Title: Consultation Author:kat_lair Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer Pairing: Buffy/Willow or Buffy & Willow Tags: Drabble, Shippy Gen, Advice, Magic, Post-Canon Rating: G Word count: 100
Summary:“Wow. I would’ve given it more than, what, six months?”
Author notes: Spring defiance from under the crushing forces of capitalism = a drabble a day in April. This one for kitarella_imagines who requested Buffy with someone not Angel or Spike :)
Beginning on May 1, fans will be able to stream the 2003 "Battlestar Galactica" miniseries, all four seasons of the "Battlestar Galactica" series (2005–2009), and the 2009 movie "Battlestar Galactica: The Plan" on both Paramount+ and Pluto TV.
All 19 episodes of "Caprica," the 2010 "Battlestar Galactica" prequel series, will also be available to stream on May 1, but those will only be found on Paramount+.
It's been several days since I finished Cristina Rivera Garcia's No One Will See Me Cry (translated by Andrew Hurley) and I've still sort of singularly failed to formulate an opinion about it; I just keep sort of mentally picking the book up and turning it over and putting it uneasily down again.
In some ways this book reminds me of A Month in the Country, in that both are historical novels that delicately build up a picture of lives destabilized by and lived in the cracks after an epoch-shaking event, while carefully avoiding -- tracing the parameters of, writing around, turning the camera consistently away from -- the event itself. The difference is that A Month in the Country does in fact feel light, delicate, balanced against the heavy thing at its center, while No One Will See Me Cry isn't in any way a light book; aside from the heaviness of its subject matter, feels laden with symbolism at every turn, although the symbolism itself is often specific and startling.
The premise: in 1920s Mexico City, an aging, morphine-addicted photographer who's been hired to take portraits of asylum inmates meets Matilda, a woman he last photographed many years ago, when she was a prostitute. Joaquin engages in a kind of narrative barter with, first the asylum doctor, then with Matilda herself, in an attempt to understand her story and how it intersects with his own to bring them both to this asylum. Both of them, it turns out, formatively knew and formatively loved the same woman, a revolutionary, in the years before the war -- but neither of them was actually involved in the Revolution, neither of them were active agents for or against the transformation of their livetimes; Joaquin describes himself more than once as the only photographer of his generation who didn't take any photographs of the war, and Matilda was, at the time, involved in an emotional affair with a desert landscape.
There are some tropes that one expects, and is braced for, around Women and Lost Women and Madwomen, especially when insanity is used as a thematic metaphor around national trajectory, especially when all that is inextrictable from questions of poverty and indigineity. Rivera Garcia is definitely deploying some of those tropes with purpose and to a point and I absolutely do not know enough to have a full sense of what she's doing with them. This is one of those situations where I wish I was reading a book in context of a class or a club. As it is, what I'm left with is interest, unease, some beautiful and surprising images, and a sense that I ought to read a lot more about the Mexican Revolution.
Something I thought was funny/interesting... the official DC page did a poll asking whether or not Joker is Batman's soulmate and referred to the pairing as being "toxic BFs".
This isn't the first time either, the official Batman page compared Batman and Joker to Netflix's Heated Rivalry. (As a side note, one of the show's leads Connor Storrie has a pretty significant Joker connection in Joker: Folie à Deux.)
One workable parse treats “Buttons Buttons” as a proper name, “Buttons’ Buttons” as a store, and button/buttons as verbs (“to fasten”). On that reading, the sentence means roughly:
In the store Buttons’ Buttons, Buttons Buttons fastens the buttons that his buttons’ buttons fasten.
What’s interesting is how it scales. If you try to extend it via clausal embedding (stacking more “that…” clauses), the result remains grammatical but quickly loses semantic coherence. But if the recursion is pushed into the possessive chain instead, it remains interpretable:
his buttons —> his buttons’ buttons —> his buttons’ buttons’ buttons —> …
This can be captured by a simple schema:
NP₀ = Buttons Buttons’ buttons
NPₙ₊₁ = NPₙ’s buttons
So unlike the classic buffalo sentence—which tolerates repeated clausal stacking—this construction seems to support stable recursion primarily within the possessive domain. More generally, it suggests a contrast between recursion that preserves a hierarchy of reference (as in possessive chains) and recursion that reuses or reassigns roles (as in clausal stacking), the latter degrading more quickly.
I’m curious whether this strikes you as a genuine pattern or just an artifact of this particular sentence. I haven’t seen this configuration discussed, though I may be missing prior examples.
Above is a guest post by Preston C. — comments welcome.
PH 14 - The Goblin Emperor Series - Katherine Addison, Nine Worlds Series - Victoria Goddard, The Locked Tomb Series | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir, Succession (TV 2018), The Chronicles of Chrestomanci - Diana Wynne Jones, The Lost Prince - Frances Hodgson Burnett https://autoao3app.fandom.tools/#/UnsentLetters2026/user/DontStopHerNow
PH 14 - The Goblin Emperor Series - Katherine Addison, Nine Worlds Series - Victoria Goddard, The Locked Tomb Series | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir, Succession (TV 2018), The Chronicles of Chrestomanci - Diana Wynne Jones, The Lost Prince - Frances Hodgson Burnett https://autoao3app.fandom.tools/#/UnsentLetters2026/user/DontStopHerNow
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I often believe that I am The Least Interesting Man In The World. That I am less interesting than literally any other man on the planet. This came to a head when I started dating (or trying to) and suffer failure after failure when guys who seemed to have less going for them than I did were still landing partners. To this day, even though I have a lifetime of stories to tell there's still the nagging feeling that nobody wants to hear them because I'm Just Not That Interesting.
