist's specificity and a knack for combining human expressions with realistic animal features, and his writing captures the universal experience of being a small creature in an unfathomably big world. It's full of absurd humour, occasional moments of awe, and recurring bits about the creative process, self-image, and the way friends or family can be on entirely different wavelengths. The comic is where I got my current default icon from, and it almost never fails to bring me a little joy or give me something to appreciate.
( 3 Comics )
kingstoken's 2025 Book Bingo: Non-Human POV(I checked this square off my bingo card last time, but this new release arrived with perfect timing, so I'm doubling up.)
Ew, It's Beautiful is the newest collection of cartoonist Joshua Barkman's webcomic False Knees. It contains around 120 short comics, the majority of which were new to me, separated into sections for winter, spring, summer, and fall based on their setting.
The stars of False Knees are usually birds, but there are some cats, insects, and at least a couple of beavers in the mix here. Barkman's art is legitimately beautiful, with a naturalist's specificity and a knack for combining human expressions with realistic animal features, and his writing captures the universal experience of being a small creature in an unfathomably big world. It's full of absurd humour, occasional moments of awe, and recurring bits about the creative process, self-image, and the way friends or family can be on entirely different wavelengths. The comic is where I got my current default icon from, and it almost never fails to bring me a little joy or give me something to appreciate.
( 3 Comics )
wednesday reads and things
Jul. 2nd, 2025 06:17 pmisisWhat I've recently finished reading:
Lamentation by C.J. Sansom, the 6th Shardlake novel. This is all about the heresy hunts in the last few years before Henry VIII's death - one faction wanted to go back towards Catholicism, one wanted a radical re-imagining of religion and social structures, and if you wanted to stay in the regime's good graces, you walked the narrow path of "the King is the divinely ordained leader of the Church, and whatever he says goes." Warning for historical burning of heretics, plus canon-typical violence; also for weird religion and contentious legal cases. Matthew Shardlake still has a crush on the queen (Katherine Parr).
What I'm reading now:
My hold on Katherine Addison's The Tomb of Dragons came in, so that. Just barely started.
What I recently finished watching:
American Primeval, which, huh, I've never before encountered media in which the Mormons are the bad guys. (This is not a spoiler. It's pretty clear from the get-go, but it gets more pointed and cartoon-villainy toward the end.) Definitely violent and gory, though also it felt very clearly written to Tug The Heart Strings (and then, often, deliberately kill the character it's just tried to make you care about) at which at least for me it failed to do. I liked Abish, Two Moons, and Captain Edwin Dellinger, and James Bridger amused the hell out of me, but - I mostly enjoyed it, but I don't feel it was superlative. I got tired of the filter to wash out colors so it looked almost old-photo sepia.
I did enjoy the historical setting of the Mormon War; as I mentioned last time, I researched it for my Yuletide story, and I think it's just an interesting time, the settlement/colonization of western North America.
What I'm about to start watching:
Murderbot! We always wait until enough episodes are out that we can watch ~every other day and not have to wait.
What I'm playing now:
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, which was recommended to me as a "spooky atmospheric puzzle game", and I'm enjoying it a lot. You play as a mysterious woman who has come to a mysterious hotel full of locked doors in what might be Germany in 1963, at the request of a mysterious man for reasons of ??? I told my brother about it because it's cheap in the summer sale at Steam, and he decided it sounded good so he is playing it now, a bit behind my progress but because of the nonlinearity he's ahead of me in some things. We're trying to give each other elliptical hints when needed.
Lamentation by C.J. Sansom, the 6th Shardlake novel. This is all about the heresy hunts in the last few years before Henry VIII's death - one faction wanted to go back towards Catholicism, one wanted a radical re-imagining of religion and social structures, and if you wanted to stay in the regime's good graces, you walked the narrow path of "the King is the divinely ordained leader of the Church, and whatever he says goes." Warning for historical burning of heretics, plus canon-typical violence; also for weird religion and contentious legal cases. Matthew Shardlake still has a crush on the queen (Katherine Parr).
What I'm reading now:
My hold on Katherine Addison's The Tomb of Dragons came in, so that. Just barely started.
