lokifan | Network

Also if anybody should be looking to buy holiday gifts for internet friends, I do have an Amazon wishlist here. If you want to send me a holiday card (or gift through not-Amazon) and you've had my address before or we chat regularly, DM me and I'll be happy to get you my current information!

disneydream06

Somebody is kissing orange ass.....

Trump wins his peace prize from Fifa – any chance of a VAR review?

At a gaudy and gauche World Cup draw, Gianni Infantino went all out to flatter the world’s most precious ego

David Smith in Washington

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/05/trump-peace-prize-fifa-world-cup

kingstoken posting in

fandomtrees

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adafrog posting in

fandom_checkin

This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time) on Friday to midnight on Saturday (8pm Eastern Time).

Poll #33924 Daily poll

Open to: Access List, detailed results viewable to: Access List, participants: 5

How are you doing?

I am okay
4 (80.0%)

I am not okay, but don't need help right now
1 (20.0%)

I could use some help.
0 (0.0%)

How many other humans are you living with?

I am living single
3 (60.0%)

One other person
1 (20.0%)

More than one other person
1 (20.0%)

Please, talk about how things are going for you in the comments, ask for advice or help if you need it, or just discuss whatever you feel like.

digthewriter posting in

adventdrabbles

Title: Tea Party
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing: Neville/Charlie
Rating: PG
WC: 500.
WARNING: Self-loathing. Fatphobia.

( Tea Party )

lightofdaye posting in

harry100

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lightofdaye

Title: To Bristle or not to Bristle?
Word Count: 3 x 100
Rating: PG-13
Characters & Pairing: Parvati Patil, Lavender Brown
Content: humour, mild sexual reference
Disclaimer: The characters, settings and HP Franchise as a whole are owned by JKR and not by me. I make no profit from writing this piece of fanfiction.
Summary: Harry's facial hair gives him hitherto unimagined opportunities.
A/n: Unbeta'd. Written for

harry100's Prompt #532: "Beard"

( To Bristle or not to Bristle? )

alisanne posting in

adventdrabbles

Prompt 6 comes from

maraudersaffair! *glee*

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04	16	21	08	02	24	10	14	06

	26	27	28	29	30	31	00

( Click here if you have trouble seeing the prompt )

Remember, we take prompts throughout the month of December, so feel free to stop by our 2025 prompt idea post.

torachan

Recently Finished
The Treehouse Library
The Last Bookwanderer
Last two books in the Pages & Co series. I really enjoyed these books!

What Kind of Paradise
This was good enough but extremely predictable. A girl has been raised alone with her conspiracy theorist/isolationist father in the woods and told her mother died when she was a child. Then one day her father takes her on a trip with him and she finds out everything she knew was a lie. ( spoilers but I don't think anyone would be surprised )

Murder at the Orpheus Theatre
Fourth in the Tate and Bell series. This time I remembered not to get the audiobook because I don't really like the narrator, and it was a much more pleasant experience. The library doesn't have anything but the audiobooks, which is why I kept getting those, but I recently signed up for Kindle Unlimited, and these are on there, so I can read them for "free" that way.

Death of a Hollow Man
Second in the Midsomer Murder series. The beginning of this was verrrrrrry slow and the murder did not happen until well after the halfway point. I prefer my mysteries to get started with things sooner, but I did enjoy it well enough in the end.

The Witches of Silverlake vol. 1
Graphic novel about a group of queer teens who play at being witches but then suddenly supernatural stuff starts happening for real. I liked this okay. It did end on a huge cliffhanger, so if another volume is released at some point I will probably check it out. I couldn't find any info about further volumes, though.

thedarlingone

Okay, tomorrow around 2pm US Eastern time I will be streaming the game "Jedi: Fallen Order" on my YouTube channel if anybody would like to come hang out in text chat? (The replay will also be available afterwards if you're interested but can't make it at that time.)

senmut

AO3 link | Her Turn (300 words) by Merfilly
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer [TV]
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Relationships: Willow Rosenberg & Buffy Summers
Characters: Willow Rosenberg, Buffy Summers, Dawn Summers [Buffy & Angel Universe]
Additional Tags: Triple Drabble, Post-Canon
Summary:

Willow left a letter...

Her Turn

This one, it's not for you. You get that, right? This time, it's about me. It has to be me. You can't… you can't keep reaching. I know you love me. I know you would want to step up, to take my place. You've always been the one making the sacrifice. That's who you are, the One. You changed the game to begin with, and then when that wasn't enough, you changed the whole playing field.

