brit_actors | Member Posts

Medium: film
Title: Osgiliath
Fandom: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Characters: Faramir, Denethor
Prompt: 26 - "sharing bad news"
Notes: 2 gifs for week 10 of "26.02 - Prompt Tables" at Fandom Empire. This is for the neighbor prompt.

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Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Location: hueco mundo
Current Music: skins - asian kung-fu generation

lycomingst

I went to the every six-month eye exam. Same, same. I took the push a button when you see the light test. My lower left quadrant is a pos. If you want to attack me, come in low and on the left. I'll never see it coming.

Then they give you a six month later appointment and you think, that's so looong away and suddenly, it's tomorrow.

I picked tomatoes off one of the plants. Sweet.

aliensamba

Medium: film
Title: Let Me Rule You
Fandom: Labyrinth
Character: Jareth
Prompt: 32 - "Is this too much to ask for?"
Notes: 2 gifs for week 10 of "26.02 - Prompt Tables" at Fandom Empire. This is for the main work.

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Current Mood: sore
Current Location: hueco mundo
Current Music: shrike - hozier

aliensamba

‎Medium: film
‎Title: There Can Be Only One
‎Fandom: Highlander (1986)
‎Character: Connor MacLeod
‎Prompt: 10 - "power"
‎Notes: 1 tumblr graphic for week 09 of 26.02 - "Prompt Tables" at Fandom Empire. This is for the neighbor prompt.
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‎( Read more... )

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: hueco mundo
Current Music: who wants to live forever - queen

lannamichaels

A disaster + first contact book that is much more interested in the first contact than in anything else, featuring an Unqualified White Male Protagonist who is clear to tell us he's white as early on in the book as possible, who is unfortunately positioned as an Everyman Savior Against His Will. Also features a sentient rock alien and space bacteria that will eat the sun down 10% of its light before going on to other targets, but alas, losing 10% of the sun will be Very Bad. On the upside, the space bacteria will solve all energy scarcity problems forever. A novel.

( Bulletpoints )

lannamichaels

The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association by Caitlin Rozakis (2025): DNF. I've come to the conclusion that "X-type-of-book BUT IT'S SCI-FI/FANTASY" is that I have to like the X type of book to actually enjoy the riff on it. In this situation, it's "mom deals with PTA and discrimination against her family BUT IT'S MAGIC PRESCHOOL for her turned-against-their-will-in-traumatic-circumstances werewolf daughter". I got like 80 pages into it and flipped to the end to discover that, yes, the only parent who was being friendly to her was, per the trope, the one who was going to betray her and turn on her, and that, also per the trope, The Big Evil Was High-Stakes Testing All Along. I agree that high-stakes testing is bad! I am not, it turns out, interested in reading a book about how parents hurt other people to subvert the high-stakes testing process so that their kid can get into the school they want to! Even though it's magic! The worldbuilding is not enough to overcome the fact that I don't enjoy reading the underlying plot.

But if that is your thing, this is the book for you.

But on the topic of High-Stakes Testing Is The Enemy: high-stakes testing, like homework and mandatory volunteering, was something I was against when I was the student involved and figured it was just because, hey, I was the student, and now that I am on the other side of it, I loathe it all the more (if the school wants the kids to do 180 hours of mandatory volunteering per year, they can get off their asses and do it during school time. Oh, that's a waste of school time and parents would complain? How interesting.). However. My objection to high-stakes testing is the high-stakes high-pressure environment.

The objection of the villain in this book is not to the high-stakes. That objection is to the purpose of high-stakes testing, which is to attempt to equalize the playing field. The villain's kid isn't good enough academically to get into the desired upper school. In this case, high-stakes testing is the enemy because then admission isn't (in theory) based on who you know and being the right sort of person. (And the book is aware of this! There are consultants who can help get your kid into the school!)

But there is also a question, one that I mentally refer to essentially as The Harvard Question (but it's not specifically Harvard, you could swap in Yale or Oxbridge), which is: is the school prestigious because rich people go there, or do rich people go there because it's prestigious. That is, I feel it's generally understood that, for some schools, the quality of education truly does not matter when it comes to that school's place in the culture; the school is prestigious because of the students who go there (and the reputation it holds from students who have gone there in the past). The purpose is social environment and being around The Right Sort and Making Connections; education is secondary (and, often, education is only important to scholarship students -- these days, especially in prestigious schools at the middle/high school level, my impression has been that the scholarship students are the only ones actually keeping those schools high-ranked in terms of test scores, because they are the only ones who care about test scores and they are the only ones whose place in the school depends on the test scores; the school depends on the scholarship students to maintain the academic prestige level, while not in any way shape or form trying to kick out the students who drag down the test score average so long as they have the right parents. The school is prestigious because of the rich people.)

