Heads-up re LiveJournal, if you haven't heard: if you still have stuff you care about there, you should probably save it now.

Yuletide reveal: I wrote A Night at the Opera for

mage-pie. I already knew them from Discord, and their prompts were very much in line with what I wanted to write. Good experience.

Tonight I unplugged my desktop, opened up the case, and gave it a clean. I am happy to say that it booted again afterwards. I haven't yet dared to try Hollow Knight again since, though. (What prompted me to do this was having the computer spontaneously shut down twice while I was playing Hollow Knight. In the same region.[*] It's a hot day, and heat plus not having cleaned the case since mumbleevermumble plus spontaneous shutdown while playing a game made me think "overheating".)

[* City of Tears, near the Watcher's Spire.]

choirwoman posting in

yuletide

Enchanted Forest Chronicles, Floris (TV), The Court Jester, Piranesi, Miss Marple, Dragonriders of Pern, Lord Peter Wimsey, Columbo, The Princess Bride, The Secret Garden, Chalet School, The Goblin Emperor, Irn Bru Snowman Ads, Dark Is Rising Sequence, Murdle, Tiny Bookshop & Untitled Goose Game, Flower Fairies, Baby Shoes Never Worn. Here, at my blog.

Current Mood: bouncy

musesfool

I hope you all had a lovely New Year's celebration and started the year off the way you wanted.

I did a bunch of cooking yesterday - rice balls to eat at dinner (since I can no longer stomach eating at midnight, pun intended) and then the Smitten Kitchen orange cranberry buns, which were supposed to do an overnight rise in the fridge so I could have them for breakfast this morning (pics). Sadly, I did not find that they rose at all overnight and in fact they stayed cold for a long time before I finally baked them. They did puff up nicely in the oven and they are tasty, but I don't know why I never have success with sweet things rising overnight in the fridge - bread and pizza have worked fine for me, but this is like the third time I've tried overnight sweet rolls of some sort and it's always the same. Anyway, the recipe makes 12 so I have 3 in my freezer for future!me to enjoy at a later date. I still have a fuckton of cranberries in the freezer though, so I'll probably make them - or the scones - again soon.

I can't remember if I've mentioned this, but if you go see Marty Supreme, keep an eye out for my nephew! He's an extra in a scene in a pool hall (I think?). He got recruited when he was out at a bar with friends one night - a casting agent told him he had the right look (like he was from the 50s) for a movie she was casting, and he eventually got to be in it! He's pretty tall, so he might stand out, idk.

In other things I keep meaning to mention, on Christmas, my sister opened up a couple of bottles of wine, and we found a red that we actually liked! It's called "Clara's Red" by Keuka Spring Vineyard in upstate New York (Finger Lakes region). It's on the sweet side for a red, and tasted like it was 85% of the way to already being sangria and had no musty basement smell or taste at all! Their 2021 Reisling was also really good, and she opened another of their white wines (I didn't make note of the type), which also tasted good. (Lest you think I was off my face on wine on Christmas, I only had a sip of each because my stomach was basically empty, which is a whole other thing - they somehow had not thought to provide anything for me or my other nephew for breakfast despite knowing we would be there? Idek. Eventually I had a couple of mini waffles [generally breakfast for Baby Miss L when she is there], but it was not enough to be drinking on.) Anyway, I wanted to put it here so I remembered it if I need to buy wine any time soon, and also as a recommendation in case any of you want to try a new wine.

*

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Both Sides Now - Joni Mitchell

skygiants

Aha! it's Yuletide reveals time!

So my Yuletide recipient this year was

genarti, who is either just about to find out this fact from my post, or has known for weeks and is just biding her time to reveal her knowledge and I'm just about to find out that fact after she reads this. Stay tuned for breaking developments!

So, for her, I wrote The Villainous Princess Saves Her Kingdom, a fix-it fic for the kdrama Jeongnyeon: The Star Is Born about the most dysfunctional lesbian of that whole cast of lesbians picking up various postcanon pieces of herself and incidentally the rest of the troupe.

HOWEVER, for obvious reasons, I had to immediately come up with a decoy fic, so from the beginning having read

raven's Yuletide letter at the same time I happened to be rereading The Dispossessed I decided I was also going to write a treat for

raven that I would present to

genarti as my assignment, which ended up as More A Comment Than A Question, a strange little timebending fic about Shevek's daughter contacting Laia Aseio Odo through time and space and not really necessarily making the most of it.

