fuzzyred | Network

Title: Her Friend
Author:

badly_knitted
Characters: Tosh, Ianto.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 535
Spoilers: Nada.
Summary: Tosh hasn’t had a lot of friends in her life, but the one she has now makes up for that.
Written For:

raisedbymoogles’ prompt ‘any, any, friend-shaped,’ at

threesentenceficathon.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters.

( Her Friend... )

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: my desk

taichara

Or something. Certainly feel it. Third 10 hr shift slogging through 15-30cm of snow incoming and that's only part of the mess all around me and yet nothing has happened to me personally so the brainweasels are also having a field day.

At least I finally stopped being a useless twat and got all the Lindwyrm parts plus a few blogposts formatted up and a cover on and a copy (+ a few promised) getting printed at Lulu. I guess that kind of counts as something?

I should be going to bed for work tonight but I'm just a lump.

Blegh.

mellowtigger

I was heading out this morning and couldn't find my nice winter hat. I searched downstairs and upstairs multiple times, even checking the front porch, but I couldn't find it. I couldn't remember when I took it off after the last time I returned home, then... oh... that must mean... right! I checked behind my pillow in bed, and there it was. I was so exhausted yesterday that I laid down for a nap fully clothed, and my hat fell off while I was sleeping.

I should buy an extra one as an easy-to-find spare, if I'm ever in a rush to get out the door. I should also buy a neon pink extra-extra-large shirt too, something that I can wear over my winter gear for easy visibility. Just something that screams, "I'm not ICE, even though I'm a white guy in puffy gear." I saw people this morning with traditional yellow vests, but that's a little too generic for my tastes, I think. This moment seems to require just a little bit more.

Here's a local news story about an ICE event that happened 2-3 blocks from my house yesterday. The article is very short on any meaningful details, but at least it's a record that it happened.

There's more local dystopia than appears in the news. I don't mean the event above. I hope historians accurately capture all of it after the immediate dangers are past.

sixbeforelunch

Snowflake Challenge: A flatlay of a snowflake shaped shortbread cake, a mug with coffee, and a string of holiday lights on top of a rustic napkin.

Challenge 13: Talk about a community space you like.

My main fannish space right now is the Ad Astra Discord community. It's a good group of people, and great for talking all things Star Trek, with occasional digressions into other things. It's an OC-friendly community, almost everyone who posts there has a collection of OC characters and at least one OC-heavy series, and everyone is super supportive of other people blathering about their OCs and favs. Nicely inclusive of all of the Trek eras too.

Challenge 14: Create a promo and/or rec list for someone new to a fandom.

Can I interest you in Murder She Wrote? I don't know what I was expecting when I started watching it, but what I got is an intelligent, competent, woman-of-a-certain-age who is allowed to have a full and exciting life. And (with the exception of the pilot) she never gets romantically entangled. Men go after her, but she's clearly uninterested. The combination of being desired and deciding 'nah, I'm good' hits my id in just the right way. (It's not about turning the men down to be clear. There are actually two separate things going on. I love seeing an older woman being treating as an object of desire, and I love seeing any sort of woman being able to have a complete life absent romance. Either would be good. Both together is amazing.) Honestly, Jessica is pure wish-fulfillment fantasy with her cozy Maine home and her exciting trips and her best-selling writing career and her fancy outfits. I am here for it.

Oh, also there are murder mysteries and they're generally pretty good.

Challenge 15: How did the Snowflake Challenge go?

I sort of ran out of steam toward the end, but with everything that's going on both in my personal life and the world at large, it's hard to focus right now. I finished it, and interacted with people, and I had a good time. That's a win, especially right now.

Current Mood: drained

lb_lee

(Everyone else can just ignore this; this is specifically for the one who emailed me using the name Thor.)

Hey, sorry to be a bother, just responded to your email about a week ago and heard nothing back, and I’m just making sure my new email worked for you and things didn’t disappoint into the void! Let me know!

Crossposts: https://lb-lee.insanejournal.com/11312.html

maevedarcy posting in

fandomcalendar

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ozma914

If you've followed me long enough, you've probably heard of the Infamous Exploding Lawn Mower Incident.

But probably not--it happened a very long time ago, when my main social media was LiveJournal. Maybe I'll track it down and reprint it one day. It was quite the tale: mushroom clouds, HazMat response, involvement with both the ATF and the Federal Aviation Administration, a Time Magazine article entitled "Will Flying Lawn Mower Blades Cause Global Cooling?" To this day, it's believed an engine bolt is orbiting Earth.

Really, the only way I could top that would be to set fire to a snowblower.

It couldn't be as bad as the mower. First of all, the snowblower was electric, and didn't have much power to begin with. That might be what killed it: Overwork. this is the first time I ever tried to run it through three foot snow drifts, and I suspect it was designed more for Texans who use them once every five years for a two inch catastrophe.

