Fic or Treat!
Oct. 10th, 2024 10:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
embraidery
@ficortreat
EMBRAIDERY's Door
DW username:
embraideryLight is on for: friends, DW followers, anyone who came here from ficortreat!
What's in the Bowl? Ficlets, logic puzzles (by Raymond Smullyan, not me), book recs, podficlets, doodles, blackout poetry
Let Me Know:
Ficlets - check out my profile on AO3 or my autoao3app for fandoms I've created for or requested before! I'll be honest, I have a lot of rare fandoms, but it's a fun grab bag. I won't create for Harry Potter anymore, but almost anything else is fair game. Let me know characters/ships you're into, maybe a prompt, DNWs? Let me know your AO3 handle if you'd like it gifted.
Logic puzzles - these would be from one of my books of logic puzzles, mostly dealing with figuring out which statements are true and which are false (i.e. one person always lies and the other always tells the truth).
Book recs - let me know genres! I have a variety of YA, sci-fi, fantasy, a little bit of horror, a little bit of poetry, quite a bit of PG Wodehouse. I also have some short stories to recommend!
Podficlets - drop a few options of fics under 2.5k and I'll see what I can do. Doesn't have to be in a fandom I know. No non-con or omegaverse and no Harry Potter, please! (And, of course, the author must be okay with the work being podficced.) Let me know your AO3 handle if you'd like it gifted.
Doodles - I can draw characters I know or characters I don't if you can link me a visual reference. Or geometric art and/or optical illusion art!
Blackout poetry - send me a page of a fic you wrote or a book/poem in the public domain and I'll black it out and make poetry!
Other info: Drop me a fun fact about something in the world or the weirdest thing you've ever eaten or some other bit of information! Happy Halloween!
no subject
Date: 2024-10-11 01:55 pm (UTC)Here are some fics I'd love to hear podficced, if any of them take your fancy:
Plucked & Pressed (The Terror), 3-sentence fic collection, T, 1.8k
Helping Hand (Pokemon), gen, 300 words
Warming Up (Star Wars), gen, 300 words
Weirdest thing I've eaten is probably kangaroo. Though maybe that's not weird, I don't know XD It was at a restaurant that serves food in pitch black, so you don't know what you're eating and find out afterwards. It was surprisingly tender!
Happy Halloween 🎃🐈⬛
no subject
Date: 2024-10-12 03:47 pm (UTC)Did you enjoy your experience eating in the dark? It sounds kind of fun!
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2024-10-11 05:11 pm (UTC)I saw on your AO3 profile that you've written Elliott/Willy from Stardew Valley! I'd love a little ficlet about them. For a prompt, maybe a fishing trip? Maybe Elliott agrees to go but then realizes he can't handle being on a boat for hours very well, or maybe on the contrary he ends up having a way better time than he thought. Maybe Willy shows him how to hold his fishing rod and they get distracted by the proximity... Up to you! (I welcome any references to the infamous trickiness of Stardew Valley's fishing minigame lol.) If you'd like to gift it to me, I'm Samifer on AO3.
I'm not sure what the weirdest thing I've eaten is... I actually really like horse meat, which I know is controversial. I guess one weird thing about me and food is that I don't like seafood at all but I had a period where I was obsessed with the fish soup at one specific restaurant, to the point that it was The thing I wanted to eat for my birthday one year. It was really good fish soup... Now I wish I could have it again...
Thank you so much, and happy Halloween!
no subject
Date: 2024-10-12 03:50 pm (UTC)I hope you can have that soup again, or find a similar one you love as much! I was at a Japanese restaurant the other week and tried a bit of the fish broth from my friend’s ramen. So good 😋 But it’s in the big city almost 2 hours away!
no subject
Date: 2024-10-29 09:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-11 08:27 pm (UTC)I would love a lil doodle of my blorbos ( https://iiwiki.werp.site/agents:dr._xu and https://iiwiki.werp.site/agents:prism ). I would also love recs for sci fi that include speculative biology or xenobiology, especially by non-USAmerican authors!)
Weirdest thing I've ever eaten: Colombian giant fat-bottomed fried ants. They were heavily salted and mostly just tasted of salt, but the texture was very similar to when you're eating peanuts from the shell and get a bit of that thin internal papery peanut skin stuck to your tongue.