Tangled webs, etc; after I had confidently reported submitting my decoy fic on deadline to

genarti,

raven's prompt went to the pinch-hit list and I had to frantically fake a different panic than the panic I was actually feeling -- ANYWAY. Hilariously,

raven discovered my identity immediately due to the usernames reveal error whereas

genarti was at church through that entire event and thus remained completely oblivious (unless, of course, she isn't, see first paragraph above.) A very chaotic Yuletide on several fronts! But I had a lot of fun writing both fics although I would prefer not to be wrangling quite this much deception every year.

geri_chan posting in

yuletide

I posted recs for 4 Yuletide (and Madness) fics over on my blog for Ilona Andrews (Kate Daniels, Breach Wars) and the Singing Hills Cycle over on my blog. Breach Wars is not yet categorized on AO3 and not showing up in the fandoms list, so please go check out those fics if you're an Ilona Andrews fan!

mayhap

I wrote Vicky Bliss, a fandom deeply embedded in my heart, for Yuletide this year!

Contrapunctus Inversus (2467 words) by mayhap
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Vicky Bliss - Elizabeth Peters
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Vicky Bliss/John Tregarth
Characters: Vicky Bliss, John Tregarth
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Meet-Cute, Crimes & Criminals, Metafiction, Period-Typical Sexism, Banter
Summary: invertible counterpoint: counterpoint in which the voices, while retaining their original form, may be interchanged above or below one another in any order

I might do something incredibly old-fashioned and write up a DVD commentary-type thing for this, because I had so much fun playing with a Vicky who's an art thief and a John who investigates her as opposed to vice versa.

The cover art for the Recorded Books audiobook of Street of the Five Moons isn't the greatest, but it has its charms and it grew on me while I was doing canon review, so I added it to my icons. There's not much to choose from when it comes to cover art that attempts to depict them! Dishonorable mentions go to this Dutch edition where they both have dark hair for some reason, and the Recorded Books audiobook of Trojan Gold where they appear to have accidentally published an unfinished sketch and even if there was meant to be a final version, it looks like it was shaping up to be bad. The American hardcover of Silhouette in Scarlet is my favorite, but the composition isn't suitable for iconning, unfortunately. The Recorded Books audiobook of Night Train to Memphis is mediocre but at least it's finished.

Current Mood: accomplished

yuletidemods posting in

yuletide_admin

End of Event
We have revealed creator names at the main 2025 collection and the 2025 Madness collection. (Reveals seems to be working as intended - fingers crossed!) The New Year's Resolutions 2026 collection will shortly open for posting. The structured parts of this year's event are over - but you can keep posting recs at

yuletide and commenting on works to let their creators know you enjoyed them.

Please comment!

Please check that you have commented on any gifts you received - you can search on your username at the Yuletide 2025 collection, or the Yuletide Madness 2025 collection, or check your own personal AO3 gifts page. We understand not everyone can comment immediately due to late-December commitments or unforeseen events, but please comment when you can to acknowledge the gifts you requested. Comments and kudos on other Yuletide works are also very welcome.

Thank you from mods and team
Thank you to everyone who took part in Yuletide 2025: writers, requesters, betas, pinch hitters, community coordinators, chatters, hippos and the hippo pool.

Thank you from mods to the tagmod team: these are the assistants who research and process tags, proofread announcements, brainstorm author questions, contribute specific fandom knowledge, check stories, and discuss how to solve problems.

We look forward to running Yuletide again in 2026!

And now
There's a reveals post up at the participant community, if you want to chat about your writing process now that you can.

New stories can be posted to the New Year's Resolutions 2026 collection.

Feedback
As always, general feedback is welcome!

This year, we increased the nominations allowance from 4 fandoms to 5 fandoms. Since that worked okay, we anticipate continuing that next year.

We introduced a limited Do-Not-Match system. That was manageable so we're interested in repeating the same process next year - though it's possible it could grow beyond our capacity, so we don't want to guarantee it indefinitely.

We changed the deadline time and the reveals times. Those changes were based on mod availability, and it was really helpful to us to have multiple mods awake at the point of deadline and reveals. We'll need to base future deadline and reveals times on that priority, but since that isn't the only factor making deadlines and reveal times effective, we're interested to hear feedback too.

Next Yuletide, we may review franchise rules to make sure we're being consistent and fair. We may also specifically review rules for music videos.

As requested by a participant, we will also be adding a section to our rules on AO3 listing what you can expect from the mod team’s communications and conduct. We have had an internal Code of Conduct for several years but agree it would be helpful to share a public version.

Again, feedback on these or other topics is also welcome.

Thank you for helping to make Yuletide 2025 a wonderful event.

morbane posting in

yuletide

Thank you for all the work that went in to the Yuletide 2025 collection and event.

