Saturday, January 17th, 2026 06:37 pm
[personal profile] dolorosa_12 wrote a post about the Russian attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure which includes helpful suggestions for concrete action.
Saturday, January 17th, 2026 08:25 pm
I have been feeling a bit left out because I have been posting fic again recently, but haven't got a single spam bot commenting on my fic, wanting to make art for me :(

But it finally happened!

I posted a Mandalorian h/c fic (quelle surprise) this afternoon, and I just got a comment telling me how much they like the fic and someone commented about wanting to turn it into a comic "so more manga readers could enjoy it).

I'm finally one of the cool kids!

For some reason I'm always ignored by the spammers and scammers. All my friends on Instagram are getting fake celebrities messaging thems, but I've never got a single fake Pedro Pascal slipping into my DMs.

Seriously, though, this is a PSA to those few people who might not yet have heard of the scammers that are currently targeting AO3 users. What makes them more insidious is that they are not anon and leave comments that seem fairly legit, making it easy to think that they're a real user who has enjoyed your fic. But the tell is that they want you to contact them outside AO3, either via email or Discord, often under the pretense of wanting to make fanart or you fic (or to just give you more feedback). If you get comments like this, do not respond to them, just delete the comment, block and report the user.
Saturday, January 17th, 2026 01:36 pm
 
 
Snowflake Challenge #9
 
Talk about your favorite tropes in media or transformative works. (Feel free to substitute in theme/motif/cliche if "trope" doesn't resonate with you.)
 
This list is a jumble of tropes and themes.

- Found Family, in both media and transformative works.

- AUs that play with how the changed context changes the characters and/or setting(s) in turn. 

- Likewise, Body Swaps - both fic and in the media - that really show how the swapped characters learn about each other. 

- I don't know what the term for this trope or motif is, but basically a HUGE number of fics that explore a major canon event, whether something only alluded to in backstory,  or an extension of a canon event.  It's basically a trope exclusive TO that fandom, since it's that specific canon event or backstory   people keep writing about. 

Two forms this can take are AUs (as previously mentioned) and fix-its (which I also love). 

- I don't think there's a trope name for this, but I appreciate storylines where conflict isn't about miscommunications, but instead the simple fact that one conversation can't resolve the issue. I enjoy the complexity.

- Don't think there's a name for this either, but I've appreciated the rise in supportive female exes and former love interests (sometimes one-sided) in M/M fiction. Thinking specifically of Our Flag Means Death, Schitt's Creek, Heartstopper and Heated Rivalry.
Saturday, January 17th, 2026 10:34 am
U.S.S. Athena
U.S.S. Athena
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, Episode 1

(Spoiler-free Commentary)

The premiere episode of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is available for free viewing (for I don’t know how long) at YouTube. I made time to watch it last night.

I had been hopeful for a good showing, and I was not disappointed. I’ve always loved Holly Hunter (since Broadcast News... and, yay! The Incredibles!) and want her to be a big success here. Also, I’m a fervent Trekkie – from way back to the actual broadcast years of the original series in the 1960s.

In the episode, Holly Hunter and Paul Giamatti were fabulous, as expected. The cadets were the expected variety of races, temperaments, maturity, composure, and intelligence; they have room to grow.

(One odd thought... if you take the academy’s chancellor and most? all? of the academy’s recruits into space... wouldn’t losing them all at once be catastrophic for the academy? I guess we’d better hope that only a small percentage of cadets are on the Athena at any one time. Dunno.)

I don’t have the time nor the budget to subscribe to Paramount+, so I won’t see the remainder of season one until much later. But I’ll continue to monitor reviews. There are always lots of review articles online. I did follow review articles of Foundation and Murderbot when I was watching those series. There are plenty of Starfleet Academy reviews online currently.

There was one article I enjoyed: I Love That Holly Hunter Can’t Sit in a Chair Normally on ‘Starfleet Academy’ at Gizmodo. And I too love that about Captain Ake.

