Talking about everything but the U.S. Elections and politics, here.

[silveradept]

So, here's a space to talk about everything else, and anything else. How is NaNo? Doing Yuletide? Watching the Dragon Prince and getting all sorts of ideas? Bake-Off? Cute pictures of animal companions or frustrations?

My only request is that as price of entry, you have voted, will be voting, or are in a circumstance where you couldn't vote (because outside the States, just moved, etc.). I'm not going to demand proof or make you say that you did, but I would love the lounge to be full of people who will do/did the thing and now don't want to talk about it for a while.

Comments

[jenett]

I did the thing! There was a cute dog.

I am indeed doing Nano, and am currently in the middle of a delightful dinner party scene with one character attempting to diminish another, and the second having absolutely none of that, thank you. It is a lot of fun to write.

I am also doing Yuletide, but mostly not worrying about writing that particular thing until NaNo is over (or at least Thanksgiving, when I have a bit more breathing room in my day.)

[silveradept]

That sounds like it's a delightful scene to write, being able to get a certain amount of "nope!" out on page.

I'm still feeling out one of my assignments for a different exchange, mostly because while I have ideas for linkages and the ways things are going, I haven't developed a frame yet that will allow the reader and the characters to see the same things I am yet. But I'm working on it all the same.

[alexseanchai]

That sounds like a delightful scene indeed!

[azurelunatic]

I am bouncing around the idea of NaNoWriMo this year. It's not too late to start. I even have my preferred program on the iPad and a Bluetooth keyboard.

[alexseanchai]

*cheering*

[alexseanchai]

NaNo is going pretty well. I love the dares thread to bits; it's saved my ass twice already.

Yuletide is not going, but I have solid ideas, I just need to turn my attention to Yuletide instead of NaNo, you know?

Dragon Prince is cute but the first two eps weren't enticing enough for me to binge it. Maybe later. Also maybe later, apparently: the second half of the Miraculous Ladybug S2 finale. idk why my brain is doing the thing. (I lie; it's because spoilers told me I have to pretend away all the plot of the season finale, if not necessarily the backstory or character details, in order for my NaNo to make a lick of sense.)

Ha, bake-off. Bake anything you like and put it up against yesterday's cookies. :D

I should go schedule the Wordpress side of Thursday's thing. From sunset Wednesday to sunset Thursday is the festival of Khalkeia, in honor of Athena and Hephaistos in Their roles as artisans and craftworkers. I am running the online festival for Hellenion. I procrastinated waaay too much... I've got the Facebook stuff mostly scheduled, at least?

[silveradept]

Sounds like a very full schedule. Of both doing and not doing.

[alexseanchai]

Also at some point I should like. Laundry. Bathroom cleaning.

[redsixwing]

I have voted! Alas, doing it by mail means no sticker.

My cat is so funny. I've never had a cat as interested in laps as miss Muffin. She wants to be on a lap at all times when it's cold out, and in proximity to her Two-Legs at pretty much all other times. She gets very offended when the owner of the lap needs to get up and move around.

I woke up the other night because I was having trouble breathing and thought I needed my inhaler. No, I needed to get one of Muffin's hind feet off my throat. I poked the cat and she rolled over and went back to sleep.

This is how rumors get started about cats, Muffin. ;p

My NaNo is the same as last year: text-based RP with a very good friend. I'm thrilled it's working so well, as I love writing this OC.

[alexseanchai]

lolololol cats

[redsixwing]

cats <3

[silveradept]

That is how rumors get started. At least mine has the courtesy to sleep on my ankles instead of my face.

That sounds like an interesting way to NaNo. Do you want to say more about how it gets done?

[redsixwing]

That's good! Muffin started with ankles and then, like the story about the boa constrictor, worked her way up. Next I'll find her coiled on my pillow, like a hat. (A friend has had a cat do exactly that. Turns out kids' heads are warm and kitty was cold.)

Sure. My friend and I decided about a year ago it would be fun to run some side threads as supplemental material to a tabletop RPG I run. To keep this from impacting the other players, it was determined that the OCs aren't permitted to move the plot. This is a great way to have low-pressure, one-on-one or one-on-many character play scenes, which can really drag down the pace of a session if not everyone is interested in them. (I have one player who does not care for this sort of thing at all.)

