Check-In Post - May 12th 2026
May. 12th, 2026 07:11 pmHello 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!
FAKE: Way Too Bright [Amnesty 50, using Challenge 434: Bright]
May. 12th, 2026 06:42 pmTitle: Way Too Bright
Fandom: FAKE
Author:
Characters: Dee, Ryo.
Rating: PG
Written For: Challenge 500: Amnesty 50, using Challenge 434: Bright.
Setting: After Like Like Love.
Summary: The sun this morning is too bright for comfort.
Disclaimer: I don’t own FAKE, or the characters. They belong to the wonderful Sanami Matoh.
A/N: Double drabble.
Way Too Bright
Tuesday word: Puny
May. 12th, 2026 10:22 amPuny (adjective)
puny [pyoo-nee]
adjective, punier, puniest
1. of less than normal size and strength; weak.
2. unimportant; insignificant; petty or minor: a puny excuse.
3. Obsolete. puisne.
Other Word Forms
punily, adverb
puniness, noun
Related Words
feeble, frail, inconsequential, measly, paltry, tiny, trivial
See more synonyms on Thesaurus.com
Origin: First recorded in 1540–50; spelling variant of puisne
Example Sentences
Puny mountains would have slowed erosion of the planet’s rocks, limiting the supply of life-giving nutrients for creatures in the oceans.
From National Geographic • Feb. 11, 2021
“Nobody moves away from Winnipeg, especially to Toronto, and escapes condemnation,” she wrote, in “All My Puny Sorrows,” her novel about her sister’s illness and death.
From The New Yorker • Mar. 18, 2019
Not to mention the shabby way he treated the loyal Bob Hobbitt, whose ailing little son, Puny Pete, longed to leave life as a cabin boy for a career as a seamstress.
From New York Times • Dec. 25, 2014
The greatness in "All My Puny Sorrows" comes from Toews' ability to make the reader want to think about that too.
From Los Angeles Times • Dec. 5, 2014
Hallblithe stood speechless a moment, looking past the Puny Fox, rather than at him.
From The Story of the Glittering Plain; or, the land of Living Men by Morris, William
Prompt: #494 - Advertise
May. 12th, 2026 10:38 amYour response should be exactly 100 words long. You do not have to include the prompt in your response -- it is meant as inspiration only.
Please use the tag "prompt: #494 - advertise" with your response.
Please put your drabble under a cut tag if it contains potential triggers, mature or explicit content, or spoilers for media released in the last month.
If you would like a template for the header information you may use this:
Subject: Original - Title (or) Fandom - Title
Post:
Title:
Original (or) Fandom:
Rating:
Notes:
If you are a member of AO3 there is a 100 Words Collection!
charabanc
May. 12th, 2026 07:28 amOriginally a horse-drawn then motorized omnibus with benches and open sides for sightseeing:
Thanks, WikiMedia!
Now generally called a coach, which is also used in the States (can't speak to other locales). The word can still be used in the UK to describe any vehicle that is slow or overcrowded or an overelaborate production, but I don't know how common either of those are, and in any case the sense in Sayers' time was the above. Taken sometime around 1900 from French char-à-bancs, literally coach-with-benches.
---L.
30 Days Of My Fandoms
May. 12th, 2026 11:10 amThe next bunch of my 30 Days answers.
Full list of questions here: kitarella-imagines.dreamwidth.org/117847.html
Day 11:
Best SFX / most woeful use of SFX
Downton Abbey= The WWI scenes, probably the only SFX in the show.
The Professionals= Not much SFX around in the 1970s, but that car exploding just as Doyle jumps out of it. He said it was very carefully arranged SFX, not what it looked like.
Bridgerton= Probably the CGI guests at big occasions.
Primeval= All the creatures and anomalies, so well done.
Day 12:
Favourite villain
Downton Abbey= Mr Green. Totally loathsome.
The Professionals= the assassin Ramos. His dress sense is something else! Lol.
Bridgerton= Jack Featherington, a true cad.
Primeval= Helen Cutter. ‘a cross between Servalan and Lara Croft.’
Day 13:
Favourite guest character
Downton Abbey= Lady Anstruther. What a cougar!
The Professionals= Tinkerbell. He started out as a figure of fun but became a hero.
Bridgerton= George III played by James Fleet.
Primeval= The ‘cleaner’ clones. I suppose Danny is kind of a guest? My ginger king 🧡
Day 14:
Character you relate to the most
Downton Abbey= Edith Crawley. The ‘ugly duckling’ sister, ignored in the corner, which I can relate to.
The Professionals= Probably Betty, trying to wrangle our heroes and support them in the background.
Bridgerton= Eloise, the intelligent geek who wants to stay independent.
Primeval= Sarah Page, she was scared of the creatures and preferred hiding in the IT room.
Day 15:
Character who didn’t get enough screen time
Downton Abbey= Sybil Crawley. And Edward Courtenay—he could have been Thomas’s secret soldier boyfriend and had a great storyline!
The Professionals= Marge Harper, the fence. She could have been a recurring character. Also Marty. He obviously had designs on Doyle as well, all that talk about Vikings! lol.