What I recently finished watching:
American Primeval, which, huh, I've never before encountered media in which the Mormons are the bad guys. (This is not a spoiler. It's pretty clear from the get-go, but it gets more pointed and cartoon-villainy toward the end.) Definitely violent and gory, though also it felt very clearly written to Tug The Heart Strings (and then, often, deliberately kill the character it's just tried to make you care about) at which at least for me it failed to do. I liked Abish, Two Moons, and Captain Edwin Dellinger, and James Bridger amused the hell out of me, but - I mostly enjoyed it, but I don't feel it was superlative. I got tired of the filter to wash out colors so it looked almost old-photo sepia.
I did enjoy the historical setting of the Mormon War; as I mentioned last time, I researched it for my Yuletide story, and I think it's just an interesting time, the settlement/colonization of western North America.
What I'm about to start watching:
Murderbot! We always wait until enough episodes are out that we can watch ~every other day and not have to wait.
What I'm playing now:
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, which was recommended to me as a "spooky atmospheric puzzle game", and I'm enjoying it a lot. You play as a mysterious woman who has come to a mysterious hotel full of locked doors in what might be Germany in 1963, at the request of a mysterious man for reasons of ??? I told my brother about it because it's cheap in the summer sale at Steam, and he decided it sounded good so he is playing it now, a bit behind my progress but because of the nonlinearity he's ahead of me in some things. We're trying to give each other elliptical hints when needed.
REC: Day by Day by surprisepink (Our Flag Means Death, Stede Bonnet/Izzy Hands)
Jun. 30th, 2025 07:03 pmdelphiFandom 50 #22
Day by Day by![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
surprisepink
Fandom: Our Flag Means Death
Ship: Stede Bonnet/Izzy Hands
Medium: Fic
Length: 1361 words
Rating: Teen
My Bookmark Tags: slice of life, romance, humour, happy ending, established relationship, izzy lives, future, flirtation, compatibility, service
Summary: A typical raid for Captain Bonnet and his new first mate.
Excerpt:
This is everything I love about the idea of Stede and Izzy together on the Revenge, with Stede captaining and Izzy serving as his first mate. The way they rile each other up is perfect, tempered to just the right heat by a better understanding of each other. Izzy's ways of trying to serve Stede while keeping his ego in check are moving, and so is Stede's growing sense of what he's doing and what it means.
The story's funny, with a comedic moment early on that made me laugh out loud, and the sexual chemistry between Stede and Izzy absolutely crackles. This one really made my day.
Day by Day by
Fandom: Our Flag Means Death
Ship: Stede Bonnet/Izzy Hands
Medium: Fic
Length: 1361 words
Rating: Teen
My Bookmark Tags: slice of life, romance, humour, happy ending, established relationship, izzy lives, future, flirtation, compatibility, service
Summary: A typical raid for Captain Bonnet and his new first mate.
Excerpt:
“I’m getting the hang of this, if I do say so myself,” says Stede, cheerily.
“And you do.”
“What’s that, Izzy?’
“Say so yourself.” The man looks entirely unimpressed, but it does take a lot to impress Izzy. Stede has accepted it by this point, and knows not to take it personally. Knows, too, that if Izzy actually wasn’t at least a little happy with him, he could leave the ship just about anywhere and find another pirate crew to join. And yet, port after port, he doesn’t.
And all Stede had ever wanted was for people to stay.
This is everything I love about the idea of Stede and Izzy together on the Revenge, with Stede captaining and Izzy serving as his first mate. The way they rile each other up is perfect, tempered to just the right heat by a better understanding of each other. Izzy's ways of trying to serve Stede while keeping his ego in check are moving, and so is Stede's growing sense of what he's doing and what it means.
The story's funny, with a comedic moment early on that made me laugh out loud, and the sexual chemistry between Stede and Izzy absolutely crackles. This one really made my day.
Rebuilding journal search again
Jun. 30th, 2025 03:18 pmalierak posting in ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png){kind=small}
dw_maintenanceWe're having to rebuild the search server again (previously, previously). It will take a few days to reindex all the content.
Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.
Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.