Okay, maybe I had something to do with changing the gameboard up. But I was only able to do it because of you, because you had so much faith in me. I need you to have that faith in me now. I need you to be the stronger one, the one who has to live, to keep facing the evil.

Hopefully it won't be as bad, not once I do this.

All my love.

Dawn wasn't used to seeing her sister frail, not even after all the losses they had faced. She'd guessed, though, that this one might be the breaking point, and hurried to get to Buffy's side. She saw the paper crumpled in a fist, but ignored it, just turning her sister to hold her.

At first, Buffy was stiff. The grief broke to Dawn's coaxing, a howl of pain and denial. Dawn just held on, petting her hair, tears streaming on her own face.

"Maybe… maybe it didn't end her?" Dawn suggested once the crying gave way to the heavy silence.

Buffy pushed the crumpled paper to her sister, letting Dawn read Willow's own words. It made Dawn swallow hard, as the pain and finality gripped her all over again.

She couldn't give into it, though. Buffy needed her. Buffy had lost Willow, and Dawn needed to step up even more.

kingstoken posting in

fandomtrees

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tielan

I'll get through Georgia by Christmas, I'm sure!

Leaving Sighnahi

Trying to remember how it all felt nearly two months later isn't easy. I'm going off the photos I took, the impression of memories. All a bit blurred by 'ordinary time'.

The bus trip from Signahi to the Mshketa region was a couple of hours long and we had one of those giant 'caterpillar' buses. Everyone had their own double seat and by the time we took the long trips it was fairly settled who was where. Some women wanted to be able to ride in the front and see where we were going, while others wanted this side or that side.

I had a woman from Alaska in front of me - there were three of them on the tour, and this one was probably the youngest of the three. She wasn't chatty, but we had a few great conversations about politics and society over the course of the next few days.

The (closed up and not used) toilet was behind me, and woman from California across from me, a woman from New York behind her, and another California woman in front of her - the photographer of the trip.

It was a pretty easygoing group of women, as I've said before. We were almost universally older, perhaps a little more jaded in our outlook than the women I met on the Naples tour, and more cosmopolite than the women of the Pride and Prejudice tour.

Out in the villages and towns, away from the cities, the country felt very different to the tourist spots. I don't know if this is typical in countries and areas where primary GDP is from tourism, or if it's just former USSR states.

We drove past spaces that felt very run-down, a lot of places and spaces were overgrown. Houses were abandoned, no glass in their windows. Gates and pergola frames were rusted and overgrown with...well, mostly grapevines, although occasionally there were other flowering vines. And the people working the spaces were all old. Almost all of them were forty and over. I didn't see any really young people until we got to the cities: Kutaisi, Tbilisi.

When we went to the markets, there was a lot of 'selling the same things'. Like, a dozen stalls are all selling the exact same thing, no difference. I feel like this happens less, even in the markets in Australia, like Melbourne's Queen Victoria Markets. Maybe in the tourist shops with the trinkets and whatnot - those are all the same, but I don't go into those. But I had the same feeling in Vietnam and in Naples and even a little in Porto. There's not enough differentiation of product, just everyone selling more or less the same thing. And, somewhat cynically, I suspect most of them come from China...

Mshketa and the history of Christianity in Georgia

In the morning, the bus took us towards Mshketa, which is in fact quite close to Tbilisi, where the tour had been on the weekend (while I recovered from COVID). The city is built at a kind of three-way intersection of various legs of the river, and overlooking it is the Jvari Monastery which was built in the 6th Century by the last vestiges of the Roman Empire.

In the 4th Century, the patron saint of Georgia, St Nino, brought Christianity to Georgia, converting the king at the time, and setting up Christianity as the main religion. Cue the churches, temples, and monasteries. Also, as later seen in the Uplistsikhe rock village, the conversion of old "pagan" temples into Christian worship spaces.

Anyway, the Jvari monastery dates back to the 6th Century and is magnificently still standing, all the stones firmly in place:

In comparison, the wall in the last photo - half-torn down, with only segments of it remaining - was built in the 17th Century. But why have the monastery and chapel survived a thousand years while the wall lies in ruins?