Now that author names have been revealed at the main Yuletide 2025 and Yuletide Madness 2025 collections, it's traditional for people to share thoughts on what they made this year. Maybe you want to write a post on your own social media (Dreamwidth or other) about your thoughts during canon consumption, your false starts, your research rabbit holes - please link it here! Or maybe you'd like to comment directly with much shorter thoughts. There's room for options in between, too.

See past posts at the reveals tag.

kahvi_kat posting in

yuletide

A few recs for my gifts here - Blackwell Series, Jeeves & Wooster, and Fantastic Four: First Steps:

https://www.tumblr.com/norwegianpornfaerie/804561142003499008/yuletide-recs?source=share

skygiants

Due to the combo of the ongoing Eight Days of DWJ project and being on the Otherwise judging committee, this has been one of my best years in recent memory for reading actual books and my worst for keeping up with write-ups.

( Books read, 2025 )

As usual, I'm hoping to write up many of the ones I missed and will probably not in fact actually get around to most of them, so feel free to ask me about any of them -- I'll try to either do a short version here or get myself together for an actual post!

marginaliana

Project 'Family Christmas Literally Anywhere That Isn't Texas' was pretty successful. My mother was thrilled that I made the arrangements and all she had to do was turn up - which was not something she had expressed a desire for in advance so I had been stressing about it but then once we were there she told me several times how much she appreciated it. Feelings wise it was pretty par in terms of how interacting with my mother is complicated, but then eased by the fact that we had places to go and things to do rather than just sitting around in her house.

The highlight was probably learning about how Benjamin Franklin wrote a story where the personification of his gout told him to drink less and get more exercise. We also went on a Christmas lights trolley tour with a live musician who made us all come up with things we wanted for the 12 days of Christmas ("ten burlesque dancers" was a good one, and "six thousand dollars"). Extremely silly and I loved it.

The part of the trip that was most me was the bit where, while waiting to go to the airport to go home, we spent several hours without screens just rambling about things and that included a long discussion of 'If you were designing your perfect restaurant, what would it look like?' Which is the kind of thing I think about all the time (my wife has to listen to ramblings of this sort on the regular which thankfully she thinks is charming) but my mother thinks about never. I think that may have given her an insight into my brain that she hasn't had in a long time.

vass

[not the usual 'things' post, but I'm hoping to do one such post once a week this year, and this is close enough.]

I finished reading Rivers Solomon's The Deep, went for a walk, mostly-assembled[*] the flatpack garden bench I bought back in November, did a bunch of weeding and tomato bondage[**], and played a few hours of Hollow Knight[***].

[* Some of the holes for the screws did not seem to have been drilled at quite the right angle, and I wasn't able to screw them in far enough even when I decided to stick a hex bit on my impact driver and use that. Which worked great for the ones on the right side, but the ones on the left side wouldn't go in any further than they already had, and as a bonus I stripped the screw heads. Ugh.]

[** Green tomatoes sighted! Now slightly further off the ground than before I tied them up!]

[Located the map to Fog Canyon, found Queen's Gardens, accidentally had my second altercation with Hornet (I beat her in Greenpath a long time ago), got my carapace handed to me and decided I was not ready for that fight yet, attempted and soundly failed at the Delicate Flower quest, and beat Uumuu and Elder Hu.]

Hope everyone else's new year is good so far.

rydra_wong

https://bsky.app/profile/rahaeli.bsky.social/post/3mbebi2xfxc25 (thread)

jjhunter

Pick a thing or two that sums up how you're doing today, this week, in general, and tell me about it in the 5-7-5 syllables of a haiku.

=

Signal-boosting much appreciated!

jjhunter

Here we are again, on the threshold of possibility. Happy Public Domain Day! May it be a Happy New Year!

Some years I make a practice of committing to quarterly intentions rather than new year's resolutions. I find it helps me lean into the rhythms specific to each season, and the shorter time frame lends itself to selecting more feasible goals that may yet build to larger ambitions.