Happy Halloween!
no subject
Date: 2024-10-12 03:53 pm (UTC)What a name those ants have!! And what a texture!
no subject
Date: 2024-10-29 09:44 pm (UTC)I looked through the SF on my shelf and didn't see a ton of books that I would say have a ton of xenobiology featured, which is a shame, since I'm interested in that myself! The one I would say for sure is Beneath the World, a Sea, by Chris Beckett, which is set in a possibly-alien ecosystem in an alternate history Earth. Jeff Vandermeer might be another possibility! I've only fully read Annihilation, which wasn't as full of xenobio as I was expecting from the movie, but still had some cool fungus.
Enjoy!!
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2024-10-11 10:25 pm (UTC)/opens gigantic bag!!!!
Please pick whatever strikes your fancy -
Ficlets -
Do I dare ask you for Challengers? Art/Tashi, Art/Tashi/Patrick. Memory, stolen moment, unhappily ever after, skilled in more than just hitting a ball with a racket.
Or! Inej! Give me feathers, cages, freedom, on the sea.
Book recs -
Give me some short story recs, please! Any genre. I don't really read short stories so I'd love to actually change that and be able to blame you ♥.
Blackout poetry -
I'm curious about what this looks like! What if I throw you a (raunchy) Battleship gift I wrote you this year? (Feel free to pick one of your SoC stories if you'd prefer that!)
I don't remember anything weird I've eaten, but I can tell you I dislike jelly because of the texture. People apparently find this weird!
no subject
Date: 2024-10-12 03:54 pm (UTC)Jelly meaning what Americans call jell-o? I can see that being an off putting texture!
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2024-10-29 10:02 pm (UTC)I typed the entire fic on my typewriter, then obscured most of it by typing xxx over it.
Transcription:
"a hand along her back;
warm mouth against her;
breathless
mouth over her breast
murmurs
exhales
arches
breathes
smiles
shakes and shakes
ascends faster,
impatient"
And as for short stories!
Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self by Isabel J. Kim: a world where people can split into "instances" of themselves, an original and a copy. The main character moved from Korea to the US as a kid and travels back to Korea for her grandfather's funeral, where she meets her instance for the first time.
The House of Asterion by Jorge Luis Borges: a very short take on the minotaur of Greek myth.
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: perhaps you read this one in school, but if it's been a long time, may I recommend reading it again? I just read it again for Trick or Treat and loved the horror of Victorian era misogyny and the slow creep of the horrible wallpaper.
Enjoy!!
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2024-10-12 01:37 am (UTC)I’d like to request either:
1) book recs for speculative fiction (Fantasy, SFF, horror) with prose you consider beautiful or striking
2) A drabble for Piranesi; prompts: rain, far shores, welcome home
Weirdest thing I’ve eaten: zucchini and carrot pizza
no subject
Date: 2024-10-12 03:57 pm (UTC)Did you enjoy the pizza?
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2024-10-29 10:16 pm (UTC)I have some book recs for you!
This Is How You Lose The Time War is sci fi prose that I personally love, but I know some people find pretty purple.
"Blue carries nothing with her between strands except knowledge, purpose, tactics, and Red's letters. Memory is tipped and decanted into Garden, life to life to life, always deepening, thickening, growing new roots and efficiencies-but Red's letters she keeps in her own body, curled beneath her tongue like coins, printed in her fingers' tips, between the lines of her palms. She presses them against her teeth before kissing her marks, reads them over when she shifts her grip on motorcycle handles, dusts soldiers' chins with them in bar fights and barracks games. She thinks without thinking, often, of what she will name Red in her next letter-hides her lists in plausibly deniable dreamscapes, on the undersides of milkweed leaves, in shed chrysalis and wingtip. Vermillion Lie. Scarlet Tanager. Parthian Thread. My Red, Red Rose."
Mink River (Brian Doyle) is maybe more of a litfic vibe but does contain elements of magical realism. It has beautiful and very unique prose that I would recommend for that alone.
