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Heated Rivalry rec

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PWHL

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Hello detectives,

Extensions are due in over two days.

This is a reminder that the extension deadline is Friday 15 May at 11:59pm Eastern. [ In your timezone + Countdown ]

No further extension dates will be given (pinch hitters who claimed in the last two weeks leading up to Friday 1 May are exempted). Extenuating circumstances will be treated on a case-by-case basis.

If you default on your extension, or I have to default you because you are a no-show, you will be required to complete a make-up gift to participate in the next round. (These are due before the next round's sign-ups.)

Please ensure all drafts are submitted. If your work remains a draft at the deadline, you will be considered a no-show.

All works submitted must be able to stand on their own if the collection opened after you won the lottery and moved to an island without WiFi for the rest of time.

Pinch hitters who claimed a request after Friday 1 May who need extensions will have their requests treated on a case-by-case basis. (I don't have any further extension deadlines.) Extensions won't be given to anyone who was assigned a request before Friday 1 May (excluding pinch hitters who claimed in the two weeks leading up to that date).

A new set of pinch hits will be published after the extension date passes.

Please email gumshoeagency@gmail.com if you have any questions or concerns. Please provide your AO3 username so I know who I'm speaking with!

I look forward to approving the works with extensions into the collection!

P.S. Comments on this post are screened.

i'm grumpy

Not only did the dreaded lurgy get worse again today, but I still can't read my fucking book. I bought it legally and everything, but nooooooooooooooo fucking DRM

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3 weeks 4 dreamwidth 2026: Day Ten

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channel islands

So sleeeeeepy

Another walk, this time partly in rain

I slept badly last night for no particular reason, just woke up at 3:30, managed to doze for a while, but was basically awake from 4:30 on. Bah.

Breakfast this morning was the sauteed veggies again, yay, but our host Elena says she'll make pancakes tomorrow morning. A day or two ago she gave us some pre-made maple(-flavoured?) pancakes from Marks&Spencer, which were fine I guess but certainly didn't feel nourishing; but now she's saying she's going to make pancakes with the bananas that are starting to go spotty brown on the sideboard. I am curious to see what they'll be like...

Today the forecast was for intermittent rain, possibly heavy at times, with a fairly strong wind from the northwest. So we decided to do a walk along the west coast, going from north to south so the wind would be at our backs. We caught a bus to our starting point, L'Etacq, about two-thirds of the way up the west coast (our big walk two days ago started at the northwest tip of the island). The bus ride there was almost an hour; taking the bus incidentally also gives us informal tours around! Also, this bus runs northward up the coast, the same route we planned to walk southward down, meaning that we could pretty easily bail out and catch it to go home at any point if we wanted to; worst-case scenario we'd have to wait an hour for the next one, but we wouldn't have to walk far to get to a stop.

There were ominously dark clouds approaching, so as soon as we got off the bus at its northernmost terminus we put on our rain gear: rain jackets and pants (and gaiters for me, because the rain pants I got in Wales last year are slightly too short and dump rain into my boots otherwise), and rain covers on our packs. This time I have a proper pack cover, unlike last year when I had to carefully dry out my passport and a lot of paper currency post-drenching.

I had downloaded a GPS track again, but we hardly needed it, since all we had to do was keep the ocean close on our right. It was about 11 am and the tide was out, although just beginning to start in again, so we went down onto the currently enormously wide beach and walked along it. It was VERY windy, enough to make me wobble on my feet a few times, and I had to put my wool hat on not only to keep my ears from freezing but also to keep my hair out of my eyes; I didn't think to bring any kind of headband on this trip. But thankfully the wind was indeed at our backs, shoving us along! And it did indeed start to rain after ten or fifteen minutes -- not a heavy downpour, but stinging painfully on my face whenever I turned to look to the side, because the wind was so fierce. Rain gear happily doubles as excellent windbreaking gear; thermal layers under it are definitely nice too.

The beach sand was hard-packed enough that walking wasn't difficult, and the views were hazed but dramatic, clouds and waves breaking on rocks and the vast curve of the bay; that whole coastline looks like a closing parenthesis. There are occasional eighteenth- and nineteenth-century towers and other structures, and also frequent German bunkers; the whole coast was heavily fortified against an expected British assault.

