incandescens | Network

The wall-to-wall crowd of the memorial from which I have just returned testifies to the love poured out and returned by the guest of honor, but I would still rather have been in the worldline where they were present to be celebrated in more than memory.

Current Music: Jack Johnson, "Better Together"

mekare

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mekare

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oursin

Last week's bread held out admirably.

Friday night supper: ven pongal (South India khichchari).

Saturday breakfast rolls: eclectic vanilla, came out a bit more vanilla-y than usual.

Today's lunch: Norwegian halibut fillets panfried for slightly less long than suggested on packet, as I have found this in the past to be a bit of an over-estimate, served with samphire sauce, baby cauliflowers quartered and cooked thus (used lime and lemongrass vinegar for the acidulation) and La Ratte potatoes roasted in goosefat.

hamsterwoman

So, L and I went to see Hoppers at the movies on Thursday. The premise sounded very stupid to me when I first heard about it, but L had showed me the “lizard lizard lizard lizard” teaser some months ago, and the lizard looked cute, and L wanted to see it by RH was not interested in seeing it with her, so I said I would. I watched Dan Murrell’s review of it with some trepidation, but he said it was a good, though “lesser” Pixar, with a good message but not too preachy, which seemed relatively reassuring. And both L and I ended up enjoying it more than we expected and laughing A LOT, which was nice.

We saw it in 4DX, which was my first experience of that at feature length – ( more on this part )

In fact, the only time the chair-jolting part became really unpleasant was during ( the previews )

The movie itself was fun! ( More, with marked spoilers )

It’s not a movie that will stay with me in some, you know, profound way, like an Encanto or an Inside Out or a Spider-Verse, but it was cute and a time well spent! I even don’t terribly resent it for costing us $33/person XD (though, seriously, that is insane).

*

I also watched a couple of comedy specials:

Pierre Novellie Why Can't I Just Enjoy Things special – about his autism diagnosis via heckler. I liked Novellie when he appeared on How Do You Cope, talking about his autism, and enjoyed him as a guest on Elis & John, in more free-form conversation, and then

scytale recommended this special, so I watched it (because I couldn’t get into Netflix for some reason, and B, whose email it’s linked to, was asleep in Normandy, so I couldn’t watch the James Acaster specials I was planning to watch with my solo dinner at home). ( I liked it (some joke spoilers) )

And then I was watching his other special on YouTube, Quiet Ones, and there is a bit he reads from a paper (because he finds it too boring to remember) about Moore’s Law XD I mean, what are the odds XD XD This show was from 2021, so a lot of it is about the lockdown, and I generally thought it was less strong (which makes sense, you would expect an artist to get better at his art as he practices it more), but I did appreciate the “quiet ones” bit, among the differences between men and women, after which the show is (justly) named.

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Some more Taskmaster-adjacent content:

- CoC 4 portrait fanart -- what a gloriously mad bunch! :D (cartoon!Andy is my favorite)

- Another Taskmaster Podcast popped up for the second live event in NYC (the last night of the tour). There was some repetition of stuff I heard Greg say on other stops or other interviews, but still some fun gleanings. ( Assorted tidbits )

Long Alex & Greg interview during the US tour (YouTube): Fun and thoughtful, with some unusual questions and good rapport. ( Assorted tidbits )

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I think it's also time for an Elis & John catch-up. It’s been a bit over a month since my last post, but really, because it took me about a month to get through the previous catch-ups, over 3 separate posts, I’ve actually got over two months worth of listening I’m catching up on – i.e. 2 months of new shows and about 7 months of Radio X backlog.

First, a visual bit: John and a giant teddy (from ~10 years ago?)