For example: "And the light itself-well, there's a certain certainness of light here, the way it shafts itself through and around things confidently, exuberantly, densely, substantively; it has something to do with the nearby ocean, maybe. Or the rain, which falls eight months a year. Or the sheer jungle energy of trees and plants here, where the flora release so many feminine ions that the light fractures into geometric patterns that are organized along magnetic lines coherent with the tides and sometimes visible to the naked eye.
Really and truly."
and "and so many more stories, all changing by the minute, all swirling and braiding and weaving and spinning and stitching themselves one to another and to the stories of creatures in that place, both the quick sharp-eyed ones and the rooted green ones and the ones underground and the ones too small to see, and to stories that used to be here, and still are here in ways that you can sense sometimes if you listen with your belly, and the first green shoots of stories that will be told in years to come-so many stories braided and woven and inter stitched and leading one to another like spider strands or synapses or creeks that you could listen patiently for a hundred years and never hardly catch more than shards and shreds of the incalculable ocean of stories just in this one town, not big, not small, bounded by four waters, in the hills, by the coast, end of May, first salmonberries just ripe. But you sure can try to catch a few, yes?"
If YA is okay, I find All the Crooked Saints very beautiful and also unique. (Somewhere between our-world fantasy and magical realism.)
"You can hear a miracle a long way after dark.
Miracles are very like radio waves in this way. Not many people realize that the ordinary radio wave and the extraordinary miracle have much in common. Left to their own devices, radio waves would not be audible for much more than forty or fifty miles. They travel on perfectly straight paths from their broadcast source, and because the Earth is round, it does not take them long to part ways with the ground and head out to the stars. Wouldn't we all, if we had the chance? What a shame that both miracles and radio waves are invisible, because it would be quite a sight: ribbons of marvel and sound stretching out straight and true from all over the world.
But not all radio waves and miracles escape unheard. Some bounce off the ceiling of the ionosphere, where helpful free electrons oscillate in joyful harmony with them before thrusting them back to Earth at new angles."
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2024-10-12 06:50 am (UTC)Gosh, you have so many fun things on offer in your bowl!! Please feel free to choose between these options, however you're inspired:
-- Doodle of Eloise Bridgerton or Benedict Bridgerton
-- Geometric art would also be really cool! Prompt (if it's helpful??): turquoise
-- Ficlet: either Edgin/Xenk or Edgin & Holga from Dungeons & Dragons: HAT, possible prompts: midnight confession, sharing a bed, a bard/singing competition (DNWs: permanent character death, infidelity, noncon)
-- Logic puzzles: I love doing Murdle-style puzzles and other kinds of logic and word puzzles, and always curious to try more!
My AO3 is
Thank you for your bounty of tasty offerings! :D Happy spooky season! ♥
no subject
Date: 2024-10-12 04:06 pm (UTC)…okay, that was a bit of a stretch. Running out of Halloween-adjacent sayings 😂 And a very happy spooky season to you!
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2024-10-13 02:57 pm (UTC)knocks
Trick or treat, neighbour! :)
I'd love a doodle of Lucien Lacroix Ref1, Ref2, Ref3 from Forever Knight.
I think the weirdest thing I ate was a slice of bread with nutella and crumbled up paprika crisps. (Yes, case of the munchies XD )
Have a great spooky season! 🦇
no subject
Date: 2024-10-29 11:09 pm (UTC)Happy early Halloween!
Here is Lucien on AO3!
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2024-10-13 10:32 pm (UTC)If you're so inclined, I'd love an OPLA ficlet! I'm particularly fond of Luffy + Shanks, Zoro + Mihawk, and Sanji + Zeff; as platonic, shippy, one-sidedly shippy, something ambiguous, or some other amalgam of feelings going on. I just really love how intense all these relationships are, and anything dealing with or poking at the intense feelings going on would be delightful! Buggy getting under Luffy's skin about Shanks, Luffy's everything concerning Shanks, the scar Mihawk left on Zoro, Zoro's determination to best him, all the history and bickering between Sanji and Zeff and their farewells, Zeff getting hurt and Sanji leaping up to defend him; it's all so good! :D
Additional prompt: vampires! Mihawk lends himself particularly well to the idea, but I'd love to see vampirism thrown into the mix with any of those pairs. :D
I'd prefer things didn't go into smut territory, but otherwise I'm cool with whatever. <3
I'm not really sure what the weirdest thing I've eaten is! I've had a gummy shaped like a finger, which was kinda odd, haha. I was offered dried crickets once, though I didn't end up taking them. :'D
no subject
Date: 2024-10-14 12:13 pm (UTC)Hello neighbour, blackout poetry is something I'm not familiar at all so I'm very curious now.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/44806885 here's a fic I've written, you can any of the fics from me if you don't want this one. Thank you. I'm looking forward to this.
no subject
Date: 2024-11-01 10:02 pm (UTC)There are a lot of different ways blackout poetry can be done. I hadn't done much of it before now but I'm really learning!