Besides, it was four degrees, and still snowing. A shovel full from a foot away, and any small appliance fire is out. I've responded to grass fires where I just stepped out of the fire engine and stomped the flames out with my boot--it was like that. Embarrassing. A wafting wisp of smoke, to be poetic.

Which doesn't mean the incident won't get bigger and bigger, every time I describe it. By the turn of the decade it will involve a blizzard, the National Guard, and the Space Force zapping parts out of orbit.

What happened? Well, the snowblower acted a lot like my back: It complained mildly, then it screamed in agony, then it stopped working. I put ice on both of them.

I suspect it burned out a belt thingy, as happened last year with our vacuum cleaner. (The snowblower, not my back.) There was smoke then, too. In that case I replaced the broken belt, and it still wouldn't work right. Now we have a new vacuum cleaner that I'm afraid to use.

Will I try to fix the snowblower? Probably not. We got it on clearance, it's four years old, and every light in the house dimmed whenever I plugged it in. I probably should consider myself lucky for not being electrocuted the first time, let alone trying to replace a belt thingy. Besides, I'm only assuming there is a belt thingy.

Now I can only hope there's not another snowstorm this winter, and we all know how my hopes go. Since I'm retiring from dispatch, I figured out how many books we needed to sell to replace the blower, and it comes out to 347, depending on the book. I can do that in a year, but by then we'll probably have to replace the stove.

The good news is that the neighbors on either side of me have real snowblowers, the gas powered kind. They've always been nice to me, at least since the restraining order prevented me from singing outside.

I should consider myself fortunate the DHS didn't set up a tent in our yard again--it killed all the grass, last time.

Maybe that was for the best.

There's always the traditional method.

None of our books have ever been reported as catching fire:

· Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO

· Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

· Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4898846.Mark_R_Hunter

· Blog: https://markrhunter.blogspot.com/

· Website: http://www.markrhunter.com/

· Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ozma914/

· Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkRHunter914

· Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markrhunter/

· Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarkRHunter

· Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MarkRHunter

· Substack: https://substack.com/@markrhunter

· Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/ozma914

· Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ozma914

· Audible: https://www.audible.com/search?searchAuthor=Mark+R.+Hunter&ref_pageloadid=4C1TS2KZGoOjloaJ&pf

Remember: Most authors are so mechanically incompetent they need book sales to pay for home repairs.

Current Mood: cold
Current Location: in a snow bank
Current Music: Summer Dreams

sabotabby

There's not really a choice this week even though a ton of great podcasts came out. It's going to be the ICHH/Cool People crossover episodes, "Everyone vs. Ice: On the Ground in Minnesota" (Part 1, Part 2). Margaret and James go to Minnesota to cover the occupation and the resistance. It's recorded before the brutal filmed murder of Alex Pretti (but after the brutal filmed murder of Renee Good) so it's a little bit more upbeat than we're all probably feeling. But it's very much worth your time. They spend a lot of the episodes discussing the community organizing, both visible and invisible, and how previous movements and the nature of the communities there led to a leaderful uprising against some of the most overt repression we've seen in the heart of empire in decades. And the show notes are full of things you can do to help if you're not able to go there.

shipperslist

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kiaa posting in

talkpolitics

This list is far from claiming to be exhaustive, but it could be useful. You're also welcome to add stuff that hasn't been mentioned:

1. Research
- ChatGPT
- YouChat
- Abacus
- Perplexity
- Copilot
- Gemini
2. Image
- Fotor
- Stability AI
- Midjourney
- Microsoft Designer
( Etc, etc, etc... )

nnozomi posting in

senzenwomen

[Note that I can only find one (1) source for this lady at all, so the accuracy of this account may be in (even) more question than usual.]

Jodai Yoshi was born in Nagasaki in 1878; her original family name was Arashima, but she was adopted as a baby by the Jodai family, who ran a restaurant/bar. She grew up as an apprentice geisha, learning dance, shamisen, koto, flower arranging, and the tea ceremony. In 1903, when the family fortunes suffered, she went out to Manchuria to earn some money. The Russo-Japanese War began the following year; Yoshi followed the army north to Mukden [Shenyang] and then south to Changchun, doing well for herself. At thirty she opened her own restaurant/brothel in Harbin, the Musashino, which had its own bathhouse and was popular with vagabonds and adventurers.