The 6th Century structures were built to Roman Standards. The worksmanship was precise and careful and everything was designed and put together just so. The wall? Was pretty much slapped together with some mortar and various stones. It's entirely possible to make really solid walls out of stones, it's just that the 17th Century builders (I think they were Templars, for some reason? Maybe? Don't quote me!) didn't bother with all that.

I would have liked to explore more inside the monastery, but I don't think there was much public access. It's not used as a monastery any more, obviously, but it still looked very solid. Anyway, we moved on after only about 30 minutes. It was a very brief stop, but interesting. I love histories and architectures, the movement of people across continents and lands... well, you know me!

On the way to Svetitskhoveli Cathedral, our guide talked a lot about St Nino, where she came from and what she did. I tried to pay attention, but got lost a few times because her accent was fairly thick.

Svetitskhoveli Cathedral

The Cathedral was really interesting, architecturally. The present version was built in the 11th Century, and the story I was told was that the architect got into trouble for not making the inside symmetrical. Outside, though, it's very imposing and the sky was suitably dramatic for it!

The church's significance is primarily attributable to the legend of the buried mantle of Christ, brought to the region in the 1st Century by a Georgian Jew. It's also allegedly a site of great miracles, and is a major pilgrimage site for the Georgian Orthodox Church. There were a lot of priests and members of religious orders there, as well as a number of pilgrims. They were decidedly distinct from the tourists.

Some beautiful stonework there, and beautiful historical murals.

One of the notable things about the church is that when the Soviets came in, they tried to eliminate all religion. So they plastered and whitewashed over a lot of the murals, which dated back hundreds of years and had some beautiful iconography and design. Unfortunately, it's not as simple as just peeling the plaster off; they've been able to get some of it off, but they had to stop because they were damaging what was underneath.

There was a small market through which we had to pass on our way up to the Cathedral from the carpark. A restaurant had a fig tree in full fruit and while I was tempted to pick and eat, I thought it might not be polite, so I passed. But I did buy a pair of very beautiful cloisonne earrings at the markets there!

Lunch, wineries, winemaking

Lunch (somewhat late) was at Ateni Vineyards. The property had been in the family for generations, and Nino had pictures of her grandfather and grandmother down in the cellar under the house, where wine had been produced for generations. Unfortunately, her paternal line were perpetrators of domestic violence, and she herself had escaped a domestic violence situation before deciding to return to the family property and renovate it from the ruin it had been.

The women she employed to assist in making the lunch are displaced women from Ossetia. My notes only have 'Ossetia' but some research shows that that Ossetia is considered an ethnolinguistic region (common ancestry and culture, and common language, I believe) and there's 'North Ossetia' and 'South Ossetia' which are more or less divided up by the Caucasus mountains. North Ossetia is under Russian control, or counted part of Russia, while South Ossetia lies within the current borders of Georgia. And takes quite a bite out of the middle of it.

For whatever reason or another, however, these women were 'internally displaced people', and they were working for Nino and assisting in cooking the feast that we ate:
- purslane and ajika brusquets
- cheese and georgian endemic wheat bread
- cucumber tomato salad with walnuts
- cornelian cherry soup
- black-eyed peas
- spinach and beet leaves pie
- squash
- cherry tarts

The cherry tarts were absolutely amazing. But, again, so much food and we simply couldn't do it justice!

We were each given a candle like the one below, and I ended up gifting this to

alphaflyer's daughter in Canada, because I'm seriously not a candle person at all.

Nino's philosophy was very 'new agey' to me, not my style. She tended to rhapsodise about 'feminine power' and the uniqueness of women, which...yes, I am for women being people and respected, but not so much for gender essentialism.

The slightly blurry photo is of the winemaking cellar in the house - the sort of thing that every household once had: a buried qvervy (Georgian wine-making vessel) into which the juice from the grape pressings would go. Apparently she'd made a very traditional-style vintage a few years back, including the foot pressing - although we weren't served it! Also, those things are hellish to clean to modern standards...

Some of the women like the wine and the winemaker so much, they bought boxes of wine and got them shipped back to their homes in the USA!

It was a really long afternoon in the end, and by the time we left, we were more than ready to head to our stay at a retreat up in the mountains...with a 10 minute walk to get there!

lycomingst

As you know, Bob, I bought some solar Christmas decorations (they look like colored light bulbs on silver sticks) to put outside. I put them in the backgarden to watch if they worked. Nothing happened and I thought, well, Dollar Tree. What I didn't realize until later, much later, was that there was a small cardboard tab that had to be pulled to activate the solar. When I made that discovery I thought, yes, that makes sense. They have to be activated..