Bridgerton= Reynolds (and Brimsley) What happened to them and their passionate love affair? It just disappeared.
Primeval= Helen Cutter, she is so evil but she also had a point about human destructiveness of planet Earth. And James Lester—so dryly funny.
[Challenge #195: Idiosyncrasy] Original Poetry: 'Dreams and Wishes'
May. 11th, 2026 10:28 pmFandom: Original Poetry
Author:
Rating: PG
Word Count: 55
Characters/Pairings: Original
Warnings: Mildly depressing concepts
Summary: For others different it might be
( Dreams and Wishes )
Museum day
May. 11th, 2026 11:55 pmI was originally planning to do the bourbon trail but honestly I have enough bourbon lying around the house as is and I'm rather worn out from the weekend but the museum looked promising. Last year it was voted best museum in KY and I can see why. It's three floors and I managed to hit it just as a docent was giving the Cool KY talk so that was fun. I had no idea some woman had ROWED across the Atlantic Ocean. Her boat is here. I knew about the paralympian Oskana Masters but didn't know she lived here.
I really liked the one interactive map, by county that brought up fun facts about each county and a song for each. I wish more museums had something like that.
FLoor#2 was jam packed with history, much about the enslaved people, KY's less than stellar showing in the Civil War and about the Underground Railroad (including mapping out one family's life for years) KY was definitely sell African families down river sort of state and oddly wasn't segregated because they wanted to keep an eye on enslaved people who were often rooming with freed people.
They had bits on women I've never heard of including an Indigenous warrior chief, another few women doctors and one who is in my talk, Mary Edward Walker (look her up, she is something else) and more than one display about how white people don't get along even with other white people in the former of Bloody Monday when over 100 Irish and German immigrants were murdered. (the one thing that never seems to change is we find new immigrants to blame and hate)
Floor Three- it's all about the bourbon. I love some of the old bottles
Museum store: I have never seen a museum store without books. It had bourbon though. A lot of only find them in KY bottles (glad they were expensive because with my luck I'd like it and have to come back for it). They had replica vintage ones that I would have liked if I had places to display them.
From there I went to the Louisville Mega Caverns It's actually an old limestone quarry and it was oddly creepy. You approach what looks like a service access into the side of the hill and really it is just that. If not for the painted footprints in the tunnel I would have thought I was in the wrong spot and it goes on being all access tunnelly for about 500 yards before opening into a cavern and then you see the visitor center.
I get snagged by a group of elderly women in front of a 'sign this waiver' computer bank 'don't you jump the line!' I wasn't planning it. I get to the bank eventually and realize you had to have BOUGHT the ticket first. How about putting the purchase area before this then? I talk to the young guy about the walking vs tram tour but it turns out it didn't matter.
It's a random monday at 130 in the afternoon and everything is sold out until 6 pm (and they're taking like two dozen at a time) I give it a pass and slink out of the scary tunnel.
I move on to the third planned event cave hill cemetery and arboretum which is about 300 acres of the Victorian style rural cemeteries that are part park and part memorial. I saw many very unusual graves (pictures hopefully tomorrow) but only found two of the celebrity ones because even though the cemetery has its own app, my phone is trash and couldn't find a signal.
I did see Colonel Sanders (yes that Colonel) whose memorial is modest (his daughter made the bust) and Muhammad Ali, who also had a modest memorial. There are many other less modest ones and the places is filled with 500 plant species and a plethora of historic signage. Even found the person who designed the confederate flag (was not expecting or wanting that)
Much cooler I found TWO magicians including Tobin who invented the cabinet of proteus. I was struck immediately with the idea that Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis knew about him and that's where they got Tobin's Spirit Guide in Ghostbusters. Even if I'm wrong, I'm right.
I was there for hours. Came back to the hotel, got lazy and doordashed from an Asian restaurant that was highly recced in a few places District 6 and was trapped between do I get pho or the spicy cauliflower bao (or the spicy cauliflower dish). I should have gone with the big dish or the pho because the bao were small but very tasty. I could have eaten a pound of that cauliflower. Got their ube basque cheesecake too. Not as ube tasting as I would have liked but very good.
Then it was my author's virtual meet up and got some editing and writing done.
It's music monday 30 weeks of music. This week's prompt is # 25 A song from your pre teen years
( Welcome to the 70s )
here's the whole prompt list
( All under here )
Museum day
May. 11th, 2026 11:29 pmI was originally planning to do the bourbon trail but honestly I have enough bourbon lying around the house as is and I'm rather worn out from the weekend but the museum looked promising. Last year it was voted best museum in KY and I can see why. It's three floors and I managed to hit it just as a docent was giving the Cool KY talk so that was fun. I had no idea some woman had ROWED across the Atlantic Ocean. Her boat is here. I knew about the paralympian Oskana Masters but didn't know she lived here.
I really liked the one interactive map, by county that brought up fun facts about each county and a song for each. I wish more museums had something like that.