As Russia made inroads into Manchuria, Yoshi was recruited by the Kantogun to serve as a spy. She used her network of women throughout Manchuria and Siberia, mostly karayuki-san (like the two O-Kikus) who knew the region and its inhabitants of all nationalities. Reports went to a brothel madam in Irkutsk. The Musashino, now employing a large number of these karayuki-san, became a private-sector spy factory of sorts, where women grew practiced at teasing classified information out of their customers in bed or over drinks. For some of them it was a chance to feel redeemed for past experiences considered shameful, whether being sold as a child, fleeing to the Continent to avoid rap sheets in Japan, surviving a love suicide, or much worse. Yoshi herself survived the Russo-Japanese War and the following upheavals, remaining in control of the Musashino to die a wealthy woman in 1927 at the age of forty-eight.

amaebi

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sovay

History, what do you mean that Folkways Records was founded by the son of Sholem Asch who, as one last trick after the scandals of Jewish lesbians and Christian novels, wrote a version of the Nativity recorded for his son's record label by Pete Seeger? What kind of concatenation is that to drop on an unsuspecting person? And is there a reason no artist is credited with the pen-and-ink illustrations depicting the story in 1963 even as the prose sticks to its historical setting, which are maddening me with their sketch-expressive familiarity, although perhaps only because my grandmother had that kind of loose, scribbly, ink-washed line? Ben Shahn at least had the decency to sign his album art. The Claibornes' "Listen, Mr. Bilbo" could have had the luck to lose its relevance since 1946. History, the other kind of convergence was more fun. Listen while I tell you that the foreigners you hate are the very same people made America great.

Current Music: The Shivas, "If You See Me"

apod_feed

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260129.html

NGC 2442: Galaxy in Volans

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260129.html

silveradept

Last call for this year's

snowflake_challenge, and, it's a bit like all the things asking us to rate and review them with our time.

Challenge #15

How Did the Fandom Snowflake Challenge Go?

I intend to keep going back and checking out entries when I'm not doing something else, and leaving comments, and trying to build that community and see interesting things that people have posted. It probably won't go that quickly, and I may not make it all the way through in a timely manner. But I'll try.

( It was fine, which is not a complaint. )

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Infinite Rivals - The 13th Struggle (Luxord)

dustbunny105

Challenge #15

How Did the Fandom Snowflake Challenge Go?

... Is it really the end of January? Huh. Alright then!

Anyhow, Snowflake went very well for me! Its structure gave me the jumping-off points I needed some days in order to find something to post about. I also felt very encouraged to fandom-post and more generally to share my thoughts on topics I normally wouldn't have felt I had anything interesting enough to say about. I've enjoyed answering all the prompts, even those I didn't vibe with as much. In a way, especially those I didn't vibe with as much, since they made me think outside my usual boxes. I even made notes for future posts based on some prompts, including the aforementioned, and how I could've answered them differently.

My main goal for the challenge was to answer all of the prompts-- which I did! Yay for me! I am, unfortunately, behind on my secondary goal of reading and responding to other participants' posts but I'll get around to that in the next couple of days. It was clashing with my "less screen time" and "fewer browser tabs" resolutions and so I needed to take a step back. I'm looking forward to getting caught up, though!

extraarcha

A THOUGHT

That community is already in the process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbor as a possible enemy, where nonconformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, is a mark of disaffection; where denunciation, without specification or backing, takes the place of evidence; where orthodoxy chokes freedom of dissent; where faith in the eventual supremacy of reason has become so timid that we dare not enter our convictions in the open lists, to win or lose.
~ Learned Hand, jurist (1872-1961)

shadowkat

Brrr...umph. It's cold. And getting colder. Today it was 8 degrees. Tomorrow it is supposed to be 10 below zero. NYC wasn't designed for anything below 20 degrees. It's a pedestrian city - we all walk places, wait outside for buses, and in some cases - on outside platforms for trains. But you can't wait outside for 20-30 minutes in temperatures below 20 degrees - you can get frost bite. Most you can safely do is 15 minutes tops. (People blow my mind - a lot of people are walking around in sneakers without socks.)

It was okay for a little bit (the cold temperatures - not the people wandering about sockless), but I'm tired of it now and want it to warm up already. (You know that it has been cold, when 18 degrees with no wind feels okay.) Also tired of navigating around snow, ice and slush. My area was a mixed bag when it came to shoveling. Some folks did it well, some tried and gave up, while others barely bothered at all. (Note Super's at apartment complex's are experts at shoveling. Everyone else sucks at it.)

Told Breaking Bad that my brother is off to Hawaii for the entire month of February, he leaves Sunday.

Breaking Bad: ask him - if he can take me with him? If there's enough space in one of his suitcases? I can curl up in it.
ME: Yeah, I'd like to go too. But alas, can't. (also Bro won't take me. He hates traveling with me. Can't think why...actually I don't like traveling with him either. So even if crazy workplace let me go - I couldn't. We'd kill each other in the space of four hours, maybe three - and that's a long flight.)
Breaking Bad: Hope he makes it out okay, god bless him.
Me: yeah me too...(well I do...for the most part...)