Second, John was on Chris and Rosie Ramsey’s “Shagged, Married, Annoyed” podcast earlier this year, where the schtick with the guest is he reads a listener-submitted story, which of course I don’t have much interest in, but he also talked about some personal stuff in more detail than I’ve heard elsewhere. (The recording was from about 6 months earlier than the podcast, so, mid-2025-ish, because How Do You Cope was actively putting out episodes and John said he’d been sober for 2.5 years, when he passed three years in November 2025.) ( Personal tidbits: giving up meat, spooky bum procedure )

Catching up on the current shows, ( Jan - Mar 2026 )

(I do also have ~8 months of Radio X shows to post about, but that's going to be a separate post -- hopefully it all fits in one, LOL.)

*

And oh hey, it's mid-March somehow, so this is probably a good time to check in on my ( fannish goals )

moon_custafer

Had several dreams, including one in which

sovay and I were watching an old movie titled, iirc, Coral Island, though it had nothing to do with the Edwardian boys’-adventure novel of the same name. I’m pretty sure Robert Newton was in it, though his character disappeared from the plot midway through.

sovay then learnt of some recently-discovered footage in which the camera had been kept running between takes, and the chatter of the actors was audible. In the manner of dreams, the footage was immersive, and we could walk into it. Apparently we were visible to them, though they took us for extras and mostly ignored us, except for somebody from Wardrobe who ran up and handed me some more-appropriate stockings and shoes.

Somehow this then segued into a different dream in which I was editing/writing speeches for the Democrats. I kept telling anybody who’d listen that I was Canadian and I wasn’t sure if I could legally work for them, but nobody paid any attention. Also the speech I was writing eventually turned into a script about the protagonist seeking advice from a magical cat.

moon_custafer

Livia is Missing

selenak

Dark Winds, Season 3: continues to be both beautifully acted, thoughtfully and empathically written, and a visual feast. Also heartbreaking in the day it follows up on s2's conclusion for Joe Leaphorn and his wife Emma. ( Small spoilery remark. ) Also I was more grateful than ever that the show takes place in the 1970s and wasn't updated to the present because Bern's new job with border patrol would have felt very differently even before her subplot kicks in.

Young Sherlock: aka the one by Guy Ritchie which doesn't feel like a prequel to his Holmes movies and is the better for it. I mean, I didn't dislike his first Holmes movie, which was the only one I saw, but I wasn't crazy about it, either, and never felt the need to see it again. Also it was made at a time where all the various iterations of Sherlock Holmes seemed to lean into emphasizing his arrrogance. Now, this show is entertaining fluff with only the vaguest nods to when it's supposed to be set: female students galore in Oxford, 1870, for some reason a rich and high ranking visitor takes the carriage instead of the train to Oxford, while someone in the production team actually remembered the Paris Commune happened, they evidently forgot or ignored both the near starvation of the population part of that and that there was also the Franco-Prussian war going on, so everyone makes a trip to Paris for one episode with no armies in sight, but the Folies Bergeres being in business with dancing girls, etc., etc., etc. Not to mentiion ( something extremely plot spoilery ) But honestly, because the show doesn't pretend to be anything but fun fluff, I did not mind. What I do suspect is someone in the production team has watched at least some Smallville and thought, hm, that "Clark and Lex were bffs for a while when young before Lex went evil" premise is great, we should do that with Holmes and Moriarty". And proceeded to follow up on this idea. Young Sherlock, played by a member of the gifted Fiennes clan, and young James M, played by Mat (the second one) from Wheel of Time, have the necessary chemistry and homoerotic subtext, they hit it off famously, and at the same time the seeds for future supervillaindom in Moriarty are there. And the show does make it believable these are two young guys smarter than most others around them and on each other's level. Most importantly, though: this Sherlock Holmes is the first one in what feels like eons who is not introduced being a jerk to the people around him. (I love Elementary ! But while Elementary's Sherlock was never as extreme as Sherlock's Sherlock, he, too, started out being rude to his Watson and everyone else.) It might come with the much younger territory, but while he's cocky, he's not (yet?) abrasive, downright tender with his mother, and, lo and behold, civil to people who aren't awful to others in front of him. Otoh, it may also be that Guy Ritchie and his production team watched the last season of Sherlock and thought, hm, dysfunctional Holmes family drama, unexpected relations, we like it, we like it, but how about giving the women better parts? ( Spoilers were very entertained indeed by the result ) Oh, and absolutely no one gets raped or threatened with rape. Like I said, this fluffy show with a heavy emphasis on the bromance manages to do very well by its female characters. Anyway, whether nor not this gets another season - which it doesn't really need for the story it has told - I enjoyed myself.

