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2025 CSFFA Hall of Fame Inductees

The quotation below is a quotation

CSFFA (The Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association) is proud to announce the 2025 CSFFA Hall of Fame inductees.

Clint Budd, fan, convention organizer, modernized CSFFA and created the CSFFA Hall of Fame
Charles R. Saunders, author, journalist, and founder of the “sword and soul” literary genre
Diane L. Walton, editor, mentor, and a founding member of On Spec: The Canadian Magazine of the Fantastic

More information here.

Congratulations to the Inductees!

New Substack post

Some thoughts on Repubicans, food and a lack of candidates.

Current Music: Les Cowboys Fringants, "Marine marchande"

J'm'installe sur le rivage pour te voir mon gros gars t'éloigner vers le large

Rabbit, rabbit! I had to go for my annual physical this afternoon, but I stopped by Porter Square Books afterward to collect a book for my mother and look what was part of their summer sea-display:

I had wanted to write about so many queer films for June, but the month disappeared. Fortunately before we ran out of the formal observance of Pride,

rushthatspeaks and I made it to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Querelle (1982) at the Coolidge. It was adapted from the 1947 novel by Jean Genet, but I have never seen anything onscreen that more resembled the novels of Chip Delany. Meant in sincere compliment, it is one of the sweatiest films I have ever seen. It looks like it smells like a porno theater. Its antihero is straight out of Tom of Finland with his sailor's tight, tight white trousers and muscular cleavage revealed by the barest excuse for an A-shirt, his boyish, chiseled, louche face under his insolently cocked bachi in the sullen, enticing haze that never varies from the sodium-smoke of just after sunset or just before dawn, a perpetual cruising hour. The sea-wall of its fantasized Brest is studded with stone phalli, anatomically complete with slit and balls. All graffiti in town is dicks. The chanteuse of the dive bar sings Wilde like Dietrich, but some of the construction workers with their buff hard hats are playing video games while the naval lieutenant who pines for Querelle records his poetically criminal obsessions into a portable tape recorder. The bare-chested, leather-vested cop at the bar actually is a cop outside of it, where he looks just as fetishistic in his fedora and black leather trenchcoat. Every interaction between men looks like a negotiation or a seduction whether it is one or not, although on some level it always is, regardless of the no-homo excuses manufactured to allow their bodies to meet. Constantly, metaphysically, literally, this movie fucks. Its hothouse, bathhouse sexuality must have come in just under the cutting wire of AIDS. I have no idea what it would offer a viewer with no sexual or aesthetic interest in men except its philosophy, although as my husband notes the philosophy is actually quite good, deconstructing its hard masc signifiers as much as it gets off on them, dissolving in and out of the words and ultimately the life of Genet; the theatricality of its interlocked sets and swelteringly flamboyant lighting would look entirely natural on the stage. It quotes Plutarch and stages a hand job that without a glimpse of cock would have caused mass apoplexies in the Breen office. (Send it back in time, please.) It was my introduction to Fassbinder and if I had seen it as an adolescent, I imagine it would have had much the same effect as Tanith Lee. It was introduced by the series programmer wearing leather in its honor and a T-shirt for Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising (1963). It made a superb date movie.

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Kink Hub Theme of the Month: "Sex on the Beach"

( You're about to view content that a community administrator has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

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theme: sex on the beach

Theme of the Month: Sex on the Beach

( You're about to view content that a community administrator has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Current Mood: hopeful

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ficathon: black emporium

Dear Black Emporium Creator,

First of all, relax! I'm far from being picky, and I can pretty much guarantee that I'll love whatever you decide to create for me. These are nothing but guidelines, for you to take to heart or ignore to your heart's content. Also, hey! You're writing me fic or drawing me art! That's automatically a good reason for me to love you, no matter what. So, please, keep that in mind. Trust me, you can pretty much do no wrong.