It's played via phone texts, and I collect the individual replies and assemble them into threads, then email them out to whoever's playing in that one. Sometimes material from the side threads gets incorporated into the main game, which is fun for whoever's been involved in them, and makes a more solid-feeling world for people who aren't - I've used these to solve worldbuilding conundrums, flesh out NPCs that later get used 'on screen,' and drop foreshadowing.

I have no idea what wordcount we've hit, but it's got to be at least a small novel by now. Both my friend and I have written every day for a year thanks to this, another friend has started a similar set of side threads, and I can't overstate how pleased I am with that.

[silveradept]

Warm pillows and cat hats. Certainly sounds like a good life for the cat.

I'm glad that the writing is working out for you and your friends! Sounds a bit like the way that Alternity was played, although on perhaps a smaller scale than that.

[redsixwing]

With only three participants, it's pretty small scale.

Thank you for this thread. Brilliant idea.

[momijizukamori]

I'm glad to know I'm not the only one with a cat who doesn't understand that humans need to breathe - Storm likes to try and sleep on my chest, which basically means I can't sleep on my back because she will do that and fourteen pounds of cat is a lot. I think she just likes being higher up, because if I'm on my side she will climb up on top of me there, too.

[redsixwing]

It's definitely not only you! This morning, she escalated to blocking my nose with her furry butt and standing on my throat with both hind feet.

I'm beginning to suspect purry, affectionate assassination attempts.

Fourteen pounds is a lot of cat!

[alexseanchai]

lololol

[momijizukamori]

Joke's on you cat, if you kill me you have to find someone else willing to put up with your constant whining.

She was even bigger when I adopted her, because the shelter free-feeds, but she's still a giant fluffball, heh.

[marahmarie]

Huh, when I do it by mail the mailer they send the ballot in comes with a sticker. The return envelope also lets you put a check on the outside to auto-register for mail-in voting next time around, which is just too cool.

I voted, but have no other reason to be here (I don't do NaNo/Yuletide/Dragon Prince, can't bake (I can burn it all to a crisp, though; PM me for my prices) and don't have the best recent cat pics going right now, so over and out...

[alexseanchai]

Come up with a new topic!

[marahmarie]

Um (off the sheer top of my head), my cat Pippy can jump onto the top of a six foot tall shelf in my bedroom from a windowsill three feet below by jumping right through the heavy vertical blinds covering the window as he leaps, which means he's literally uh, doing it sort of blind-folded, get it. I'm pretty sure he's some sort of cat-genius.

[redsixwing]

That's quite the kitty! :D

We're all here to chat about nothing in particular, so I think you're in good company. ~_o

[alexseanchai]

hee hee hee hee :)

[silveradept]

My own cat thinks that windowshades are just annoyances that get in her way when she wants to watch cat television, and she'll happily bound up from the floor to the sills without a care or worry, or from the bed to the same. They're something in a cat brain that accommodates for them, I guess.

[wohali]

I am having a frustrating last couple of days.

My electronic circuit board design, well, I forgot to check the maximum height of components, and exceeded it by about 7mm.

OK, I think, I'll take those two components and mount them at a right angle. No problem!

One of the two replacement right angle components has its "legs" in different places, meaning soldering it is going to be very difficult. I'm going to attempt to bend them so I can squeeze it in, but if not, I will have to get new PCBs made up. That's another $50 and another week's wait before I can get things moving. And I have to buy all the replacement components.

So yeah, that's my stress.

[silveradept]

That's quite a stress. Here's hoping the legs sit and solder well. I'm guessing getting a different box to house it all in isn't going to work all that well.

[alexseanchai]

*wince*

[ghoti]

I had the day off and I adulted many of the things. I think, hours later, my eyes are finally un-dilated. I also did a 1:1 martial arts lesson and groceries and got a lead on getting a shadow box of my grandfather's medals sorted.

I also got 2 stickers for knocking the potted plants over and causing a ruckus upon entering my polling place.