Transcript:
Want her heart
Want her friendship
Afraid to lose her
Promised to be family
Wanted to be happy
no subject
Date: 2024-10-14 11:09 pm (UTC)I ate a pinecone once...
no subject
Date: 2024-10-29 11:37 pm (UTC)Happy early Halloween!
Here are a few puzzles paraphrased from What is the Name of This Book? by Raymond Smullyan. These are from the chapter on the Island of Knights and Knaves. Knights always tell the truth and knaves always lie (and every person on the island is one or the other).
1. Inhabitants of the island A, B, and C were hanging out. A stranger asked A, "Are you a knight or a knave?" A mumbled the answer and the stranger couldn't hear. The stranger asked B, "What did A say?" B responded, "A said that he is a knave." C interjected: "Don't believe B; he is lying!" Is B a knight or a knave? What about C?
Answer
B must be a knave, since neither a knight nor a knave can say that they are a knave. Therefore, C must be a knight.2. C's answer isn't needed to solve the above problem. Here's a version where C's answer is necessary. The stranger instead asks A, "How many knights are among you?" A mumbles the answer. The stranger asks B, "What did A say?" B replies, "A said that there is one knight among us." Then C says, "Don't believe B; he is lying!" What are B and C?
Answer
B is a knave and C is a knight.3. There are two inhabitants, A and B, who are each either a knight or a knave. A says, "At least one of us is a knave." What are A and B?
Answer
A is a knight and B is a knave.4. Suppose A says, "Either I am a knave or B is a knight." What are A and B? (The meaning of either/or this book uses is this: if the statement "either P or Q" is true, at least one of P or Q is true. [Both can be true.] On the other hand, if the statement "either P or Q" is false, both P and Q are false.)
Answer
If A is a knave, the sentence is false, meaning that A is not a knave and B is not a knight. That would mean that A is a knave and not a knave at the same time. So he must be a knight. His statement must be true and at least one of the phrases must be true. Since A isn't a knave, B must be a knight. They are both knights.5. Suppose A says, "Either I am a knave or else two plus two equals five." What would you conclude?
Answer
This is a trick question. Neither a knight nor a knave could say that sentence.6. There are three people, A, B, and C, who are each either a knight or knave. A says "All of us are knaves" while B says "Exactly one of us is a knight." What are A, B, and C?
Answer
A is a knave, B is a knight, and C is a knave.(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2024-10-15 10:23 am (UTC)Now here are some Halloween-related fun facts:
- The pumpkin capital of the US is Illinois.
- 4/10 people believe in ghosts according to a 2019 YouGov poll.
- The movie "The Conjuring" is based on real-life events.
- Halloween falls on a full moon every 19 years
The weirdest thing I've ever eaten... rabbit. I was told that it was chicken. I was not amused.
Thank you!!
no subject
Date: 2024-11-04 07:46 pm (UTC)Transcript:
A slow kiss
A little dance
Her hair
Hypnotized me
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2024-10-15 11:33 am (UTC)I spy 10 Things I Hate About You. Might there be a treat with any of the characters?
no subject
Date: 2024-11-04 09:35 pm (UTC)Kat loves Patrick's hair, and he loves hers. In the evenings, as she sits up against the headboard and reads her books, he'll lay beside her and play with her hair. He twists sections together and watches them untwist. He wraps pieces around his fingers or weaves them in between.
One night, she stops reading a section aloud and turns to look at him. The warm light from their bedside lamp illuminates his hair from behind, limning each strand with gold and giving him the look of a haloed angel. He's far from it, she thinks fondly, but he's beautiful.