FLoor#2 was jam packed with history, much about the enslaved people, KY's less than stellar showing in the Civil War and about the Underground Railroad (including mapping out one family's life for years) KY was definitely sell African families down river sort of state and oddly wasn't segregated because they wanted to keep an eye on enslaved people who were often rooming with freed people.
They had bits on women I've never heard of including an Indigenous warrior chief, another few women doctors and one who is in my talk, Mary Edward Walker (look her up, she is something else) and more than one display about how white people don't get along even with other white people in the former of Bloody Monday when over 100 Irish and German immigrants were murdered. (the one thing that never seems to change is we find new immigrants to blame and hate)
Floor Three- it's all about the bourbon. I love some of the old bottles
Museum store: I have never seen a museum store without books. It had bourbon though. A lot of only find them in KY bottles (glad they were expensive because with my luck I'd like it and have to come back for it). They had replica vintage ones that I would have liked if I had places to display them.
From there I went to the Louisville Mega Caverns It's actually an old limestone quarry and it was oddly creepy. You approach what looks like a service access into the side of the hill and really it is just that. If not for the painted footprints in the tunnel I would have thought I was in the wrong spot and it goes on being all access tunnelly for about 500 yards before opening into a cavern and then you see the visitor center.
I get snagged by a group of elderly women in front of a 'sign this waiver' computer bank 'don't you jump the line!' I wasn't planning it. I get to the bank eventually and realize you had to have BOUGHT the ticket first. How about putting the purchase area before this then? I talk to the young guy about the walking vs tram tour but it turns out it didn't matter.
It's a random monday at 130 in the afternoon and everything is sold out until 6 pm (and they're taking like two dozen at a time) I give it a pass and slink out of the scary tunnel.
I move on to the third planned event here.
It's music monday 30 weeks of music. This week's prompt is # 25 A song from your pre teen years
( There are so many from the 1980s )
here's the whole prompt list
( All under here )
Book review: Ninefox Gambit
May. 11th, 2026 06:50 pmAuthor: Yoon Ha Lee
Genre: Fantasy
I went out of town for my little sister’s graduation this weekend and finished two books on the trip! The first was Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee, a fantasy-in-space story about a young infantry captain who has the soul of a famous traitor embedded into her mind to assist with a tricky military campaign.
I nearly had to eat crow on this book because I’ve said so many times I prefer when SFF books just dump you into their world rather than giving you an expositional primer, but Ninefox Gambit really tested my commitment to that. The first third of this book is a whirlwind of terms, practices, and concepts that not only are never explained, but for which the context is nearly nonexistent. I think you simply have to accept being confused to enjoy this one, which is why many reviews did not.
Semi-related, this may dress itself up as sci-fi, but it is fantasy. This is a magic system. A magic system that makes use of mathematics, but a magic system nonetheless. Accepting that going in will make dealing with the practical jargon much easier.
All that said, I ended up really enjoying this one, and I do plan to read the next two in the series. There’s just oodles of machinations and scheming and recontextualizations that I think are great fun and the end payoff was worth sticking with it.
As is the case with any story of this nature, our resident omnicidal traitor, Jedao, eclipses the book’s actual protagonist, Cheris. It’s just hard for our young, inexperienced infantryman to be as engaging as someone with as much history and baggage as Jedao. But I do think Cheris holds her own and doesn’t become just Jedao’s shadow. Additionally, Jedao, who is the most tactically brilliant mind the empire ever produced, gets plenty of opportunity to shine without making Cheris look like an idiot in comparison, which is a difficult needle to thread as the author. Furthermore, Cheris comes into her own more over the course of the book, which makes sense for her rapidly expanding level of experience.
Jedao is great fun to poke at and learn about, though I won’t say too much here to avoid spoilers. I hope we get to hear more from him in the next books.
Lee tees up the next book perfectly here without ending on a total cliffhanger. Nevertheless, I’ll be getting my hands on book 2: Raven Stratagem as soon as I can.
My Characters Meme
May. 11th, 2026 03:45 pm#mycharacters
Rules: make a list of your top 10 favorite characters to think about. Then let people in the comments choose one question for you to answer about them.
My characters:
1. Jack O'Neill (Stargate SG-1)
2. Daniel Jackson (Stargate SG-1)
3. John Sheppard (Stargate Atlantis)
4. Rodney McKay (Stargate Atlantis)
5. Bobby Singer (Supernatural)
6. Jason Todd (DC Comics/Batfam)
7. Bruce Wayne (DC Comics/Batman)
8. Mugen (Samurai Champloo)
9. Gwendal von Voltaire (Kyo Kara Maoh!)
10. Zuko (Avatar the Last Airbender)
The questions:
1- What’s the one thing they refuse to admit they want, even to themselves?
2- If they could undo one moment, would they actually do it—or has it become part of who they are?
3- What kind of love do they think they deserve vs. what they actually accept?
4- What’s their “I’m fine” behavior that clearly means they are not fine?
5-What song would absolutely destroy them emotionally if it came on at the wrong moment?
6- In another life, who would they have been if things had gone right?
7- What’s the smallest, most insignificant thing that still reminds them of someone they lost?
8- What's something they desperately want people to know about them but won't tell a single soul?