What was really interesting was the comments section of the article. Apparently a large number of Trekkies really dislike the new show. Reading their complaints was interesting. I hope the producers of the series ignore that feedback and simply continue on their chosen path.

On the other hand, a couple of comments did resonate with me.

I LOVED her doing all that! I'm 5'2" myself and while I don't often get the chance to be in chairs like her character's, I could see myself doing that on occasion. I almost certainly did as a kid. As for those having a "problem" with this show, I am a long-time Trek fan, having started watching as a kid right after it went into syndication in the 1970s (I'm just one year older than the franchise), and I love every iteration. Are they all perfect? No. Do some of them challenge Roddenberry's vision? Of course. Are they woke? You better believe it, from day one 60 years ago! But they never stray so far that you can't recognize the ultimate message: We can be better. We can do our best to be kind, understanding, tolerant, collaborative and uplifting. If you don't like that, fine; don't watch. But don't tell me Starfleet Academy is not Trek, because it very, very much is, and it proved that in the first two episodes right off the bat.
–– MartinC

and:
I liked her character, immensely. And look – I’m 70, and I know they’re targeting a generation that’s several removed from me, but it’s still Trek … and I love it.

And I’ve got to say … when they brought the Athena (god, what a gorgeous starship) down to San Francisco, with Rufus Wainwright singing “you’d better wear some flowers in your hair,” it was practically a religious moment for me. I feel sorry for anyone who can’t share that joy.
–– Zaphod

Haters probably didn’t like Lower Decks or Prodigy or Strange New Worlds either. Well, let them sulk elsewhere. I like all flavors of Trek. (Admittedly, I have some reservations about Enterprise.) Haters include non-Trekkie White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. SMH. Let Miller know that Star Trek has been “woke” for 60 years.
Saturday, January 17th, 2026 05:00 pm

Posted by Kristen French

Some people refuse to use baby talk with babies. The sing-song repetition of cute nonsense words commonly spoken by adults to infants—and pets—can have a grating quality that makes some people cringe, like nails on a chalkboard. It can seem like the adults are regressing to a more primordial, infantile version of themselves.

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But baby talk may actually help babies learn to talk.

These are the findings of a study recently published in the journal Developmental Science. Researchers from the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia, wanted to know if the exaggerated pitches and other sounds typical of what’s technically termed “infant-directed speech,” or IDS, could help babies learn to tell the difference between one vowel sound and another. Vowel sounds are the ones most commonly exaggerated by adults in baby talk, research has shown, but this practice isn’t unique to infant-directed speech. Humans also tend to draw out vowel sounds when articulating in noisy environments and talking with non-native speakers. 

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Whether baby talk helps babies learn language has been a somewhat controversial subject. “Previous research has consistently shown that infants prefer to listen to IDS,” said researcher Varghese Peter in a statement. “But whether it has any significance beyond this is under debate.” 

Read more: “When Kids Talk to Machines

Some studies have already shown correlation: That infants whose parents use exaggerated vowel sounds appear to have better language perception abilities and larger vocabularies later. But not all baby talk features long sing-songy vowels. For example, parents who speak Dutch, Norwegian, and Danish are less likely to use them when talking to infants. Exaggerated vowels can also blur the distinctions between one vowel and the next, which could, in theory, make it harder for babies to learn how to understand and use them.

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To investigate, Peter and his colleagues recruited 22 Australian adults, 24 4-month-old infants and 21 9-month-old infants and brought them into the lab. Then they played recordings of a single Australian-English mother talking in baby talk with her 9-month-old infant and in regular adult speech with someone else and recorded what was happening in the study participants’ brains using EEG recordings when they were listening to specific vowel sounds spoken in the language of baby talk. They chose these particular ages because the first year of life is critical for language development— a time when babies become more attuned to native language sounds and less sensitive to non-native ones. In the first four months, babies are mostly learning acoustic pattern matching, while the perception of different vowel categories is thought to advance in a major way between six and nine months of age.