Current Mood: chipper
Current Location: Munich

princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: busy

conuly

Seriously, asleep more than I've been awake. And I never did manage to work out the logistics to get to the memorial, which halfway sucks but halfway is "Welp, social anxiety" so....

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thawrecka

TV: My Prince of Tennis anime marathon continues apace. Good news: Tezuka vs Atobe is just as good as I remember! The look on Atobe's face when he realises Tezuka has accepted his challenge! Oishi asking Tezuka if he's sure! Atobe getting what he wants, but no longer wanting it! Atobe wishing the game would go on forever! When the crowd stops cheering and just looks on in shock for that endless tiebreak! The arm raise at the end! Honestly, magnificent. I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding when Atobe finally won, even though I knew it was coming, it was that tense.

The Inui/Kaidoh doubles arc is also just as homoerotic as I remembered. Hunting down the place where Kaidoh trains shirtless, asking him to play doubles against a vibrant sunset, the whole 'let's mutually use each other' thing... What a good pairing. I 100% believe they hooked up between tennis practises....

Kawamura's hyper macho tennissona is so funny to me. Also, I just got to Fuji asking to use his bloody tennis racket and, wow, instantly remembered how hard I shipped that pairing back in the day. There should have been more fic about them!!!

I feel like Tezuka/Oishi is also an underrated ship; people don't do enough with that dynamic early on where Oishi is taking Tezuka to his doctor's appointments and acting like his worried wife. On the other hand, people have done much with how shippy the Golden Pair are after they break up in the arc where Inui gets back on the team, and they were right to, this bit of tension is the most shippy Oishi and Eiji have ever been, and from what I remember they get even shippier later.

I have to admit I didn't pay much attention to the (anime only) Josei Shonan arc, which was sooooooooo boring. All the characters on the opposing team have wacky hair to disguise that they don't have interesting personalities. I felt very [I have no memory of this place] so I assume I straight up skipped this arc the first time around. In theory the Inui & Momo doubles match should have been interesting, but it mostly underlined for me that they both have better chemistry with Kaidoh. It's not like I can say the storyline the manga did instead at this point was better, because I also don't remember that 🤣 The Rokkaku arc is fine, but the most striking image is the super long racket. Echizen is adorable in this arc, though.

I'm about to start the Rikkai games. The last bunch of episodes have been very Momo/Kaidoh shippy. Rescuing the kitty together ❤️

I kind of want to write Prince of Tennis fic again... in 2026... but I have genfic ideas. Where Ryoma is aroace but doesn't care because he only identifies as a tennis player. And then I guess I'd have to write a lot of tennis?

Watched two movies yesterday:

The 2006 Prince of Tennis live action movie, which is so much worse than I remembered. It's not good as an adaptation and it's not good as a film in its own right! No narrative focus! A lot of bad acting! Ryuuzaki is young and hot for some reason! They try to jam in too much stuff and too many characters and everything feels thin and underwhelming! The upside is I think Fuji is perfect in it in his approx five seconds of screen time, and the weird side is Ryoma and Tezuka are so much shippier here than I think they've been in any other version of the canon.

Challengers: the sad story of a woman who can't marry tennis, so she has to put up with men.