And so if the rich students all go somewhere else, does that new school become prestigious? Or does it, instead, reflect poorly on the rich students. Would Oxbridge lose some of its prestige if it stopped churning out prime ministers?

Which comes back around to: is the prestigious upper school that the villain's kid can't get into, what makes that school the one everyone wants to get into? Is it because of the rich/well-connected students? Or does it provide a quality education? (Or both.)

But if this is a case where the only way to get into Magical Oxbridge is to go to Magical Eton and the only way to get into Magical Eton is either high-stakes testing, or cheating/fraud, and you are only going to get certain highly-desired jobs if you did go to Magical Oxbridge (or Harvard Law), then the problem is entirely in the system, and switching from legacy-based admissions to high-stakes testing admission for middle/high school does not do a damn thing to help. Because it's just moving the goalpost of when the vital admission occurs, and moving that goalpost younger and younger and younger, and putting the onus on the students to be good enough at taking tests. (Also academic sandbagging can come into play here, but that's irrelevant to this book as far as I read it.)

But of course that's a situation that testing is meant to equalize, so you don't have to make sure your kid gets into the correct middle school to have any hope of that child ever clerking for the Supreme Court.

A lot of these kinds of books that I've read also -- I was gonna say "give short shrift" but often they give zero shrift at all -- for the kids who don't get to go to the Best School. What happens to the rest? What does actually happen if they have to go to the safety school, the third-best school, the worst school. So much is made of making sure the best and the brightest can go to the prestige schools, and little attention is on everyone else. The ones designated not good enough to get a good education, as education standards are presented.

At least in this book, it's made clear the high-stakes nature of the testing for the protag and her daughter: if the daughter fails out at the kindergarten level and isn't admitted to first grade, the alternative is bad. Because discrimination and the inherent decisions made in the worldbuilding in order to give it stakes to the protagonist. (Even though I'm not sure high-stakes testing at this level actually makes any sense here, but, go with it, price of admission and I also did not read a lot of this book.)

(because, okay, the issue is scarcity issues: there are more Deserving Kids than there are spots in the school -- I was once told a statistic with no citation whatsoever, that there are more high school valedictorians with a perfect GPA and perfect SAT scores than there are spots in the freshman class at Harvard, and quite frankly I do actually believe that, without any data whatsoever -- however, there doesn't seem to be other feeder preschools in this fictional situation, so are they artificially having a larger preschool class than they have spots in first grade, thus creating the pressure? What limits their ability to expand their first grade class so they can guarantee a place in first grade for every one of their kindergarteners? Does their exclusive reputation require that they have many more applicants than spots, thus making them seem Exclusive And Prestigious And Good, rather than just a safety school which isn't exclusive or cool or prestigious because it lets in Those Sort Of People, You Know, The Poors.)

Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford (2024): In other news, a noir murder mystery set in alternate history United States. DNF. But hey if I were more into noir murder mysteries...

But among the things that really threw me out of it from the beginning is that the noir detective is a cop. I haven't read as widely as many others in this kind of genre (especially since -- look it may sound like I'm allergic to murder mysteries but really I'm just a little too full of them, in the metaphoric sense, and would prefer some mysteries that aren't murder) but it really threw me that the protagonist was a cop.

This is also one of the kinds of books where I flipped to the end and read the end and was like "well, guess there was clearly a lot of plot going on" and then was like "ah so the author does not want to do a sequel".

aliensamba

Medium: film
Title: You Must
Fandom: Warcraft (2016)
Characters: King Llane Wrynn, Garona Halforcen
Prompt: 01 - "the choice you have to make"
Warnings: Spoiler Warning (but it's 10 years ago).
Notes: 2 gifs for week 09 of "26.02 - Prompt Tables" at Fandom Empire. This is for the neighbor prompt.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: hueco mundo
Current Music: yoake no uta - jo0ji

lycomingst

The electrician has come and gone. AND he has revealed to me the magic switch and how to unlock its secret.

aliensamba

‎Medium: otome game
‎Additional: Team Alpha
‎Title: Just A Game
‎Fandom: Love and Deepspace
‎Character: Valko
‎Prompt: table 02 - 16 - "game"
‎Notes: 2 gifs for week 09 of 26.02 - "Prompt Tables" at Fandom Empire. This is for the team challenge (alpha).
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‎( Read more... )
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Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Location: hueco mundo
Current Music: breathe - faspitch

lycomingst

I spilled coffee on my bedroom extension cord that has everything plugged in and it knocked out half the house's power. It only causes some inconvenience (like, moving the frig to the other side of the room), but now I have to call the electrician the third time for the same outage. I haven't done that yet because I'm so mad at myself. Just mad.