I've put them out front and they're as cute as a bug in a rug. Only it's mostly rain and clouds here so they don't gather much solar and don't last late into the night. But I'm decorated for Christmas. And a couple don't work because I've broken them somehow.

moon_custafer

Dreamt Jeff Bridges was the paterfamilias of a clan of actors/stunt/FX crew, who all had kind of a Western vibe even though hardly anyone makes Westerns anymore. Following a wild chase scene, I had to trackhi. down in a bar and talk him into coming back to help shoot the climactic scene of their latest gig, but he didn’t know me and had no reason to trust me.

After listening to my speech about how he should do it for the sake of his daughter (Fay Masterson), he went to the men’s room while he thought about it. Some bystander started bad-mouthing him, and I told the guy off with the line: “Fuck you. WE’RE working for Tarantino!” while glancing around to see if Tarantino was in the scene, pulling a director’s cameo.

Except in the dream I couldn’t quite remember his name, so I said Victor Tarantino.

Now considering the possibility this was a movie about a movie being directed by Quentin Tarantino’s fictional less-successful brother Victor (played by Quentin, natch).

celli

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nnozomi posting in

guardian_learning

部首
广 part 2
庇, to protect/to cover; 床, bed; 序, order/sequence ( pinyin )
https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?cdqrad=53

语法
Uses of 多
https://www.digmandarin.com/hsk-2-grammar

词汇
本科, undergraduate (course) (pinyin in tags)
https://mandarinbean.com/new-hsk-4-word-list/

Guardian:
那你好好在床上躺着, lie down on the bed
只要你多看多听多学，你自然就懂得多了, you just need to watch, listen and learn a lot to understand more naturally
[no 本科]

Me:
你的程序有问题啊，来除错一下。
本科的时候你不会学习这种内容。

falena

So, today was my day off and I watched the first three episodes of the Heated Rivalry tv series just because I've seen some gifs around Tumblr. I read the whole Game Changers series years ago, I'm a big m/m romance reader, unsurprisingly, and I enjoy a good sports romance tremendously. I am Italian, I know nothing about hockey and this has not prevented from enjoying the hell out of a fair bit of m/m hockey romance and fanfic.

Wild Ice by makeit_takeit. 46K words. Men's Hockey RPF, Travis Konecny/Nolan Patrick. As with all hockey RPF, I have no idea what these two guys look like or even what team they played for, but it's all irrelevant. This is an AU where one of the two is himself, I guess, retired after hockey, while the other is not a hockey player. This is just such a gorgeous love story, with, complex layered characterisation and the natural beauty of Canadian winter landscape as its backdrop. It's a sort of grump/sunshine pairing, I guess. The tags give you a good idea of what to expect.
Front Runner by makeit_takeit. 60K words. Men's Hockey RPF, Jamie Benn/Tyler Seguin. This is another AU, a high school one, where the characters play football in Texas. Picture Friday Night lights only gayer? :D This is another great story. Again, I know nothing about American football, but I'm a sucker for coming-of-age story mixed in with romance. And this has such a strong sense of place, which makes it all the better. Not that I know the first thing about Texas high school football culture, but I am a big fan of Friday Night Lights, trust me when I say I didn't throw the comparison lightly.
and i spit out the seed by linearity. Heated Rivalry AU, of the canon divergence kind. Basically Ilya and Shane get outed much earlier than in canon. Amazing characterisation and dialogue.

The Pitt

Since we're talking sports romance, I cannot help but reccing the best sports AU in this fandom: Love Game by homespun. Mel/Frank, ofc, still a WIP but it's going to be complete soon, in, like, a 4 days? And I can already tell this is going to be an all-time favourite. Ah, it's a tennis pro AU. And it's P-E-R-F-E-C-T.

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lokifan

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Daily Check In.

Dec 06: Tea Party (Fandom: Harry Potter)

To Bristle or not to Bristle?

Drabble Series: To Bristle or not to Bristle? (Lavender, Parvati, Harry, Hermione)

Prompt 6, 2025

Weekly Reading

(no subject)

LadiesBingo: Sacrifice / Letting Go

zooey_g's Tree

Georgia Day 3: Jvari Monastery and St Nino

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Dream Journal

freedom! and parentheses, lol

第四年第三百三十一天

Rec-cember Day 5: Hockey romance

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