( More details under the cut. )

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TV Tuesday: Geeking Out

Laptop-TV combo with DVDs on top and smartphone on the desk

Have you ever been to a convention focused on a particular TV show? Or have you been to panels on one in a multi-fandom convention? What aspects are a draw for you?

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July: Amnesty Month

July is another Amnesty Month. That means that instead of a new theme, the challenge this month is to create new works for any of the previous themes.

You can find the previous themes in the tag list under t.

Posting guidelines are here. Please remember to tag your fandoms and themes!

If you have any prompts or recs for previous themes, you can leave them in the comments using the template below:

For recs:

For prompts:

The amnesty period will last until 31st July.

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Sunshine Revival Challenge #1

Challenge #1

Journaling Prompt: Light up your journal with activity this month. Talk about your goals for July or for the second half of 2025.
Creative Prompt: Shine a light on your own creativity. Create anything you want (an image, an icon, a story, a poem, or a craft) and share it with your community.

I don't have much to say on the journaling front other than Happy Canada Day! to my fellow Canadians. I can't believe its July 1st already. No goals other than to keep house searching (I'm so tired of house hunting)

For the creative prompt I made a banner for my most recent fic that I created for

holmestice

Singularly Unique
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (Granada)
Relationship: Holmes/Watson
Rating: T
Word Count: 3220 words
Summary: Watson is happy with his life with Holmes, but things are going to change after a man from Watson's past contacts him.

Lastly, if you like John Watson and are looking for some inspiration, I'm currently hosting a prompt fest over on AO3 in celebration of Watson's birthday. It's open to all Watsons from all adaptations. Come leave a prompt or claim a prompt! More info can be found here.

Also, thank you to all my dreamwidth friends who have been helping me promote it. We're currently up to 9 prompts! But, hopefully we'll get some more.

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Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered, am in Birmingham

Wot a saga, eh, wot a saga, first time I have ventured significantly forth these many years -

And to start with, MAJOR HEAT EVENT.

In anticipation, I had - or so I thought - prudently booked a taxi via taxiapp, with a certain amount of leeway, just in case -

- which turned out very prudent, as when I went to check the booking this morning the app was showing 'network error' and this was clearly on their end rather than mine, and a little looking about suggests that this is not their first ~~rodeo~~ server problem.

So when, at designated time, taxi cameth not, I set out towards the Tube, not without some hope that a black cab might pass me on my way, but that Was Not To Be -

And on reflection, I should perhaps have waited for a Bank train, because getting out on Charing X platforms at Euston involves rather too many stairs.

However, Avanti kindly texted me the approx time my train would be boarding, and this all seemed set - although my (1st class) seat was aisle, backwards, there was nobody in the other 3 seats so I switched -

HAH.

When we reached Coventry, choochoo sighed and gave up, and we had to debouch and take the next Birmingham bound train - which was delayed....

At Birmingham New Street had considerable faff trying to discover a Way Out that would take me to a taxi rank.

When I finally arrived at hotel booked by conference organisers there was an immense performance trying to find the right group booking, as it was not under any title that I might have thought of but that of some hireling booking agency.

However, I am now in nice cool room and have had tasty room service snack. Even if I have had to wrestle with getting my laptop to talk to the free wifi...

premonish

premonish (pri-MON-ish) - v., to warn in advance.

Although admonish now means something more like rebuke, especially after the fact, it originally meant warn beforehand--from Latin ad-, against + moneō, warn/advise. This much less known word replaces the prefix with pre-, here in the sense of before.

——L.

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"Drabble: Anti-Brooklynians." (Captain America) G

Title: Drabble: Anti-Brooklynians.
Author:

lannamichaels
Fandom: Captain America
Rating: G
Archives: Archive Of Our Own, SquidgeWorld

Summary: Aliens wrote Shakespeare, the Earl of Oxford built the pyramids, and Steve Rogers was never Captain America.