What the team found is that 4-month-old babies had stronger, more “mature” responses to vowels spoken in baby-talk-ese—what they called a “mature” response—whereas the brains of adults and 9-month-old babies responded similarly to both baby talk and regular speech. “When they heard vowels spoken in adult speech, their brains showed a less advanced response. However, when they heard the same vowels spoken in infant-directed speech, their brains produced a more advanced response, similar to that seen in older infants and adults,” explained Peter, referring to the 4-month-olds.

“In other words,” he continued, “‘baby talk’ isn’t silly at all; it may support early language learning from as young as four months of age.”The scientists note that it’s possible vowel exaggeration isn’t the only part of baby speech that could be responsible for the ways the youngest babies responded to baby talk. Typically, exaggerated vowels coincide with higher pitches and greater pitch ranges, which could have also contributed. Another caveat: The authors focused on a specific contrast between “a” sounds and “i” sounds. For more difficult vowel contrasts, the benefits of using baby talk could extend beyond nine months, they point out. 

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What they found may not prove that every goo goo gaga creates a genius, but it does suggest that this linguistic nonsense has real meaning to those who actually need to hear it.

Lead art: Design_Stock7 / Shutterstock

Saturday, January 17th, 2026 10:27 am
Here’s another Media Roundup after not months and months! Hopefully I’ll be reading and watching things other than fic a bit more often and thus post these media roundups more often than I was.

I seem to have gotten into the habit of reading a lot of graphic novels in December and January. I currently have a big pile out from the library – and I’ve read a few of them, and hopefully will get around to even more of the pile.

Lu and Ren’s Guide to Geozoology by Angela Hsieh— A very charming graphic novel about two girls on an adventure. Featuring charming art and very cute geo fauna! (As a Mandarin learner I did find the almost but not quite hanzi characters a little bit frustrating)

The Pale Queenby Ethan M. Aldridge—Another YA graphic novel, this one featuring an f/f romance. I really liked the fae in this book – they were a good mix of beautiful and scary. The art is also lovely!

Crush of Music— I’m still watching this very slowly, the subtitles have mostly been better for the last few episodes –so that’s nice. I’m enjoying seeing Liu Yuning and Zhou Shen interact in this – at one point they played the kazoo together!

Various Batman ect comic—So I mentioned in my 2025 media review post that I accidentally acquired a new fandom, that fandom is batfam. This is embarrassing for me because for years I've been prone to what R calls “the Batman rant” where I complain that punching people in the face is a dumb way to reduce crime rates. Plus I just feel like superhero comics are a space that's pretty hostile to me and my values. But apparently if you give me fic about a family of 3-8 adopted siblings finding each other/bonding and don't make me think too hard about the moral foundations of the universe then I'm willing to suspend my moral disbelief.

Anyways I got sucked in enough to be curious about the source material and have been reading stuff on hoopla. I'm fairly impressed with their comic reading interface too, it has a nice flow. (It doesn’t play well with my RSI issues but then neither does turning pages) The actual stories vary in quality, but some of them are surprisingly good. Even the not very good ones are surprisingly more-ish. I’m bringing a lot of emotional investment in these characters from my fic reading which also helps make the comics more engaging.

The Cross-Dressed Union—I thought that if my media theme at the moment is comfort that I should really start a new crossdressing girl drama since that's a big comfort trope of mine, So I asked around for recs and started this drama about an arranged marriage between a crossdressing woman and crossdressing man. It sounded fun but so far I’m pretty meh about it. I think my biggest problem is that the ML is the main character, and for these kinds of stories I prefer more focus on the FL. Also it's not doing enough with gender
Saturday, January 17th, 2026 07:51 pm
I haven't been doing the Snowflake Challenge this year, but the latest challenge popped up on my f-list, and I had to do it.

Challenge #9
Talk about your favorite tropes in media or transformative works. (Feel free to substitute in theme/motif/cliche if "trope" doesn't resonate with you.)


If you've been following me for any length of time, you know where this is going )


Snowflake Challenge promotional banner featuring an image of a wrapped giftbox with a snowflake on the gift tag. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.
Saturday, January 17th, 2026 12:45 pm

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner featuring an image of a wrapped giftbox with a snowflake on the gift tag. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.