One of the buildings we passed was a small, mostly white-painted old stone house with a few windows and absolutely no indication of mod cons after about 1880; a sign outside indicated that (like the Seymour Tower we walked to across the seabed on our first real day here) it can be rented for overnight stays. However, your £400 rental fee doesn't buy you beds or toilets: https://www.nationaltrust.je/stay-hire/properties-for-hire/le-don-hilton/

(Again, we were walking at low tide, across a beach that was maybe seventy meters wide at that time; Geoff will doubtless post some pictures soon. If you want to see what high tide can look like there, go to the page I just linked, click "view all photos," and look for the one with crashing waves! All the coastal walks come with big warnings about not getting trapped by the incoming tide. Trudie, who led our Seymour Tower walk, told us about the rule of twelves: in the first hour the tide is coming in, a twelfth of it comes in; in the second hour, two twelfths, in the third hour, three twelfths; and then back down three, two, one over the next three hours. Which means that if you notice the tide starting to come in, calculate how fast it's moving, and from there assume you know how much time you have before you're cut off, trapped, and drowned, no you do not; it's soon going to be coming in two and three times as fast as you're currently allowing for.)

We also passed a handful of seaside cafes, ranging from fairly swanky restaurants to parked vans; about half of them were actually open. I stopped in to one of the swankier ones to pretend to consult their menu but really just to use their bathroom 😈. We also saw two intrepid and possibly utterly mad people going into the surf, I assume to in fact surf although they were a little too far away for me to see surfboards. We lost sight of them as soon as they went into the water, so I hope they managed all right! Other than them, it was far too rainy and windy for anyone to be on the beach.

After an hour or so the rain stopped and the sky largely cleared (it was still windy, so the clouds were moving at a good clip!); we took off our rain gear and enjoyed the amazing unhazed views. And after about three hours in all we reached our endpoint, the La Courbière lighthouse at the island's southwest tip. Well, not the lighthouse itself; the tide had by now come in enough that the causeway that connects the lighthouse's rocky perch to the mainland was underwater. But the ice cream van parked at the top of the causeway was also worth visiting!

Ice cream consumed, we walked a little further up the road to where a bus home was due in ten minutes. Perfect timing.

What with having slept badly and then a three-hour hike, I was getting really groggy and sleepy on the bus! We pondered stopping for coffee on our way home from the main bus station, and wandered through the pedestrianized shopping areas eyeing various cafes, but weren't really feeling coffee. We did, however, split a very acceptable cinnamon roll from Marks & Spencer's food hall.

Also we realized that we had wandered pretty near a restaurant that Elena, our host, had recommended to us. She's Latvian, and her daughter married a Kenyan man, and they've recently opened this Kenyan restaurant here! So we went by to check it out; it was about 4:00 pm at that point, and the restaurant was closed for the gap between lunch and dinner, but we admired the menu posted outside, and then through the glass door I saw a woman with a child I recognized as Elena's granddaughter, who was here the other day while we were having breakfast. The woman saw me seeing them and came to the door to ask if we needed anything, and I said "Are you Elena's daughter?" and of course she was, and we made a dinner reservation for six pm. before finally heading back to the guesthouse.

Having collapsed for a while, showered, and collapsed for another while, I was pretty stiff when it was time to slog out again to dinner. But it was worth it! We split an appetizer of "Swahili-style" potato croquettes stuffed with minced beef, with a cloud of parmesan shreds on top and tomato salsa on the side, which were excellent. Then I had grilled cod, which came with various veggies in a pool of a smoky tomato sauce surrounded by a hot green herby sauce, and ugali on the side; Geoff had a goat coconut-milk curry and a tomato and cucumber salad dressed with the same hot green herby sauce. Everything was delicious, although I would like goat more if it weren't always so bony. Then for dessert we split a fantastic hot chewy chocolate brownie and vanilla ice cream, which probably isn't particularly Kenyan except in the sense that Kenyans know a good dessert when they see one 🤤 Oh, and we also shared a Kenyan lager called Tusker, which was very good. The waitress told us that if we ever ordered beer in Kenya it would be served warm unless we specified we wanted it cold, but I don't remember how she taught us to ask for it cold.