( I started this in 2019 and then ignored it every time I saw it instead of getting it to fit wordcount )

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Round 176: Working Together

Photograph with added text: Working Together, at Fancake. Workers in India use wide wooden paddles with long handles to shove a huge yard of drying grains into big piles. The grain, most likely rice, is a beautiful golden color, and there's a mix of western and traditional clothing among the seven men and women.

Our theme for July is working together!

This round is for fanworks that feature characters working together to achieve a common goal or—and this is not necessarily the same thing—fanworks set in the workplace.

The tag for this round is: theme: working together

If you're just joining us, be sure to check out our policy on content notes. Content notes aren't required, but they're nice to include in your recs, especially if a fanwork has untagged content that readers may wish to know about in advance.

( Rules! )

( Posting Template! )

( Promote this round! )

Reblog on Tumblr | Reskeet on Bluesky | Retoot on Mastodon

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poll

2025 July Fan Poll

Hey everybody, it's that time again: time to vote for which stuff gets the LiberaPay/Patreon money this month!

As always, anyone can vote (please do!), but LiberaPay and Patreon patrons get double weight for their votes. (Due to Patreon's porn purges, I really encourage you to use LiberaPay, if you get a choice.) If you want to see the blurbs for any of these works, those are here! (You can also leave your requests there; requesting a story or essay is always free!) If you don't have a DW and so can't do the poll, that's okay; just leave your vote in the comments below; anon comments are turned on.

Which works gets the money, and thus posted this month? YOU CHOOSE, readers!

Poll #33310 2025 July Fan Poll

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 8

View Respondents

Did you toss LiberaPay/Patreon money my way last month?

View Answers

Yes (my votes count double)
4 (100.0%)

What writing gets posted this month?

View Answers

Infinity Smashed: Born Lucky
3 (37.5%)

Reverend Alpert: the Traveling Exorcist
2 (25.0%)

Henchwench for Hire (F/F supervillainy)
2 (25.0%)

Rutless (trans omegaverse porno)
1 (12.5%)

Flights of Reality (the Cursed City)
0 (0.0%)

Anatomy of a Dance
0 (0.0%)

The Boy Whose Heart Is Home
1 (12.5%)

The Battleaxe and the Blood-Eater
1 (12.5%)

The Hands of a Dozen Strangers (touch essay)
5 (62.5%)

What art/comic/zine gets posted this month?

View Answers

Cult Comix
2 (28.6%)

Death Watch
3 (42.9%)

How it Was, How It Is
1 (14.3%)

2012 hospital sketchbook
1 (14.3%)

2013 Homeless Year sketchbook
0 (0.0%)

2014 AllFam sketchbook
0 (0.0%)

Blushing and Scent (Mori/Rawlin fluff)
4 (57.1%)

Red Tape Hell (disability farce)
3 (42.9%)

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Ask A Manager: refusing to work for a customer for moral reasons,

[Be warned, the the main discussion of the post is s about #3, a letter about a coworker with gastric issues. At least people are being pretty good about labeling their responses. Beyond the ... details... it is fast descending into a fight between proponents and opponents of ableism. Thhs is letter #1] about the ethics of refusing service.( Read more... )

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(no subject)

I am once again asking for audiobook recs! I'm looking for nonfiction, read by the author, preferably not too dense. Audiobooks are not my normal medium, so I'm picky. As for what kind of nonfiction, I like history, cultural criticism, psychology, etc.

Audiobooks I've actually enjoyed listening to:

The Anthropocene Reviewed and Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green
Girl On Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert
How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question by Michael Schur
Unruly by David Mitchell
Roctogenarians: Late in Life Debuts, Comebacks, and Triumphs by Mo Rocca

I think all of these people except Gilbert have experience on TV/podcasts, which probably contributes to them being good at reading their own stuff.