Challenge #9

Talk about your favorite tropes in media or transformative works. (Feel free to substitute in theme/motif/cliche if "trope" doesn't resonate with you.)


Road trip!!! This remains one of my favorite tropes/themes. Avatar: The Last Airbender is a great show all around, with terrific story writing, characters, and so many themes worth analyzing. But I also loved the traveling "road trip" aspect of it, and the way the main characters had adventures on Appa (the AtLA equivalent to on the road) as well as in the different places they landed.

Road trips and journeys feature in so many of my favorite classic movies, too, in all genres. It Happened One Night is a really fun romantic comedy in which the characters travel by bus then hitchhike, and get into all kinds of humorous situations on the way. The Searchers and True Grit (original and remake) are excellent westerns that use this trope. And of course, Hitchcock's great North by Northwest, though a thriller, features a chase halfway across the country by cars, train, cabs, and planes.

Of course there is always conflict and drama, and in more serious stuff, going on during the journeys. But I love the way the journeys bring out those conflicts and play a part in helping the characters resolve things and grow.

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Saturday, January 17th, 2026 11:24 am

I am reminded of a statement by the former mayor of Bogotá, Antanas Mockus, a politician who employed artistic strategies in his office: "When an artist goes to prison, they take a piece of chalk and draw a line some centimetres from the wall to define their space, so they can have a bit more restrictions (sic). But by making those restrictions they in fact liberate themselves." A line can be a border and simultaneously an assertion of freedom. Being able to decide on your own limits, your strengths and weaknesses, is always empowering, offering a certain degree of sovereignty even in the direst situation.

Joanna Warsza, "Open Mic: Joanna Warsza on the Art of Open Group," *Artforum," October 2025, p. 110.

I've been thinking about this since I read it an hour or so ago. I think the quote from Mockus helped Warsza to set up for presenting her idea, but I don't think Mockus (at least as presented in this quote or — as I think is likely — in this translation of his quote) appears to quite understand what was going on in those prison cells. I don't think the artists wanted to "have a bit more restrictions (sic)," but instead, as Warsza put it, to "decide on [their] own limits."

When I was younger and studying poetry in school[^1], I never really understood why someone would choose to write poetry once prose had been invented, which seemed to me to be a superior method for conveying ideas. It's only later, as I learned more and started producing art of my own, that I learned the potential value of working within a set of restrictions, whether self-imposed or those of a traditional form. And looking back, I wonder if this value of restriction is something that my teachers could have explained to me, or if it's something that I had to figure out on my own in order to understand it.

[^1] Confession: I never really liked or (apparently) understood poetry.

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Saturday, January 17th, 2026 09:37 am
Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid


[Goodreads | Storygraph]

4.5 / 5 stars

More under the cut )
Tags:
Saturday, January 17th, 2026 05:08 pm

Honestly, we thought better of the Finns, being told how amazing a society they have: How would you feel if your therapist’s notes – your darkest thoughts and deepest feelings – were exposed to the world? For 33,000 Finnish people, that became a terrifying reality While the guy involved seems to have been an absolute horror from a young age in terms of hacking exploits, doxxing and swatting people, etc, we also note that there was actually criminal negligence brought against the company holding the patient data, which sounds a bit grim in terms of regulatory procedures and oversight.

***

This is very peculiar, because you see 'catfishing' and you think it's about monetary fraud, but that didn't seem to be at stake here: How a friend request led a beauty queen to uncover Scotland's most prolific catfish:

[T]hey were all left wondering why she did it. "All of us were pretty much left with no answers whatsoever," Abbie says.

I was wondering about whether there was something similar in play to some of the prolific poison-pen letter-writers in that Penning Poison book I read last year: not all of them were 'women with nature turned sour in the veins and sometimes terrorising whole communities for years with their spite' but that was one category.