And it didn't rain on us either going to or coming back from dinner, hurrah!

Tomorrow is forecast to be "rather cloudy with showers, perhaps heavy or prolonged." Thanks for the specificity, folks. We're planning on going to the Jersey Zoo, which is run by the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, of which Geoff is a big fan. ("He was one of my boyhood heroes," he says.) That should give us a fair number of indoor things to see, so we're not outside getting rained on all day. But first I'm going to take a sleep aid tonight, and we'll probably take it easy tomorrow. On top of three hours of actual hiking today, Geoff reminded me that we did more than an hour of just going back and forth through town.

For now, we are curled up in our warm room, blogging. And as soon as I post this, it's time to relax with a Heated Rivalry story 🏒🍆😍

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Wednesday got caught in a pelting hailstorm

What I read

Finished Platform Decay

Read Jonathan Coe, Bournville (2022), which was a Kobo deal, and I have been vaguely interested in reading something by him since coming across his really rather good intro to that archetypal Sad Girl Novel, Dusty Answer. However, was rather meh and tempted at points to give up on this family saga from VE Day to Covid told as vignettes at various Memorable Dates in History of C20th Britain.

There was a certain amount of picking things up and reading a bit and thinking, no, at least, not now, if ever.

Re-read Sally Smith, A Case of Life and Limb (The Trials of Gabriel Ward, #2) (2025), as there is another one forthcoming shortly.

Kobo deals turned up a new Simon R Green, For Better or Murder (Holy Terrors Mystery #4), alas, this was pretty much phoning it in.

Muriel Spark, The Hothouse by the East River (1973), which is a very very weird novella, absurdist, grotesque, is it about something that happened when they were working for Secret Organisation with German POWs in War and is that why the unheimlich frisson (turns out, no).

After that I just wanted the perhaps too simple and predictable pleasures of Robert B Parker, Silent Night (Spenser #41.5) (2013, unfinished at his death, completed by his agent Helen Brann).

On the go

Persuasion, which I began somewhat behindhand of the daily chapter group read on bluesky.

Up next

Well, there's that new Literary Review, but apart from that.

Am being irked by certain writers whose new ebooks are pretty 2x or more what they used to be. (I might have gone for this I suppose had I not been a bit underwhelmed by some recent offerings.)

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bundle of holding

Bundle of Holding: The Other Side

11 character-class supplements for any old-school FRPG.

Bundle of Holding: The Other Side

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Moon Knight rewatchalong + related links

A couple FFA anons mentioned watching Moon Knight for the first time, so somebody started an anniversary rewatch! …Interest dropped off pretty hard after the first few episodes, sigh. (I didn’t start it. I did end up finishing it.) But at least a couple nice observations came out of it.

I used this as an opportunity to tackle a project I’ve been meaning to do for a while: “cleaning up the MK episode transcripts I saved from a slightly-dodgy website.” Here’s one nice simple file with all the Moon Knight transcripts.

There are other enhancements I pondered throwing in, like “links with more info about the research topics Steven references” or “extended lyrics for some of the music” (somebody linked this Reddit post about the Arabic/Egyptian background music and how relevant the lyrics are, good stuff). Maybe next rewatch.

Screencap of Marc + Steven in the Egyptian underworld

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: my desk

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Check-In Post - May 13th 2026

Hello to all members, passers-by, curious onlookers, and shy lurkers, and welcome to our regular daily check-in post. Just leave a comment below to let us know how your current projects are progressing, or even if they're not.

Checking in is NOT compulsory, check in as often or as seldom as you want, this community isn't about pressure it's about encouragement, motivation, and support. Crafting is meant to be fun, and what's more fun than sharing achievements and seeing the wonderful things everyone else is creating?

There may also occasionally be questions, but again you don't have to answer them, they're just a way of getting to know each other a bit better.

This Week's Question: What do you wish you could get right first time, every time?

If anyone has any questions of their own about the community, or suggestions for tags, questions to be asked on the check-in posts, or if anyone is interested in playing check-in host for a week here on the community, which would entail putting up the daily check-in posts and responding to comments, go to the Questions & Suggestions post and leave a comment.