The Big Idea: Matthew Kressel

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/07/01/the-big-idea-matthew-kressel/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56299

Hop on board for author Matthew Kressel’s newest ride through the galaxy, Space Trucker Jess. In this Big Idea as he takes you through not only his writing process for this particular story, but on a journey through a high-concept sci-fi world viewed through the eyes of a teenage girl.

MATTHEW KRESSEL:

I was a feral kid. Both my parents worked full-time jobs, and I’d come home to an empty house. I had no supervision. I went off with friends and we, ahem, did things. Stupid things. Really fucking stupid things. And when I look back on those days I’m like, How the hell did I make it out alive?

But that freedom was glorious. You could do whatever you wanted. Go anywhere. You had the feeling that anything could happen. And it often did. The good and the bad.

That’s the kind of feeling I hope to evoke in Space Trucker Jess. The joy and spontaneity of discovery. In my childhood, we got into trouble all around the neighborhood. In my novel, Jess gets into hijinx across the galaxy.

Like Jess herself, I began the book with a simple premise: Screw the “rules.”

In my past stories and novels, I labored over every paragraph, sentence, word, and punctuation mark until I’d wound myself into a Gordian knot a million words long. In Jess, I felt the need to loosen the bridles, to let my idea run wild, like that feral kid who got into trouble around the neighborhood. What emerged was Jess, a take-no-shit foul-mouthed kick-ass teenaged girl who’s smart as hell, caring and empathetic, who solves problems not with violence but with brains and determination. Though too often for her own good, Jess’s curiosity gets her into trouble. Big trouble.

Think Natasha Lyonne narrating 2001: A Space Odyssey.

There’s lots of high-concept SF, and, yeah, Space Trucker Jess has all the tropes: starships and FTL travel, alien gods, missing planets, galactic secrets. But I wanted to tell the story a different way. Not from an omniscient or a dry and distant third person, but from deep in the point of view of a sensitive and expressive girl who’s journeyed across the Milk and back a thousand times and who knows more about starships than most people know their own nose.

And so you get high philosophy and fart jokes. Orthodox religion and irreverent sacrilege. Weird inscrutable aliens and deadbeat dads. All told from a foul-mouthed over-confident, wicked-smart and sometimes willfully naive girl who just wants, at the end of the day, to be left the hell alone.

Space Trucker Jess is also about identity. I wrote a good chunk of the book during the first Covid lockdowns. Cut off from friends and family, from work and all the many inter-personal relationships I took for granted, I felt my sense of self drifting. Without those external interactions reflecting my identity back to me, I didn’t know who I was anymore. It was very disconcerting.

A lot of that experience makes its way into the book. Jess’s worldview expands enormously throughout the novel, sometimes suddenly and violently, and she is forced to reckon with a new sense of self and a greater awareness.

Also, Space Trucker Jess is about family. Jess loves her deadbeat dad, and she and him have been grifting their way across the galaxy for years. But she knows he’s an asshole, he knows he’s an asshole, but she just can’t let him go. The relationship is, from the start, highly dysfunctional. Jess just wants stability, away from him. But getting away is harder than it sounds. Without getting too personal, I had a lot of turbulence in my childhood home, and I wanted to explore the contrasts between the family we’re born with and the family we choose, and how those dynamics can alter the course of our entire lives, for better or worse.

So if you want to go on a fun adventure alongside a bad-ass genius girl head-firsting her way through the galaxy who’s just looking for some peace in an uncaring universe, while encountering alien gods, missing planets, galactic secrets, and more, well then, Space Trucker Jess might just be your ride.

Space Trucker Jess: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author socials: Website|Facebook|Instagram|Bluesky

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/07/01/the-big-idea-matthew-kressel/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56299

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fanfiction,
movies

fic: please don't bury my soul

Y'all! I finally finished my Sinners fic! Now I can write my other Sinners fic!

Thank you to

dollsome for looking it over for me!