I think I first got this feeling when I was in a Boy Scout storytelling circle, and realized I had pretty much nothing to share. The reason for this was at the time my life was pretty limited. Other boys were talking about the time they went fishing, or went out on their dad's boat, that sort of thing. I had school (which nobody in the circle wanted to hear about) and the rest of my life was taken up by the family business, which I was forbidden to talk about.
The reason I could not talk about the family business was because my parents operated from home in violation of zoning laws. They were paranoid that somehow word would filter back to the authorities and they'd be shut down (they were the original "Laws for thee but not for me" folks).
So now I'm going to spill the tea with a vengeance. My parents, Ronald and Norma Paradis of 607 Harbor View Boulevard, Somerset, MA operated a business with machinery out of their home in violation of zoning laws. They were in the direct mail business, and our basement was full of 1960s-vintage machinery for addressing and stuffing envelopes.
Here is one of the machines: a Phillipsburg Inserter. It could automatically stuff up to four inserts into an envelope, seal them, and count them. Stacks of outer envelopes and inserts went in, and stacks of stuffed envelopes came out.
Being a homebased business started on a shoestring, my dad bought used equipment and tinkered with it to get it working. Boy, did he tinker. This thing was constantly jamming and acting up, and so he had to twiddle with various adjustments to get it to behave. I still own the very screwdriver he used to do the tinkering. He was constantly angry, on edge, and cursing up a storm about this.
One day when I was maybe five years old, I had a friend over, and I told her "We have an inserting machine. It's always broken". My mom overheard this, dragged me aside, and laid into me about how we were never to talk about this to anyone. I was just trying to make conversation and mom shut that down. The message was clear: don't try to make conversation in case you accidentally spill the tea.
Being a small family business it consumed our lives. I was frequently dragged in to do various tasks for the business, from hand-stuffing envelopes for small jobs, to operating the addressing machine, to operating this very inserting machine, to operating even bigger machines that I'll talk about later. Of course, having an underage child operating industrial machinery like this was its own brand of illegal, which my parents emphasized was yet another reason to not breathe a word about it to anyone. I didn't get an allowance, I got paid for the hours I worked in the business.
So here it is, the inserting machine that I was forbidden to talk about, for everyone to see (this picture is not the actual machine; it's a newer model for illustration purposes). If you want to see one in action take a look at this short video. This is the kind of story that *could* have made me interesting back then, if only I was allowed to tell it. Which I'm doing now.
Part of me wishes I could go back and drop a dime on my parents...
"Dear readers and friends. The unhappy fact is---the numerous bouts of anaesthetic I've had have made it pretty well impossible for me to write. I drop stitches. Not many. No problems with daily life or doing creative stuff or enjoying life in general. But the ability to control narrative is just not what it was, and it's just not going to be there. I've accepted that, painful as it is. I thank all of you who've stood by me patiently. The body of work is what it is, and I am lastingly grateful to my publisher, Betsy Wollheim, who has given me every extension of time and resource. And of course to Jane, who is all things.
It's been difficult for me to get around to much lately around the day-to-day needs so here's a small slice of latest events. First, the weather's been glorious lately, it almost makes it feel okay to live in Glasgow; I could get used to this. Yesterday, we took our dog L. over to Glasgow Green and today I still hope we get to bring him for a walk along the Clyde.
Recently, we got coffee with R.'s childhood friend and their partner: they were passing through Glasgow, which was great. It is interesting to see here somebody who lived so near R. far away and long ago.
Yesterday, R. observed that our mattress really isn't great in how it transmits disturbance on one side of it over to the other. So, this morning we headed to IKEA to replace our VALEVÅG pocket-sprung mattress with an ÅNNELAND hybrid mattress. I was skeptical about how well we would be able to fold our old mattress and fit it into the car but R. led and it all worked out. The council waste centre was rather busy on a sunny weekend afternoon but there was parking near the mattresses and, with the help of R.'s sons, the mattress replacement is now complete.
We also stopped at Sainsbury's, which is near IKEA. It's one of the more pleasant supermarkets to shop in: the aisles are generally wide and the self-scanning handheld device's UI isn't annoying.
I realized that I've generally been sleeping rather well for quite some time now. I think it may be the change in job: having dropped a couple of grades in responsibility, going from leading teams to taking Jira tickets, the stress is reduced commensurately.
On not-in-office days, I've been using the cross-trainer more often than not. I am pleased to be achieving this change in habits. My calf is a bit sore but, as always, ignoring an issue seems to work fine: if I don't use it as an excuse not to exercise then the exercise tends not to make it any worse. My eating has not been anywhere near modest enough but the food has been tasty so, well, there's that.
At work, I have an on-site visit in NYC coming up and I have already checked that the hotel also has a cross-trainer. It will be interesting to try getting between Newark Airport and Penn Station by rail: it looks easily achieved but is a new experience for me. We do have business Uber but I got on so badly with the Uber app and their customer service that I am happy to avoid it.
Often, I've felt as if my body and mind were moving through molasses: I can do what I must but everything's effort, whether mental or physical. More recently, that's happened less. It seems premature to link the improvement with exercising but time might tell.
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