I now declare this Check-In OPEN!

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Amazing Spider-Man/Venom: Death Spiral - Body Count #1

( Scans under the cut... )

Another Fantasy Bundle - The Other Side OSR

This is a bundle of Old School Revival (D&D-like roleplaying) covering evil witches and warlocks from The Other Side Publishing.

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/OtherSide

This isn't something I'm likely to want since I don't play D&D or any of the Old School Revival games, and I suspect that some of this is likely to seriously annoy practitioners of Wicca, druidism, and other traditions. Since I am evidently not the intended market I'm going to give it a hard pass.

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The Fury of Firestorm #2: The Origin Of Firestorm

( Read more, )

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Knull #5

( Scans under the cut... )

The End of Florida Oranges

Florida's orange crop is dead, down by 95%, mostly due to citrus greening disease, caused by the Liberibacter asiaticum bacterium and spread via a species of sap-sucking psyllid, the Asian citrus psyllid Diaphorina citri, and apparently another as well, the African citrus psyllid Trioza erytreae. Psyllids are small and related to aphids and whiteflies, the Asian citrus psyllid looks like a brown lacewing and the African citrus psyllid looks like a little brown moth. The age of orange juice for breakfast is over and the Florida orange groves are not coming back, they're getting replaced with housing developments.

What's the attraction to living in Florida? With hurricanes getting more frequent, destroying houses, cutting the electricity, downing trees, it sounds like Russian Roulette. High risk should have a high payoff. I don't see the payoff, unless you're Disney or a drug running cartel. Here in the Land of Ice and Snow, we have clothes, houses and infrastructure that keeps everyone from dying from exposure. It doesn't look like everyone in Florida can keep dry under a 4m storm surge or relax with a book while high winds throw uprooted trees around outside. I live in the sweet spot of North America. No floods, no fires, no 40°C heat waves, actual health care and less snow than last century, but just enough for winter and spring needs. I would like more deer 'k thanx, and a pony. Many ponies. Little ones. Pasture pets. I'd need a stable. I'd have to move. I hate moving.

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Word of Honor Icons

Created for

seasons_of_fandom Spring 2026 CH07: SPRING MOOD

12 Word of Honor Mood Icons

amused	annoyed	content	happy

mischievous	refreshed	sad	shocked

thirsty	worried	+1 determined	+1 enraged

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: A street
Current Music: "All for the Love of One" - Mediaeval Baebes

The Kill that Keeps On Killing

Well, it was nice to get a little decent Marvel content in Punisher: One Last Kill last night, even if it did feel more like John Wick content. Perhaps the key was dialling the ambition way down from where it was on Daredevil and focusing on telling a simple vignette. It helps that Jon Bernthal seems very passionate about the character, enough that he co-wrote the teleplay with Reinaldo Marcus Green, who directed. Green is the director of the Academy Award nominated film, King Richard, which I haven't seen, but One Last Kill does come across as more competently directed and less sloppily edited than a lot of other recent Marvel TV content. And, thank Christ, the fight choreography is good.

( Spoilers for Punisher One Last Kill behind the cut )

Punisher: One Last Kill is available on Disney+.

Pretty goldfish shaped dumplings!

Look at them!

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( Read more... )

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ushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation, volume 1 by Rifujin Na Magonote

A selfless act of heroism costs a homeless NEET his life. Waking in an unfamiliar world, he resolves to do better in his next incarnation.

Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation, volume 1 by Rifujin Na Magonote

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(no subject)

Dear Eric: I strongly dislike tattoos, as does everyone in my immediate family. I can't fathom why anybody would want to ruin their skin and risk infections. I was hoping this fad would die and fade away like indoor smoking in a restaurant.

I can hardly bear to eat out anymore at just the sickening thought that someone with tattoos would be cooking, preparing or serving the food and taking out all the enjoyment for me. I know it's a personal choice, but why would anyone be proud to show them off like a really ugly piece of art on an ugly or aging body? Beats me. I don’t know what to do about this.

– Ink Free

( Read more... )