Title: please don't bury my soul (4646 words) by Lirazel
Fandom: Sinners (2025)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Lisa Chow & Sammie Moore, Bo Chow & Lisa Chow, Grace Chow & Lisa Chow
Characters: Lisa Chow, Sammie Moore
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, the blues as emotional articulation, warnings for references to period- and canon-typical racial violence against black people, Grief/Mourning, started having a lot of 'who's going to tell lisa what happened to her parents???' feelings
Summary:

On a street in Oakland in 1956, Lisa Chow hears the sound of the Delta.

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string things

I'm still marvelling at having a hobby that I'm willing to spend money on -- I went to a weaving conference last week (got a first-timer scholarship, which covered admission and room and board, but I splurged and got a single room, so paid a little extra) which meant buying extra yarn for the workshop, and then even though I'm well out of storage room and have said multiple times I need to make some things before I buy more stuff, I bought 7 more cones of yarn (some of it was on sale! the rest was just really pretty hand-dyed!). Some of it I can definitely think of things to do with it, the rest I'll just have to try and keep an eye out for ideas, because I don't want it to sit forever.

And I talked to people too, constantly, the whole weekend. My god. By day 2.5 I was wiped, I am not an extrovert by any means. But folks chatted throughout classes, in the hallways, just wherever. I walked out of the dinner hall and ended up talking with some random woman whose name I never caught for like 10 minutes. Plus, also, I ran into a friend from local fandom cons who I hadn't seen in like 10-ish years (MJ and Con.txt). Neither of us were doing fiber things back then, so it was really a (pleasant) surprise.

Anyway now I am back home and waiting for work to ramp back up -- it always slows down in the summer due to end-of-fiscal-year purchasing deadlines, but today starts the new FY, so I'm just waiting for the word that budgets are loaded into the system, and I can start doing work again. Things are also wonky because DC passed an energy savings bill recently, so in order to comply we're finally getting around to converting the building to LED lighting -- which means shuffling folks' offices and encasing the stacks in protective material. We don't have an end date and the last construction project went on and on and on, so folks are just crossing fingers that impact will be minimal on the full-term researchers starting in the fall. I'm planning to hide in my new office with a fucking door so I can avoid chatty opinionated elder coworker for once in my life. My god this would be an amazing time to finally get a new job and quit.

Oh! I almost forgot. I also managed to blitz through all of Elementary in the last month or so, after having had it on my 'to watch' list for years. There are some parts of it that left me kind of 'meh,' and for someone who's great at identifying prosthetic-forehead Star Trek actors in other roles by only their eyes, I could not for the life of me identify Johnny Lee Miller in 3/4 profile shots on multiple occasions. My brain also kept replacing him in my memory with Darren Nichols. I think it was something about the overly upright posture (and also the dramatics). These things mostly resolved themselves by probably midway through season 2, by which point I could focus on things like how unsexy Mycroft was. It's a shame but unsurprising that there isn't more fic. I need to find something to watch that does have a lot of fic, but I haven't come up with anything yet. Though I think the latest season of Leverage: Redemption just finished, or is about to, and that sounds like it should give me something to sink my teeth into.

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sunshine revival

Sunshine Revival: Challenge #1

Challenge #1

Journaling Prompt: Light up your journal with activity this month. Talk about your goals for July or for the second half of 2025.

Creative Prompt: Shine a light on your own creativity. Create anything you want (an image, an icon, a story, a poem, or a craft) and share it with your community.

Goals for July:

I read 5 books in June so I would like to match that (at least).
I want to have a get-together/game night at my house in July.
I want to feel more ready for starting my new job in August (ie. have more ideas for lessons and activities).
I would like to stay in therealljidol , but even if I get cut I would like to continue to do some creative writing each week.

With the events in the world and in this forsaken country (and, hell, even my own crappy state) being so overbearing and despair-inducing, I want to keep the energy to reach out to friends, to work toward the future, and to read and write. Everything feels so hopeless and like things are ending, so I want to do things that are actively reaching for a positive future.