Behind the thick red curtains

Does anyone want to run a May fest?  No one has signed up yet.  I'm doing April, so I'd rather not pinch-hit May.

You can pick any theme you want.  What is a current fandom you're loving?  Or a social cause?  There are also dozens of prompt lists on the Bingo Card Generator, if you want to pick one (or mix and match several) from there. 

Title: Joke's on You
Fandom: Criminal Minds
Characters: Emily Prentiss
Rating: G
Length: 58 words
Summary: 3 sentence fic. Emily's dream job may be just a dream.

( Read more... )

Title: A Spring Morning in the Garden
Fandoms: Sherlock Holmes (ACD) - Retirement era
Ratings: G
Pairings: Sherlock Holmes, John Watson
Prompts from the Dancing with Daffodils section: Landscape, Replete, Hunter Morn, Fulfilment

A Spring Morning in the Garden on AO3

Title: The Obstacle in the Case
Fandom: Miss Marple
Rating: G
Length: 375 words
Summary: Miss Marple removes an obstacle to the case - by providing a second

Title: First Hurdle
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: No Warnings Apply
Fandom: Heated Rivalry
Relationships: Ilya Rozanov/Shane Hollander
Tags: Established Relationship, Sick Shane, Shane's Parents Find Out Early
Summary: Ilya had to take the first hurdle alone.
Word Count: 3,895

( First Hurdle )

Title: Robo-Man
Fandom: Marvel's Midnight Suns
Rating: G
Content notes: None apply
Summary: icons of Marvel's Midnight Suns Tony Stark. made these for a friend who's obstacle to role-playing as this character was a lack of icons... and since i've been playing the game recently, i snagged screenshots to make icons from. (i also have a mod on the game to improve Tony's facial hair bc i can't abide the mustache-only look)

these were made for robo_man's journal, so if they give the okay, these are free to snag, otherwise, all theirs. XD


( Robo-Man )

I keep forgetting to post about this: we've been troubleshooting the "missing notifications" problem for the past few days. (Well, I say "we", really I mean Mark and Robby; I'm just the amanuensis.) It's been one of those annoying loops of "find a logical explanation for what could be causing the problem, fix that thing, observe that the problem gets better for some people but doesn't go away completely, go back to step one and start again", sigh.

Mark is hauling out the heavy debugging ordinance to try to find the root cause. Once he's done building all the extra logging tools he needs, he'll comment to this entry. After he does, if you find a comment that should have gone to your inbox and sent an email notification but didn't, leave him a link to the comment that should have sent the notification, as long as the comment itself was made after Mark says he's collecting them. (I'd wait and post this after he gets the debug code in but I need to go to sleep and he's not sure how long it will take!)

We're sorry about the hassle! Irregular/sporadic issues like this are really hard to troubleshoot because it's impossible to know if they're fixed or if they're just not happening while you're looking. With luck, this will give us enough information to figure out the root cause for real this time.

Man, why do I not have a They Might Be Giants icon?

They just released a new album (The World Is To Dig), their 24th album, and, yeah, okay, I know I've been listening to them since I was in high school, but I am honestly impressed and pleased that they are still out there making music and also have (unlike most of the other bands I really liked in high school) managed not to do anything massively problematic that I am aware of and are just, you know, seeming to genuinely enjoy getting to spend their lives hanging out and making music.

The r/tmbg subreddit asked people not to rehash the same argument we have every album (that we have been having since the days of Usenet, as they pointed out), which is "why isn't this album more [X] like the last album?" and while I will say that it doesn't have any songs where I'm like "this is definitely the best on this album" (like "Brontosaurus" which was clearly the best thing on Book, their last album) I think "Sleep's Older Sister" (described by someone on reddit as "what if Taylor Swift was high" lol) is going to be stuck in my head, as is "Outside Brain," and "In the Dead Mall," so it's a little weird to me how most of my faves are Flansburgh songs this album, though I do like Linnell's "Character Flaw" and "What You Get." But this seems like a very good Flans album to me.

(I think most of the fanbase would say that Their most popular songs are Linnell's -- Birdhouse, Ana Ng, and so on -- and the Ratings on the wiki bear this out, as the top ten are Linnell. You don't even get to a Flans song on this list until what is currently #17, which is "Put Your Hand Inside The Puppet Head," which I like a lot but I think is, you know, maybe not one of Their most well-known. So I am in kind of a weird position where I generally agree with the fandom consensus but also my absolute favorite TMBG song is actually "Sleeping in the Flowers," which is a Flans song.)

Because I guess it wouldn't be a TMBG album if I didn't have to look any words up while listening, I did have to look up two words. And I don't mean "I couldn't understand the words they were singing so I had to check the lyrics," I mean "I've never heard that word before in my life." So, yeah, I had to look up "galliard" (a Renaissance courtly dance, apparently) and "Coffey still," although in my defense I don't actually know anything about how distillation works.

So, yeah, new TMBG album. At least the world contains that.

Our new challenge is:

OBSTACLE

As always, you can interpret the prompt literally or figuratively, in whatever way works for you.

Each work created for this challenge should be posted as a new entry to the comm. Posting starts now and continues up until the challenge ends at 4pm Pacific Time on Monday, 20th April. No sign-up required.

Mods will tag your work for fandom. When you've posted entries to three consecutive challenges, you will earn a name tag, and we'll go back and tag all your previous entries with your name, as well.

All kinds of fanworks in all fandoms are welcome. Please have a look at our guidelines before you play. If you have any questions or concerns, don't hesitate to contact a mod. And if you have any suggestions for future challenges, you can leave them in the comments of this post.

You can view stats for fan_flashworks entries and search and filter them via the Community Report and Creator Report. See our FAQ post for more details.

Also, keep an eye out for the next ffw_social post, which will go up in the next couple of days. If you haven't joined the ffw_social comm, it's never too late to come and check it out. (Posts are locked, which means you have to join to see them.)

The Beam challenge is now closed. Here are the entries:

The Fantastic Journey: Fanfic: Nightmares And Illusions by badly_knitter
The Professionals: Fanfiction: Hazard of the Job by lucy_roman
GOTH: Fanfic: beams of silence which is (the skin) by bluedreaming
Beam: Miss Marple: Fanfic: From Dust to Thimbles by smallhobbit
Criminal Minds: Fanfiction: Moving On by infinitum_noctem
Heated Rivalry: Fan Fiction: Feeling Wanted by darkjediqueen
Culture Club: Fanfic: Power Cut by midnight_heavenly_bodies
no fandom: icons: balance by highlander_ii
Viola come il mare: Fanfic: Love Becomes You by veronyxk84
Ariadne - Jennifer Saint: fanfic: undutiful by teaotter
Torchwood: Fanfic: Not for general use by m_findlow

\o/ \o/ \o/

Thank you to everyone who participated! You're now free to post your entries to your journal or wherever else you'd like. If you're archiving on AO3, you can add your work to our fan_flashworks collection there.

The Community Report and Creator Report will be updated shortly with the entries from this round. See our FAQ for more details.

Next challenge coming right up.

Title: Not for general use
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack, Ianto
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 1,319 words
Content notes: None
Author notes: Written for Challenge 511 - Beam
Summary: Jack has revised plans for their weapons training date night.

( Read more... )

Title: undutiful
Fandom: Ariadne by Jennifer Saint (mods, please use the generic book tag)
Content notes: I've only read the first two chapters so far, and I doubt if it goes this way. But I want it to.
Challenge: Beam
Length: 100 words

Summary: Ariadne has the sun's blood in her veins. It won't be enough to save her.


( Read more... )

Title: Love Becomes You
Fandom: Viola come il mare (category: tv)
Author: veronyxk84
Pairing: Viola Vitale/Francesco Demir
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: none
Word count: 100 (Ellipsus)
Spoilers/Setting: Set after S2 (rejecting and disregarding the upcoming S3).
Summary: In the heat of a Palermo afternoon, Francesco beams at his phone.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction created for fun and no profit has been made. All rights belong to the respective owners.

Challenge: #511 - Beam

—
( READ: Love Becomes You )

☙ ☙ ☙
 

Title: balance
Fandom: none
Rating: G
Content notes: None apply
Summary: icons of Alice D'amato & Simone Biles on balance beam


( balance )

What I Just Finished Reading

KD Casey, Breakout Year: A m/m baseball romance that the author apparently wrote in response to feedback saying her books had too many Jewish characters, so now everyone in this book is Jewish, which is clearly the best way to respond to bigoted criticism. A+. Loved that. I wish I could say the same about the rest of the book, which is a fake-dating second-chance romance where only one of the main characters currently plays baseball, which means there's way less baseball than in her other books, which made it kind of meh for me because the author is really amazing at putting baseball as an integral part of her baseball romances (sometimes it's hard to find sports romances where the author seems like they actually care about the sport) so unfortunately I spent most of the book hoping for more baseball in the baseball book and not getting it.

What I'm Reading Now

Comics Wednesday!

( Iron Man #4 )

What I'm Reading Next

No idea. But, hey, maybe I can read books now? Here's hoping, anyway.

Fandoms: 3 Greek myth, 1 Resident Evil, 1 Poppy Playtime, 1 orginal fiction, 14 none
[ Card & Fills ]

Title: Power Cut
Fandom: Culture Club
Pairing: Boy George/Jon Moss
Rating: G
Length: 905
Author notes: Decided to write a little comedy.
Written for: Challenge 511 - Beam
Summary: The power goes out at half eleven. George gets his hands on the torch. This is a mistake.

( Read more... )

Today in Fandom Complaints, I wish to preface my complaint by saying that since, obviously, I am enjoying watching the entire back catalog of Dimension 20 and also Campaign 4 of Critical Role, that clearly I enjoy watching Brennan Lee Mulligan's DMing.

However, I think it's really, deeply weird, that for a guy who clearly defines himself by being a big nerd who knows a lot of stuff about stuff (and, I mean, sure, that's great, I am also a big nerd) -- anyway, that basically everything I have ever seen him say about Latin is totally wrong. If there's Latin, it's wrong. (If there's Greek, it's also often wrong, but there's less Greek, at least. Still bewildered at CR C4 featuring him defining "dithyramb" essentially as "amphitheater" and then telling the audience to "look it up." I... did? It doesn't mean that.)

Yes, I was annoyed while watching D20 Fantasy High that he consistently stresses "Avernus" wrong -- the Latin stress rule is not hard, I promise -- but I told myself that, okay, maybe it's a D&D thing and D&D decided to pronounce the name of their thing differently from the real thing. Sure. Fine. Okay. I was annoyed that D20 Unsleeping City S2 decided to make the cornerstone of its season the quotation "Nulla dies umquam memori vos eximet aevo" because then that meant I had to listen to it be mispronounced and mistranslated and taken out of context a lot -- and because it's one of lysimache's favorite bits of the Aeneid it's also one of my favorite bits of the Aeneid. But everyone takes this one out of context a lot now (it's part of the 9/11 memorial, for some weird reason) and I guess I can accept that people don't know it's about Being Gay and Doing War Crimes and that's just how it is.

But, okay, so, I am coming up on the end of the season Mice & Murder, which is basically "The Wind in the Willows but what if we just murdered a bunch of animals at Toad Hall and then a fox version of Sherlock Holmes had to solve the mystery" which I assume is not what the book is actually about although I haven't read it. Anyway, here in the penultimate episode, the characters are given a clue to a passcode, and the clue is in Latin, and they are asked if any of their characters know Latin.

The clue is "mors est in gloria." He repeats this, like, two or three times, and he's clearly reading it off something -- it is definitely the thing he intended to say. (The closed captions spell it wrong, but that is absolutely the thing he is saying. He pronounces it very carefully.)

Because I have clearly put several points into Knowing Latin while building my real life human character my first thought is "well, that's a weird clue." Like, what the hell? "Death is in glory?" Okay, sure. Whatever. It didn't occur to me that it could have been meant to say something else. I just thought it was weird on purpose.

Then he tells the player whose character would definitely know Latin (the character is a vicar) what this is supposed to mean, privately, and they excitedly report to the rest of the group that it means "glory in death."

No. No, it does not.

It's four words. Come on. How do you get this wrong? How do you get this exactly backwards? How do you look at the phrase "in gloria" that you have constructed and decide that you nailed it and that that for sure means "in death?"

I don't expect most pop culture to get Latin right, but, like... I expect better of Pop Culture For Total Nerds, I guess. I would really like D20 to do better. Please. For me. Get someone to check your Latin.

(I also did not buy the two Game Changer pins with Latin mottos from the episode where they gave them Latin mottos because both of them had bad Latin to varying degrees. One of them was bad to a degree where it was like "okay, this contains words that obviously are Not Actual Words and therefore makes very little sense, what the fuck" and the other one was only bad to the degree of "if you know what it is trying to say, you can see how they got there, but this really only means that in Medieval and not Classical Latin." Which, eh. I guess clearly it could be worse.)

Title: Feeling Wanted
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Explicit Sex
Fandom: Heated Rivalry
Relationships: Ilya Rozanov/Shane Hollander
Tags: Established Relationship, Plot What Plot, Ass Eating, Shane Teases Ilya
Summary: Ilya was beautiful with the sun on him. Shane couldn't help himself.
Word Count: 5,240

Posted by Frank Jacobs

https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/grayening-why-everything-is-gray/

No, you haven’t suddenly gone colorblind. This map is in color. In fact, it is a map of color — specifically, of each U.S. state’s favorite house paint color. It’s just that those favorites look like a swatch book for a funeral parlor — like fifty shades of gray.

Well, gray-ish. From Hawaii to Maine, from Alaska to Florida, the most popular shade for your home’s exterior is some variation of gray, off-white, beige, or greige — a hue so existentially undecided that it can’t commit to being either gray or beige, and so ends up neither, and both.

Dipped in a vat of Resigned Indifference®

But how can this be? America is anything but monochrome. It contains multitudes of cultures, climates, and landscapes, and people who disagree, loudly and publicly, about nearly everything. So why, when Americans need a tin of house paint, do they so often reach for the neutral shelf? Why does the average house in this great and varied nation look like it’s been dipped in a vat of Resigned Indifference®?

The answer is a phenomenon dubbed “the grayening”: a gradual but relentless draining of pigment, not just from exteriors but also from interiors and from the stuff of everyday life, like cars and phones. In 2020, researchers at the Science Museum Group in London found evidence of the trend’s longevity. Feeding roughly 7,000 photographs of everyday objects — kettles, lamps, cameras — from the late 1800s to 2020 into an algorithm, they then asked it to track color distribution over time.

The result: a striking shift toward achromatic — that is, neutral — colors in material culture.

The grayening has accelerated in the 21st century, but it has ideological roots in the 20th, and industrial ones in the 19th.

The muted lingua franca of global commerce

Early 19th-century objects tended toward natural material colors: the warm brown of wood and leather, the yellows and brass tones of metals. Over time, those pigmentations surrendered steadily to black, white, and gray.

The shift was slow but steady, and its cumulative effect was massive. By the late 20th century, grayscale had colonized and dominated a wide range of object categories. To a large extent, this desaturation is a byproduct of mass production. Industrial manufacturing favors repeatability. Neutral tones are easier to standardize, less likely to clash, and more globally marketable than a particular shade of tangerine, which may sell brilliantly in Seville but offend everyone in Seoul.

In that sense, grayscale is the muted lingua franca of global commerce: inoffensive because it says nothing at all. But the grayening is more than simply an accident of industrialization. In the early 20th century, it got a powerful philosophical boost from modernist design ideology.

“Suited to simple races, peasants and savages”

In his 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime,” Austrian architect Adolf Loos argued that ornamentation was not merely unnecessary, but a sign of arrested moral development. Truly evolved people, he suggested, would gravitate toward clean lines and plain surfaces. Applied ornament, including the use of color as decoration, didn’t enhance; it cluttered and distracted.

Loos’s polemical target was Art Nouveau, then in full frothy bloom. His arguments were influential on the Bauhaus school of art, which canonized restraint and straight lines. It, in turn, informed the International Style that swept global architecture from the 1930s onward, a style that favored glass, steel, and concrete. All gray: not just by default, but as a statement of seriousness.

Le Corbusier, pioneer of what we now simply call modern architecture, made the point with characteristic charm, declaring that color “is suited to simple races, peasants and savages.” Ouch.

The desaturation didn’t stop at buildings. Car colors have been meticulously catalogued since the dawn of the automotive age, making them a useful proxy for the broader culture’s chromatic pulse. Black had its first heyday as a car color about a century ago, when Henry Ford famously quipped that his Model T was available “in any color the customer wants, as long as it’s black.”

The last, best decade for bold car colors

Like many good stories, it’s only partly true. The early Model T also came in gray, blue, green, and red. Ford narrowed the selection to black in 1914 for reasons that were purely industrial: oven-baked black paint dried faster, speeding the production line; it was more durable than other paints; and it was cheaper, helping to bring the price of a “Tin Lizzie” down from $780 in 1910 to $290 in 1924.

Colors also returned in the final years (1926–‘27) of the Model T, which had sold 15 million units by the time production ended — a cumulative industry record that stood for 45 years, until the VW Beetle surpassed it in 1972.

That Beetle had a good chance of being brightly colored, for the 1970s were the last, best decade for bold car colors, with audaciously named hues like Plum Crazy Purple, Lemon Twist, and Hugger Orange livening up the lots.

Earlier decades had their own distinctive palettes: soft pastels and bold two-tones on 1950s cars, jewel tones through the 1960s, and a rich, earthy greenness in the 1990s.

Then, around the turn of the millennium, car colors took a hard right onto Monochrome Avenue and never looked back. In 2004, roughly 60% of new cars sold in the U.S. were achromatic, meaning black, white, gray, or silver. By 2023, that figure had reached 80%. In 2011, white became the single most popular car color worldwide, a position it still holds today.

A self-reinforcing cycle of blandness

The latest global data, from BASF’s annual Color Report, shows white at 38% of new cars produced in 2025, black at 23%, gray at 19%, and silver at 8%. That colorless quartet accounts for 88% of all new cars on the planet. The most popular color worldwide is blue, at just 6%. Green and red each manage 3%.

The logic behind this near-total surrender is once again financial. Car paint production is expensive, and unusual colors reduce the chance that a vehicle will be sold. So manufacturers rationalize their palettes to a dozen safe tones per model, max. Large institutional buyers — rental companies, fleet operators — reinforce that conservative streak, because they too must eventually bulk-sell whatever they bulk-buy. The result? A self-reinforcing cycle of blandness.

A similar calculus applies to houses and house paints. As any estate agent will tell you, neutral colors maximize the resale value of your house because they offend the fewest buyers. There may well be a future home owner out there who shares your passion for aubergine — but betting on them being in the market precisely when you’re selling is a pretty big gamble, and with one of the most expensive assets you’re ever likely to own.

And so the houses of America, and much of the world, are painted in Agreeable Gray, Mindful Gray, Accessible Beige, and their many relatives from the neutral shelf. Note what these names actually signal: not This is who I am, but Please, don’t mind me. Agreeable Gray — the top choice in Alabama, Arizona, and the Carolinas — doesn’t so much describe a color as a social posture.

How minimalism became an aspirational identity

Color-wise, the whole world seems stuck in neutral these days. Call it late-stage modernism. The narrowing of the palette that started with industrialization and became part of modernist ideology in the early 20th century, morphed into a lifestyle choice in the early 21st.

The cultural coup de grâce came around 2010, when minimalism was elevated from an aesthetic to an aspirational identity. “Millennial gray” became a form of conspicuous restraint that signaled sophistication. And no object embodied that shift better than the iPhone.

Apple’s earlier iMac computers were available in such translucent, almost aggressively cheerful colors as Bondi Blue, Tangerine, Strawberry, and Grape. The company’s current product lineup comes primarily in Space Gray, Silver, Gold, and Midnight Black.

Color has migrated to a new, virtual reality

So this is where practicality, resale values, and modernist ideology have gotten us: to a material world that is so drained of color that it might depress the hell out of even Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier.

Interestingly, studies suggest there’s something to that colloquial association between gray and depression. Researchers at the University of Manchester tested healthy volunteers, people with anxiety, and people with depression, asking each to choose a color that represents their current mood. Yellow dominated among healthy subjects. Among both anxious and depressed participants, gray monopolized the top spots — with participants describing it as representing “a dark state of mind, a colorless and monotonous life, gloom, misery or a disinterest in life.” The researchers cited previous studies that found depressed people tend to describe life as “monochromatic” or as having “lost its color.”

But the world is darkest — or grayest — just before the dawn. There are signs that the grayening has peaked. As their colors of the year 2025, Pantone chose Mocha Mousse, a warm brown; Behr selected Rumors, a deep ruby red; and Valspar picked Encore, a rich navy blue. Design professionals are noting rising demand for terracotta- and clay-inspired hues.

In car colors, green made little but steady progress in 2025, doubling to 4% in the Americas, overtaking red in Europe. Axalta Coating Systems named Evergreen Sprint, a dark green, its 2025 global car color of the year, and General Motors added Typhoon Metallic, a similar hue, to its palette for the Cadillac CT4 and CT5 models.

And it is worth noting that color has migrated to a new, albeit virtual reality. Our devices may be Space Gray or Midnight Black, but what they project at us is a continuous, attention-grabbing, kaleidoscopic riot of color.

And even that may be a transitional arrangement. History points to the cyclical nature of chromatic preferences. The glorious excesses of the Baroque, for instance, were preceded — and followed — by periods of relative restraint. Who knows: Whatever succeeds the iPhone may be available in Bondi Blue, or Plum Crazy Purple.

Strange Maps #1289

Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com.

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This article How the modern world turned gray (and why color may be coming back) is featured on Big Think.

https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/grayening-why-everything-is-gray/

Title: Moving On
Fandom: Criminal Minds
Pairings: Jennifer "JJ" Jareau/Emily Prentiss
Characters: Emily Prentiss
Rating: G
Length: 84 words
Summary: Emily decides to let go.

( Read more... )

Title: From Dust to Thimbles
Fandom: Miss Marple
Rating: G
Length: 3 x 100 word drabbles
Summary: Miss Marple finds dust, a lot thimble, and the solution to a problem

Fandom: GOTH - Otsuichi
Rating: T
Length: 100 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: The title is from The house and the birds by Sonia Bueno, translated by James Womack.
Summary: Kamiyama thinks that other teenaged boys have no taste.

( Read more... )

Title: Hazard of the Job
Author: lucy_roman
Rating: Teen and up
Summary: Set after the episode Look After Annie
Pairing: Bodie/Doyle
Word Count: 170

( Hazard of the Job )

Title: Nightmares And Illusions
Fandom: The Fantastic Journey
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Fred, Scott, Varian.
Rating: PG
Spoilers/Setting: Riddles.
Summary: Scott is trapped beneath a fallen ceiling beam, but although Fred tries to help him, there seems to be nothing he can do.
Word Count: 950
Content Notes: Nada.
Written For: Challenge 511: Beam.
Disclaimer: I don’t own The Fantastic Journey, or the characters. They belong to their creators.