Could have used more tennis, though I found the tennis ball POV shots kind of funny. I mostly got the impression that Tashi found Art nice and convenient and she was attracted to Patrick but didn't want to be in a relationship with him, but she was really in love with tennis. I didn't find Zendaya convincing as a tennis player, but she is convincing as the hot woman two dudes fight over, so that was fine. The homoerotic tension was there, but by the end I think I found it the least interesting part? At the beginning I didn't like Tashi, but by the end I found her the only likeable character, weirdly enough; I think it might be because she was the best characterised of them all, and had more depth to her longings.

The ending felt great, which I think is because it gave me the impression the men were finally as in love with tennis as Tashi was. I can see why people want a threesome at the end of that film, but I mostly felt like none of those people should bone. Much like with the peach fucker film I feel that Luca Guadagnino's aesthetic sensibility and mine don't mesh very well; the film wasn't pretty enough to my tastes, but obviously worked well for other people.

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cimorene

Wax informed me that it was definitely coming out too small and would need to be started over, so this morning I spent several hours unraveling it after I finished weaving in the ends on the Bumblebee Breton (#2).

The three skeins rolled together into one yarn ball are the size of a baby's head, according to Wax. (Close enough I guess.)

pauraque

When I was a kid I had two artillery games: Tank Wars and QBasic Gorillas.

side by side screenshots of two artillery games, one on a green battlefield with visible firing arcs in a starry sky, the other with gorillas standing on skyscrapers — *Left: Tank Wars. Right: QBasic Gorillas*

Both games share the same basic concept. You and your opponent sit on opposite ends of a battlefield and take turns lobbing projectiles at one another in parabolic arcs, adjusting the angle and power of each shot to try to land a hit.

Tank Wars, created by Kenneth Morse, allows you to customize a myriad of game options, from windspeed to the color of the sky. You can play hotseat multiplayer, or if you have a keyboard and a mouse (fancy!) you and a friend can huddle around the computer together and split the controls. If your friends are unavailable there are CPU opponents of various levels of skill, from "Mr. Stupid" to "Wind Master". As you rack up points you can buy bombs with different blast radii, and when you win the terrain blows up in a satisfying crater and rains back down on the field in an elaborate shower of pixels.

QBasic Gorillas came with MS-DOS 5.0 and was created by Microsoft as a demonstration of the capabilities of the QBasic programming language. You and your opponent are gorillas who throw exploding bananas, and when you win, you do the Monkey.

Tank Wars is, I suppose, the "better" of the two games, in the sense of having more sophisticated graphics and gameplay. But does it have dancing gorillas? Does it have exploding bananas? Does it have a cartoon sun that makes a face like 😮 if you manage to hit it? I ask you. I did play both games a lot, but I know which one was more appealing to my sensibilities as a child of 8-9 years of age.

shewhomust

Thursday was

durham_rambler's birthday. This is not a plea for messages of congratulation: he really doesn't seem interested in celebrating it. I asked him several times if he wanted to take a day out, or do anything special, and never got an answer - and then the weather was horrible, so it's just as well. The most birthday-related activity of our day was organising a card for his sister-in-law, whose birthday is today. Maybe I exaggerate a bit: there were cards, and we opened a bottle of wine with our dinner, but I stand by my title: not celebrated, but observed.

Despite all of that, it did seem celebratory to go out to a concert yesterday: Kathryn Tickell and Amy Thatcher at Ushaw. I don't enjoy all of Kathryn Tickell's projects, and we didn't enjoy Amy Thatcher's Re:Vulva at Hartlepool, but this collaboration is solid Northumbrian tradition, fiddle and smallpipes and accordeon and clogs and just the right amount of chat. Here's a taster - but imagine it without the band lurking in the shadows (the lighting wasn't as good, either):

<

Watch on YouTube

I think it was the guitarist John James who said that the Welsh have no folk music, because 'we know who wrote them all'. Kathryn Tickell takes the opposite position: a tune can still be traditional even if you know who wrote it, even if she wrote it herself, because tradition is a living thing. (As the Incredible String Band sing: The opposite is also true.) So we had songs by Kathryn and Amy, songs by the Northumbrian shepherds with whom Kathryn played as a child, Alastair Anderson's Dog Leap Stairway and some genuinely old pipe tunes, and I enjoyed them all. So when I said "solid Northumbrian tradition," what makes it solid is the geographical unity.