He stops twisting a piece of hair around another and looks up at her. "'In these situations, women often find themselves acquiescing to the men—?'" he says encouragingly.
"Ah, so you were listening!" Kat says.
"Why wouldn't I be?" he teases.
Kat sets her book on her lap. "One might say it isn't your area of interest."
"No, but it's yours." He smiles up at her. "And you are my area of interest."
She swats his shoulder. "Flatterer." But she braces herself with one hand on the pillow behind her and leans down for a kiss, smiling into his lips. When she pulls back, she says, "I could teach you how to braid my hair."
"Not that I'm objecting, but—"
"You were playing with it. Before. You do that a lot."
He pushes himself up to sit next to her. "Should I stop?"
She puts a finger on his forehead and smoothes out the crease between his eyebrows. It always surprises her how quickly he can snap into and out of that serious mode, genuinely concerned about her in a way very few people ever are. "No. I just thought you might like to know."
He leans forward and kisses her forehead. "I'd love to."
So she divides her hair into sections and shows him how to do a simple braid. He's always had good hand-eye coordination, making lovely things in wood shop and metal shop, and he quickly catches on. She moves on to French braids, turning her back on him and tilting her head so he can practice. It isn't long, though, before he pulls her braid aside and kisses her neck, her shoulder, her upper back. She grins to herself and lets him enjoy it for a bit before turning around, straddling his lap, and diverting his attention elsewhere.
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2024-10-24 02:16 pm (UTC)could i have a black out poem using a page from chapter one of this fic im working on? https://archiveofourown.org/works/45957901/chapters/115677121
no subject
Date: 2024-11-04 07:03 pm (UTC)Did you enjoy the scorpion??
Transcript:
Profane souls
Sacrifice rites
Hidden grief
Find beauty
In worldly desires
no subject
Date: 2024-10-25 09:23 am (UTC)Weirdest thing I've ever eaten was probably a dog biscuit on a dare. IIRC it wasn't terrible.
no subject
Date: 2024-11-04 10:14 pm (UTC)I'm realising now that a lot of what I have read is YA, and I don't know if that's cool or not--if it is, I can add some more recs!
But here's some non-YA:
Beneath the World, a Sea by Chris Beckett: Mildly horror SF in which an asteroid hit the Earth hundreds of millions of years ago, creating an alien ecosystem very cut off from the rest of the world. A cop ventures there to try to enforce the UN ruling that duendes, creatures that instill terror and other psychological effects on nearby humans, are considered people and shouldn't be killed by the people living there...but he is way, way over his head.
Short Stories:
Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self by Isabel J. Kim: a world where people can split into "instances" of themselves, an original and a copy. The main character moved from Korea to the US as a kid and travels back to Korea for her grandfather's funeral, where she meets her instance for the first time.
The Court Magician by Sarah Pinsker: a street urchin accepts an offer to go to the palace and learn the secret of real magic, but it comes with a steep price. Dark fantasy
Husband Stitch by Carmen Maria Machado: a girl with a ribbon around her neck meets a boy, gets married, has a family: but her husband won't leave the fact of her ribbon alone and desperately wants to touch it. Kind of a horror about everyday misogyny.
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2024-10-30 06:00 pm (UTC)The weirdest thing I think I've eaten is alligator (tacos? maybe?) while in Florida.
no subject
Date: 2024-10-30 09:12 pm (UTC)Transcript:
I fancied him hideous,
disagreeable,
simple
But looking at him—
affectionate,
sublime,
content,
friendly—
between us
indifference thawed
We were friends
He was
magnanimous
to me
Queequeg and I
at peace
no subject
Date: 2024-10-31 05:29 am (UTC)Link at Project Gutenberg: https://gutenberg.org/files/345/345-h/345-h.htm
Thank you & Happy Halloween! :)
no subject
Date: 2024-11-01 10:56 pm (UTC)I gotta finish reading Dracula at some point...I was on the Daily Dracula train for a while there.
This is technically erasure poetry, but it's the same concept.
Transcript:
Sunset shrine
Devotion to the world
Birch leaves
Snake vertebra
Coloured twilight
Pine valleys
Snow in darkness
Wind through the hills
Walk here approving
Before sleep
(no subject)
From: