absolutedestiny

Happy More Joy Day 2026!

Image is of the orange shrimp Muppet, Pepe the Prawn, in a tutu performing a classic looking ballerina move. Kermit, Miss Piggy, and Fozzie Bear are watching him. Text says "More Joy Day! (Why a prawn in a tutu for the mascot? Why not?) Wake Up Joy Man!"

Welcome to the 19th More Joy Day!

The goal for today is to seek out and give a little joy to others, in the hopes that it will expand outward into the world. As the TWOP recapper Jacob said:

...you continue to stand, and you continue to remember that you’re not alone, and with reverence for this fact, you can’t help but add to joy. Which is your entire job, from the day you’re born until the day you die: more joy.

This is our job more than ever. We can build a better world than this, and it starts with small acts of community and caring for each other.

Please post your little bits of joy, whether performed online or in physical space, on Tumblr (tagged with some version of More Joy Day), in the comments of this post, and/or on Bluesky or wherever you are, so that we can all enjoy them. :) I'll try to reblog when I see them pop up in the tags here!

Need more info or ideas? Read all about it here! The ultimate goal is to do just one joy-filled thing for someone(s) today; either something small, like paying someone an unexpected compliment or leaving a short comment on a fanwork; or something big, like writing a fic or making a vid or buying groceries for someone. The smallest amount of joy helps, and is a kindness that wasn't there when you started. Online OR offline counts! Whatever you can manage is wonderful - there is no joy-shaming on More Joy Day! Happy More Joy Day to you all!

Current Mood: optimistic
Current Music: Peaceful working music

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the_shoshanna

kass recently reminded me of this post I made fourteen years ago(!) titled “sex, and slash sex scenes,” in which I discussed how

slash was the only genre of literature I had ever found [at the time I found it, circa 1989] that followed the characters into bed and back out of it; that investigated and demonstrated how the people they were outside of bed were connected to the people they were in bed; that modeled how to be with someone in everyday life, go to bed with them, and then wake up next to them and continue everyday life with them. In slash, "everyday life" wasn't differentiated from "sex life." Who people were outside of bed and during the day critically, obviously, demonstrably influenced how they behaved in bed with each other, and vice versa; but the characters never lost themselves or turned into different (wimpy wispy sappy) people because they had fucked. (Okay, sometimes they did, but those were the bad stories, the ones we mocked.) The two parts of life weren't disjunct; indeed, they were crucially connected, mutually influential, even indivisible. In fact, that indivisibility was often the whole point.

Kass wondered how this might relate to Heated Rivalry, which I continue to be moderately obsessed with. I’m really grateful to her for pulling this up (hi,

kass! Thanks!),

because I think it relates a lot.

HR has gotten a lot of press for being horny, for being extremely sexually explicit. (And hot. Which there's nothing wrong with. Fiction is often created with a goal of making the reader happy, or sad, or angry, or tense, along the way as part of the experience; "hot" is also a legit way for fiction to try to make the reader feel. Not that I think the people reading this need to be convinced of that!) But the sex is not "gratuitous" (i.e., existing only to make the reader hot); it is absolutely integral to the story being told. The way Shane and Ilya relate to each other through sex is what their relationship is built on. The long, detailed, explicit sex scenes are the places where they (and we) discover how they relate to each other: where Shane learns that Ilya may be an asshole but he is also scrupulously concerned with Shane's sexual consent, where Ilya is charmed by Shane's dorkishly careful folding of his clothes (the moment when, according to Rachel Reid, Ilya fell in love), where they learn to trust each other, to work together; and also where they are most vulnerable to each other and have to deal with that. (Or fail to deal with it. Cf. tuna melts, oh my heart.)

The sex scenes' importance as character development is illustrated in the negative by episode 3, the Kip and Scott episode. We get very little, comparatively speaking, of Kip and Scott in bed, because we don't need it. Kip and Scott have their own issues and concerns, but they're not sexual ones. We see them in bed so that we can see Scott say how into Kip he is, and his own moment of asking for explicit consent; and so that we can see a moment of them laughing together in bed, having fun, which I don't think we see Ilya and Shane doing until episode 6 ("Sir, I'm just the bellboy!"). Other than that we don't need to see the actual sex; the important sexual aspects of their relationship are conveyed by things like Scott flinging himself onto Kip on the couch (can I just say, those eyeglasses give me "sexy Daniel Jackson" vibes!) and by the "Can I fuck you?" "Absolutely" exchanges. The sex scenes in HR overall aren't "gratuitous," as demonstrated by the fact that, when they're not serving plot and character development, they're not there.