[silveradept]

Hooray for adulting, and also extra impressed for doing it with dilated eyes.

[anais_pf]

Voted. Now making Dutch meatballs, mashed potatoes and a cabbage-onion-bell pepper dish for dinner, with my partner. Forgot to do NaBloPoMo last night and not doing great on No Sugar November either, but eh, who cares?

[silveradept]

Sounds like it will be good food.

And while it might not be a great month so far for posts or no-sugar, there's still the rest of the month.

[cosmolinguist]

I went along to the bi group's meeting for the first time in months. I probably talked too much but we had such good conversation, about all kinds of big and small things, bi-related and not. It reminded me why I love this group and not to take it for granted.

[silveradept]

Yay, community. It's always nice to be able to talk with people when you're being your full self.

[alexseanchai]

TRUTH

[longmagpieroads]

Bake-Off on Netflix is LIFE right now. both roomie and I are in love with Sue and what we've learned from the show has help us both in our baking/cooking!!

also nano is going well for a project that started because of a fight. :)

[silveradept]

Oh? Tell me more about this project.

Also, yes, there's a lot of fun going on in the Bake-Off. I'm not sure I've learned anything from it, but I tm that's because my baking skills might be more on part with Mel and Sue's. At least on the show.

[longmagpieroads]

We were playing Wait Wait Don't Get Me Started (where you have fifteen minutes to just rant on whatever non politics topic comes to you and then you get points for how entertaining and convincing you can be in the house rules we play with) and I started in on tv shows that had such potential and wasted all of it. Like it could have been SO good but became an incoherent character assassinating plotless mess. I had a couple of shows in mind as I was going and pulled out some examples for ways things could have been.

So they pretty much told me after time was up that really what I needed to do was to write my version of how it could have been better because they would all read that book. Or in my friend's words "Just write the effing werewolves already" as he tossed a pillow at me.

[silveradept]

That sounds like a fun game, and that you had enough material in there for something very good. I think we'll all want to see whatever the werewolves produce.

[longmagpieroads]

I'll let you know when I get it finished. :)

[vass]

Thank you for making this space.

I've been napping during the day. It's not great for my sleep schedule, but it helps with my nerves. Especially since it's been raining a lot over the last two days, and lying in bed listening to the rain, accompanied by one or both cats, is a good way to be.

Yesterday was Cup Day in my city, a state holiday in honour of a horse race. It rained so hard that there were electricity failures in the suburb where the racecourse is. The general mood, among Melbournians who are not into horse racing, gambling, and/or drinking holidays, was schadenfreude for the people who'd shown up in their fanciest suits and frocks and hats to drink champagne and watch the horses.

[silveradept]

Naps with cats and a nice rain soundtrack sounds very soothing.

I'll bet the people who wanted to see the house race weren't as happy with the rain. But I'm not much for horse racing myself, so.

[momijizukamori]

Netflix has really been killing it with animated series - Voltron is great, Dragon Prince is great, and I marathoned all of Castlevania over the weekend and that is also great (though, uh, very much Not For Kids - though honestly, I think it's great that we've reached that point with Western-produced animation).

In other good news, we learned Monday that as part of our current Corporate Overlords being acquired by even larger, worse Corporate Overlords, we're being sold off to a private equity firm that specializes in tech, and as a result, once that second deal closes, we will be our own independent company again, which is fantastic news (as someone on one of the event planning committees, I'm seriously looking forward to being able to pick our own vendors again - we had an absolute nightmare time dealing with one of the corporate-mandated ones last month)

[silveradept]

Dragon Prince is very interesting, and I'm looking forward to the second season, should it arrive.

Hooray for independence again, and things going back to choosing your own again.

[momijizukamori]

Same - hopefully with more Amaya because holy shit I'm gay for her.

It's a huge weight off my shoulders, and I think the shoulders of everyone else who's been here a while, even if we're still waiting to hear on things like health insurance etc.

[silveradept]

Yes, more Amaya please! She's absolutely the kind of badass the world needs there. I also found it a nice touch the way that Callum (and presumably Ezran, although we don't see him do it) can sign with (Aunt) Amaya and don't necessarily need Gren to interpret.