***

Now, this is creepy: Manager of women’s football club banned for 12 years after bombarding players with indecent images:

Hamilton denied 24 FA charges of improper conduct, all relating to his time in charge of the club, but an independent regulatory commission concluded that 23 of the 24 were proven. The FA received evidence from four players and a staff member, all of whom detailed examples of Hamilton trying to elicit sexual activity between May 2022 and November 2024.
....
The commission also noted “with sadness” that one of the victims appeared to blame herself, and that more broadly the complainants “feared the consequences of complaining and that it would impact on their chances of being selected”, adding: “Worst of all, some of them somehow felt that it might be their fault.”

He sounds absolutely terrible quite apart from that: “verbally aggressive and bullying management style”.

***

Dining across the divide - this week it's the Grand Canyon - not yet online - because one of the parties is a Yaxley-Lennon fanboy.

***

And this is just a minor thing that agitated the niggles and peeves when it crossed my line of sight earlier today, but if you are writing a historical novel about the first women at the University of Oxford I really don't expect it to be set in the 1920s. That was when they were first, finally, awarded degrees. They'd been studying there much longer, over 40 years.

Saturday, January 17th, 2026 06:24 pm
Agatha Christie's Seven Dials on Netflix was excellent.

It doesn't star Hercule Poirot, nor Miss Marple, but a young lady played by the delightful Mia McKenna-Bruce. <3

Apparently, these characters also appear in an earlier novel, so I hope they'll adapt it too.
Saturday, January 17th, 2026 04:54 pm
Russia's tactic of targeting Ukraine's energy infrastructure is not new, but it has been particularly brutal this winter, with the combination of four years of relentless attacks on civilian infrastructure, the near cessation of US military aid (in particular air and missile defence) and an incredibly cold winter proving particularly devastating. I spent most of yesterday reading increasingly panicked internal mailing list items at work as the main university library was closed (in 10ish-degree temperatures) due to a lack of water and heating. Meanwhile, Kyiv has experienced weeks of sub-zero temperatures, and most of its residents have no (or limited) electricity, heating, or water in their homes: a situation that has become a severe crisis.

Anastasiia Lapatina is a journalist and young mother in Kyiv, and she describes the situation in a recent Substack newsletter with devastating clarity. Kyiv's brave and resilient people carry on — businesses adapt and stay open, the government implements crisis planning, ordinary people find whatever workarounds they can to stay warm and fed — because they have no other option.

While we cannot stop Russia from continuing to perpetuate this cruelty, there are, as usual, concrete things that we can do in response. If you live in a country whose elected politicians are meant to represent to interests of their constituents, contact them about this situation, and ask what they (whether in government or opposition) are intending to do in response to it.

Investigate Ukrainian advocacy groups in your country or region. In the UK, I've been to protests, vigils and other advocacy events organised by the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, and being signed up for their newsletter (or following their or equivalent groups' social media accounts) is a good way to stay informed about upcoming ways you can show your support (or protest your government's actions or inaction) in person.

If you are financially able, the Anastasiia Lapatina newsletter item linked above includes a fundraiser that she and some American colleagues are running to buy large (expensive) batteries for struggling residents of Kyiv. This will, at least, allow them to power some appliances, including portable heaters, for a few hours a day. They have already bought two batteries for two families. I have donated to this fundraiser and trust these individuals to be responsible with the money they collect.

I had expected that United24, the Ukrainian government fundraising platform, would have had a targeted campaign to gather funds to support residents struggling without heat and water, but I can't see anything specific on their website as of 17 January. I do know that the government organises 'invincibility points' (sites in cities and large towns where residents can go to warm up, get hot drinks, and power mobile phones and other devices), so I would assume a donation to their 'Rebuilding' or 'Medical' strands may help in that direction.

This current state of affairs is chilling in a literal and psychological sense.

Please feel welcome to share this post.
Saturday, January 17th, 2026 05:42 pm
Theme Prompt: Hot Water
Title: What They Say
Fandom: Lord of the Rings
Rating/Warnings: General Audiences
Bonus: No
Word Count: 985
Summary: Two times Aragorn takes a bath.

What They Say )