I finished my Deadwood dvds and I've ordered the movie. I haven't seen it before and now I must. Next up is Burn Notice. That gets a little repetitive but I like the cast. It's out of alphabetical sequence because the casing is so awkward and it wouldn't fit on the shelf correctly before I thinned some of the dvds.

I'm watching Inspector Ellis on Acorn and they tell me there's a new series of Chelsea Detective coming soon, so I guess I'll be signed up until September.

aliensamba

‎Medium: film
‎Fandom: The Last Witch Hunter; The Green Knight
‎Characters: Witch Queen, Kaulder; Sir Gawain, The Green Knight
‎Notes: 2 gifs and 1 tumblr graphic for 02.13 - "earth day" at Seasons of Fandom.
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Challenge Details:
‎You may make any kind of work, featuring any kind of medium or image/prompt, as long as it is earthy, green, features growth or rebirth, or anything that you can justify as having to do with Earth Day.
‎

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‎( Read more... )

Current Mood: sore
Current Location: hueco mundo
Current Music: departure! - galneryus

aliensamba

Medium: film
Title: Dear Diary
Fandom: Bridget Jones's Diary
Character: Bridget Jones
Prompt: free choice - 9 - "dear diary"
Notes: 2 gifs for week 09 of "26.02 - Prompt Tables" at Fandom Empire. This is for the main work.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: hueco mundo
Current Music: yoake no uta - jo0ji

lycomingst

Under the guidance of gilda_elise, I got a VPN and can now get into LJ. I don't know how that works.

What I thought was a cherry tree turns out to be a plum tree. (I thought they were tasteless cherries!) Horticulturally challenged.

I baked cookies.

I lol'd for a minute after seeing this. Chuckle when I think of it.

Watch on YouTube

aliensamba

Medium: otome game
Title: Consider This Tenderness
Fandom: Love and Deepspace
Character: Sylus
Prompt: 41 - firework
Notes: 1 gif for week 08 of "26.02 - Prompt Tables" at Fandom Empire. This is for the neighbor prompt.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: sore
Current Location: hueco mundo
Current Music: skins - asian kung-fu generation

aliensamba

Medium: anime
Additional: Team Alpha
Title: Perseverance
Fandom: I Parry Everything
Character: Noor
Prompt: table 02 - 38 - "Prove them wrong!"
Notes: 2 gifs for week 08 of "26.02 - Prompt Tables" at Fandom Empire. This is for the team challenge (alpha).

( Read more... )

Current Mood: impressed
Current Location: hueco mundo
Current Music: no gifted - utahime dream all stars

kaffy_r

An Inland Sea Greets What Comes from the Great Plains

I just witnessed a thunderstorm that's possibly the biggest one I've watched and listened to in years, possibly decades. It was short, but it hung above our building for an endless number of minutes, and the sky was a constant puzzle of light and lightning branches reaching from the sky to the ground and the ground to the sky.

It was loud and the rain was coming in sheets, and at least twice the thunder was so loud that even I - who adores thunderstorms, and who was standing in our back door to watch it - momentarily jumped back from the doorsill. Not for long, though.

It only lasted about seven minutes (my best guess), before moving out to the lake itself. This is one of the great things about living next to an inland sea - the thunderstorms rolling in off the plains.

This day has had a perfect ending.

Current Mood: happy
Current Location: the home office
Current Music: BTS "Into the Sun"

aliensamba

Medium: anime, otome game
Fandoms: Bleach; Love and Deepspace
Characters: Kyoraku Shunsui; Caleb, Zayne
Notes: 3 collages for 02.12 - "bound and determined, spring style" at Seasons of Fandom.

Challenge Details:
For this challenge, you'll be making a collage or URSTYLE-type graphic of an outfit that would represent a character from any fandom in the "bounding" style, for Spring!

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-aliensamba of autumn

Current Mood: artistic
Current Location: hueco mundo
Current Music: golden years - davie bowie

Profile

The League of Obscure British Actors

April 2017

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The League of Obscure British Actors

Member Posts

074 - 2 gifs; 26.02 - the return of the king

(no subject)

073 - 2 gifs; 26.02 - labyrinth

072 - 1 tumblr graphic; 26.02 - highlander

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (2021)

Two DNFs

071 - 2 gifs; 26.02 - warcraft

(no subject)

070 - 2 gifs; 26.02 - love and deepspace

(no subject)

069 - various graphics; 02.13 - the last witch hunter, the green knight

068 - 2 gifs; 26.02 - bridget jones's diary

(no subject)

067 - 1 gif; 26.02 - love and deepspace

066 - 2 gifs; 26.02 - i parry everything

Dept. of Wonder

065 - 3 collages; 02.12 - bleach, love and deepspace

Profile

April 2017

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