In the comments, I encourage you to join me in sharing one or more intentions you have of any size for the first quarter of this year (January, February, March), and what you might do on a daily or weekly basis to nurture them. If you would like to do so privately, all anonymous comments on this post will remain screened unless you explicitly okay otherwise.

cyphomandra posting in

yuletide

Recs for KJ Charles' England series, Utopia Avenue, Soulmate Goose AU, LEGO Botanical Garden and LEGO Natural History Museum, The Long Walk, Oxford Time Travel Universe, Dredge, and Miss Marple, here at my dreamwidth.

regshoe posting in

yuletide

Seven Yuletide recs (plus one non-Yuletide rec) at my journal. Fandoms are Blackadder, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (TV), Flower Fairies - Cicely Mary Barker, LEGO Botanical Garden and LEGO Natural History Museum, Moby Dick - Herman Melville, Piranesi - Susanna Clarke and (unofficially) Raffles - E. W. Hornung.

snickfic posting in

yuletide

One last batch in before reveals! Nine recs, all on my journal. Fandoms include:

The Long Walk (2025)
Carrie
The Odyssey
Philadelphia Flyers RPF
Crash (1996)
19th Century Poets RPF
True Detective
Jaws
The Blue Castle

jadelennox

The Clockwork Alarm (3058 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Old Kingdom - Garth Nix
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Lirael (Old Kingdom), Imshi (Old Kingdom), The Disreputable Dog | Kibeth
Additional Tags: Yuletide 2025, The Great Library of the Clayr, and its many fun and exiting rooms
Summary:

An alarm sounds in the library while most of the staff have been called to the Watch. Typically a Third Assistant Librarian wouldn't be brought along to respond to an alarm, but when only Lirael and Imshi are left in the Reading Room....

Goalposts (7607 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Scholomance - Naomi Novik
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Galadriel "El" Higgins/Orion Lake, Orion Lake & Guo Yi Liu
Characters: Orion Lake, Scholomance (Scholomance - Novik), Guo Yi Liu
Additional Tags: POV Orion Lake, Post-The Golden Enclaves: Lesson Three of The Scholomance, The Golden Enclaves: Lesson Three of The Scholomance Spoilers, Orion gets a hobby, Back-To-School Night at the Scholomance, Poetry, (sort of), creative writing, Post-Canon, El is mentioned a whole lot but not actually present, Angst, the mortifying ordeal of becoming your own person
Summary:

At first Orion started with love poems.

whatever souls are made of (15800 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 3/3
Fandom: Star Trek: Lower Decks (Cartoon)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Brad Boimler/Beckett Mariner
Characters: Beckett Mariner, Brad Boimler, Crew of the Starship Cerritos (Star Trek)
Additional Tags: Episode: s05e01 Dos Cerritos (Star Trek: Lower Decks), Alternate Season/Series 05, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine References, Post-Dominion War (Star Trek), Friendship/Love, Identity Issues, discussion of the mirror universe, Angst, Pining, Comedy, Romance, Parallel Universes
Summary:

After the alternate-universe Becky Freeman tries to swap lives with Mariner in 5x01 "Dos Cerritos," Rutherford and T'Lyn decide to work out how to detect any further potential impostors from alternate universes.

This ends up being a not so great idea that stresses everybody out.

(Especially Boimler.)

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

Привет and welcome to our new Russian friends from LiveJournal! We are happy to offer you a new home. We will not require identification for you to post or comment. We also do not cooperate with Russian government requests for any information about your account unless they go through a United States court first. (And it hasn't happened in 16 years!)

Importing your journal from ЖЖ may be slow. There are a lot of you, with many posts and comments, and we have to limit how fast we download your information from ЖЖ so they don't block us. Please be patient! We have been watching and fixing errors, and we will go back to doing that after the holiday is over.

I am very sorry that we can't translate the site into Russian or offer support in Russian. We are a much, much smaller company than LiveJournal is, and my high school Russian classes were a very long time ago :) But at least we aren't owned by Sberbank!

С Новым Годом, and welcome home!

EDIT: Большое спасибо всем за помощь друг другу в комментариях! Я ценю каждого, кто предоставляет нашим новым соседям информацию, понятную им без необходимости искать её в Google. :) И спасибо вам за терпение к моему русскому переводу с помощью Google Translate! Прошло уже много-много лет со школьных времен!

Thank you also to everyone who's been giving our new neighbors a warm welcome. I love you all ❤️

Profile

Elizabeth (the delinquent, ecumenical)

December 2025

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Style: Adjustable Gradient for Bannering by branchandroot

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stuff wot I'm reading

Reading

Various

25 recs in 18 fandoms

and ice cream castles in the air

(no subject)

4 Yuletide Recs

FIC: Contrapunctus Inversus (Vicky Bliss, Vicky Bliss/John Tregarth, T)

Yuletide 2025 Wrap-Up

Please comment!

Yuletide 2025 Reveals Posts

Recs for my gifts

(no subject)

Tis I, The Gout!

2026 so far

PSA for anyone who's still got stuff they value on LiveJournal

How Are You? (in Haiku)

Meme: Quarterly Intentions (1/4)

A handful of recs

A few recs

Yuletide recs (part III)

couple-few more recs

Привет! LiveJournal imports may be slow

Profile

December 2025

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