With one exception, and perversely one of my favourite pieces: a tune called The Joy of It by Shetland fiddler Catherine Geldard.

oursin

Goodness knows, some real weirdness is revealed in You Be the Judge in Guardian Saturday, but today's produces a theory which is entirely new to me -

You be the judge: should my housemate stop warming her mug and then pouring the water back into the kettle?

But apart from all this hoohah about HYGIENE, I am rather taken with New Health Scare Theory:

Boiling water twice is a no-no for me – there is a change in quality and taste. My life had a certain drabness to it – I now attribute that to consuming poor-quality water for so long without realising.

This could be a whole new thing, couldn't it? Once-boiled water for vitality!

I was going to ask are they living in a log cabin or what in Ohio if the kitchen is so freezingly cold in the mornings they have to warm up the mugs so that they do not immediately chill the coffee but I see the issue is poor insulation.

Maybe they should do something about insulation rather than bicker over 'secondhand water'?

oursin

Happy birthday,

gwynnega!

tozka

1. I found a tiny snail on the wall INSIDE the house. How did it get there? Where is it going?

2. What I thought was a weird-looking vase revealed itself to be a crystal singing bowl. I can see why enthusiasts are SO enthusiastic about it. The sound sort of vibrates upwards and it's almost a physical feeling once it hits.

3. One week until I leave Chichester and head to Cardiff! If you have any recommendations for charity shops, used bookstores, small museums or other interesting places to while away time, let me know.

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Page Summary

sovay - There's no combination of words I could put on the back of a postcard
mekare - Bridgerton show vs novel
mekare - Art: Hiroshige 9
trobadora in fandomcalendar - 镇魂 | Guardian: 520 Day Reverse Exchange 2026
oursin - Culinary
hamsterwoman - Watching + listening roundup (Hoppers, Britcom rabbit hole) + fannish goals checkin
moon_custafer - Dream Report
moon_custafer - Meadowville, Chapter 8
selenak - Of Navajo cops and future arch nemesis
princessofgeeks - randominity of happiness for a change
conuly - I've been so tired these past few days that I wonder if I'm actually sick
flareonfury in fandomcalendar - galorechallenge | Round 14 is now open!
thawrecka - A bunch of tennis fiction I guess
flaskbringer in fandomcalendar - Multifandom: Worldbuilding Exchange Sign-Ups Open
cimorene - RIP 30% of #3 triplet sweater
pauraque - Tank Wars (1990) · QBasic Gorillas (1991)
shewhomust - Not celebrated, but observed.
oursin - Yet another thing to worry about???
oursin - (no subject)
tozka - 3 things today

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Page generated Mar. 15th, 2026 11:30 pm

Imaginal Casements

Making Bricks Without Straw

Network

There's no combination of words I could put on the back of a postcard

Bridgerton show vs novel

Art: Hiroshige 9

镇魂 | Guardian: 520 Day Reverse Exchange 2026

Culinary

Watching + listening roundup (Hoppers, Britcom rabbit hole) + fannish goals checkin

Dream Report

Meadowville, Chapter 8

Of Navajo cops and future arch nemesis

randominity of happiness for a change

I've been so tired these past few days that I wonder if I'm actually sick

galorechallenge | Round 14 is now open!

A bunch of tennis fiction I guess

Multifandom: Worldbuilding Exchange Sign-Ups Open

RIP 30% of #3 triplet sweater

Tank Wars (1990) · QBasic Gorillas (1991)

Not celebrated, but observed.

Yet another thing to worry about???

(no subject)

3 things today

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January 2026

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