I also hope this weekend's winter storm skips over NY and Long Island and heads out to sea. We do not need more snow.

They are already wandering about with snow melting machines. (Basically hot tubs on the backs of trucks, which they use to melt the snow.) I'm blaming my incessant brain fog on the cold weather. I'm forgetting things and having troubles focusing. Also I keep dozing off at work. It's either the cold, anxiety (gee, wonder why?) or senility is settling in at the ripe old age of 58.

Oh, a bit of good news? The Senate rejected the Bill (that will fund ICE among other things) 55-45. It required 60 to pass. 8 Republicans voted with the Democrats specifically against the ICE measure. So if anyone called to stop it? Kudos. People keep calling for a General Strike - but I'm not sure they understand what that means? I mean if you shut down public transportation, hospitals, fire departments, doctors, nurses, EMT, sanitation, taxis, etc - what happens if someone needs an operation, a heart transplant, injures themselves, or has a heart attack? Also you have a lot of paycheck to paycheck folks? If they go on strike - there goes this month's rent. I endorse protests that do not injure innocent people unnecessarily or animals for that matter.

Although, I am vaguely amused by the statement: No one thought the Revolution would start in Minneapolis except for Prince. (Which is actually true - he even called his band "The Revolution" and kept writing songs about how the world ends.)

27. Up-Helly-Aa is a vibrant fire festival celebrated in the UK Shetland Islands tonight. Thousands gather to witness the breathtaking sight of a longship ablaze, illuminating the night sky. Do you have any similar local winter or summer celebrations?

The US is weird? We have so many blended cultures - that it depends on which state and community you live in? But yes, there are Winter Festivals.
I think NY's is the Chinese New Year - we have a huge celebration for it in Chinatown and various areas in NY.

28. Have you ever played a kazoo?

In case you don't know - This is a Kazoo

And not that I recall?

29. It's Tom Sellek's birthday - have you ever seen him in anything you've enjoyed?

Ponders. I guess a handful of Magnum PI episodes? He's not a favorite of mine. I'm kind of ambivalent. Also I was more into "Fame" which was opposite it at the time. Yeah, Sellek never did anything for me. He was kind of boring? A little bit like James Garner and Harrison Ford (or what would happen if they got together and had a kid), but both are much better and more charismatic actors than Sellek. Also Magnum PI couldn't hold a candle to the Rockford Files.

soc_puppet posting in

queerly_beloved

Got time for some more Thursday Recs?

Do you have a rec for this week? Just reply to this post with something queer or queer-adjacent (such as, soap made by a queer person that isn't necessarily queer themed) that you'd, well, recommend. Self-recs are welcome, as are recs for fandom-related content!

Or have you tried something that's been recced here? Do you have your own report to share about it? I'd love to hear about it!

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fuzzyred

February 2026

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Page Summary

badly_knitted - Ficlet: Her Friend
taichara - I'm not dead but I probably should be
mellowtigger - so tired
sixbeforelunch - snowflake days 13-15: community, fandom promo, and reflection on the challenge
lb_lee - Attn: Thor!
maevedarcy in fandomcalendar - [MULTIFANDOM] Three is Not a Crowd
ozma914 - So, I Set Fire to My Snowblower
sabotabby - podcast friday
andrewducker - Interesting Links for 30-01-2026
shipperslist - Little Mushroom by Yi Shi Si Zhou, book 2
kiaa in talkpolitics - Friday offtopic. 100 AI Tools to replace your tedious work
nnozomi in senzenwomen - Jodai Yoshi (1878-1927)
amaebi - Emailing my senators
sovay - All the ghosts, some old, some new
apod_feed - NGC 2442: Galaxy in Volans
silveradept - Snoflake Challenge 2026 #15: Five Stars
dustbunny105 - (no subject)
extraarcha - A THOUGHT FOR TODAY
shadowkat - More memage and whinging about the cold...
soc_puppet in queerly_beloved - Thursday Recs

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Fuzzyred's Marvelous Reading Nook

Come cuddle with me

Network

Ficlet: Her Friend

I'm not dead but I probably should be

so tired

snowflake days 13-15: community, fandom promo, and reflection on the challenge

Attn: Thor!

[MULTIFANDOM] Three is Not a Crowd

So, I Set Fire to My Snowblower

podcast friday

Interesting Links for 30-01-2026

Little Mushroom by Yi Shi Si Zhou, book 2

Friday offtopic. 100 AI Tools to replace your tedious work

Jodai Yoshi (1878-1927)

Emailing my senators

All the ghosts, some old, some new

NGC 2442: Galaxy in Volans

Snoflake Challenge 2026 #15: Five Stars

(no subject)

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY

More memage and whinging about the cold...

Thursday Recs

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February 2026

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