And it's illustrated even more in episode 5, which has no sex scenes at all, although Shane and Ilya have sex twice in it. The friend I did the Boxing Day marathon with commented, "We don't need to see the sex, now that they've learned to use their words," and I was like, "Yes! Words like 'Shane' and 'Ilya.'" And of course the sex in episode 6 is warm and playful and emotionally intimate in ways that they've never had before, and it's important for us to see that.

(Check out this paired gifset paralleling the ep 1 and ep 6 blowjobs: almost exactly the same moves, but one in a dark secret hotel room and one in the sunshine they both deserve. My heart.)

Basically, HR is the absolute quintessential of what I said in that 2011 post I was so glad to find in slash.

There are a lot of other reasons I love HR. I want to have the brain to post about its sound design at some point! But it is a god damn master class in telling a story involving, and through, sex.

(I lost some time trolling icon communities -- remember those? -- looking for a good HR icon, but none of the ones I found really worked for me. So I went with this one, because when the credits rolled on ep 6 as I finished my watchthrough with

dorinda, I punched the air and exulted, "My tax dollars at work!")

kass

Dear Purimgifts Author,

Thank you so much for writing me a story! I love all of these things and I know that whatever you write for me, I will love it too.

In general I am a big fan of: chosen family, happy endings, competence, characters being awesome, theology, snark and banter, kindness. I'm happy with anything that feels right to you given the characters at hand. If you want to cross a given fandom over with Megillat Esther, or with Tanakh in general, that is always my jam. (But you don't have to if you don't want to.)

Write something that makes you happy, and it will make me happy.

Please, no betrayal or unquenchable angst or people being awful to each other or grisly death or anything like that. There's enough of that in RL. Thank you kindly.

In closing: yay Purim! Yay you! Thank you so much!

Kass

( My requests: Lady Astronaut of Mars by Mary Robinette Kowal, Parks and Rec, The Naturalist Society by Carrie Vaughn, Murderbot, The Diplomat, Stardew Valley )

kass

I had the pleasure of rereading Naomi Kritzer's Catnet books and delving into them this Yuletide! I wrote:

Calm on Catnet (1548 words) by Kass
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: CatNet Series - Naomi Kritzer
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Rachel Adams/Steph (CatNet)
Characters: Rachel Adams (CatNet), Steph - Character, AI | CheshireCat (CatNet)
Summary:

Glimpses of what came next. (Set between Catfishing and Chaos.)

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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 ❤️

kuwdora

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Current Mood: awake

shati

2025 retrospective: I think there's a strong argument to be made that this has been the worst year of my life, but it's not going to keep the title, so actually making it seems too much like giving too much of an invitation to that Simpsons meme. (This one. Like I'm already in the that Simpsons meme zone but I don't have to set the table for it.) So I'm going to ignore the year and just try to finish random book posts before it actually ends.

I read these ones over the last year, several of them literally last winter, so this post is a mix of sentences I barely remember typing and sentences I typed while barely remembering the books. I should probably also mention that I have no actual knowledge of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

King Leopold's Ghost, Adam Hochschild

A library book sale had this a while back, and I'd been meaning to read it for a while. It's a sort of meandering narrative approach to the PR rise and PR fall of Leopold's atrocities in the Congo: the book follows the figures warring over public opinion around the Congo more than the rubber terror itself, which is bad enough seen around the edges. ( the rest under a cut )

( The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination )

( No Enchanted Palace: the End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations )

( Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: the Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa )

( Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives )

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absolutedestiny

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Pinch Hit #5

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sex, and slash sex scenes, and Heated Rivalry

Dear Purimgifts Author

Yuletide reveal

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Привет! LiveJournal imports may be slow

January Posting Meme 2026

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0 days since i added Yet Another Song to my project.

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February 2019

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