i said i would write this before the end of the year and it is december 29!!! i have never lied ever in my entire life. i barely remember anything so this is mostly a photo dump with my vague recollection of past events.

INTRO
after austin 2023 and montreal 2024, australia 2025 was me and risa's third race and our first outside of north america! we were intrigued by this race for many reasons: season opener due to ramadan timing, oscar's homecoming, lewis's first in red, a new crop of rookies, me having never been to australia before, etc...

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merrileemakes posting in

booknook

Arms Race: And other stories By Nic Low

Nic Low is a writer of Ngāi Tahu and European descent who divides his time between Melbourne and Christchurch. His writing on wilderness, technology and race has been widely published and anthologised on both sides of the Tasman. His first book was Arms Race, a collection of speculative fictions shortlisted for the Readings and Steele Rudd prizes, and named a New Zealand Listener and Australian Book Review book of the year.

This was a real mixed Dog of stories, not in quality or interest but in tone. They ranged from very speculative future dystopias to... I don't even know what the counter to spec fic is. Normie? Mundane? I can't remember the last time I read garden variety fiction. But one of the Low's mundane stories was a total riot - 'Rush' describes a group of First Nations Australians styling themselves as the Aboriginal Land Council of Minerals and digging up a war memorial in central Melbourne to prospect for gold. It was bang on in tone and hilarious in the way it perfectly captured the double standards and unconscious (or just fucking conscious, really) bias of colonised Australia. (hey remember the time when a brown muslim woman tweeted on ANZAC day about the human rights violations Australia was inflicting on (brown and mostly muslim) refugees and the backlash was so strong she lost her job, had to move house and eventually had to flee the country?)

I had to check to see when this book was published to work out which of the many sacred First Nations sites destroyed by the resources industry could have prompted this story, but considering the book is 11 years old there's too many to even consider.

I also really liked 'Facebook Redux', about a 70 year old millennial who digs up his old Facebook Profile to find his dead wife's old profile and gets scammed by Russian AR hackers. A really prescient story about what we broadcast online and how it can be used against us.

Low's style of not using quotation marks for speech was a bit challenging to get used to, but it was worth persevering to experience the depth and variety of these well-crafted stories.

5/5 stars. Some of these stories will stay with me for a long time.

Current Music: Tuck Shop Ladies - Hi Vis

linky

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beautifulmechanical

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dine

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drabble_zone

Title: Moving On
Fandom: The Fantastic Journey
Author:

badly_knitted
Characters: Jonathan, Varian, Travellers.
Rating: PG
Written For: Challenge 482: On The Road Again.
Setting: Turnabout.
Summary: Leaving Coriel behind, Varian is deep in his own thoughts.
Disclaimer: I don’t own The Fantastic Journey, or the characters. They belong to their creators.
A/N: Triple drabble.

Moving On

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: my desk

prettygoodword

ramrod (RAM-rod) - n., a rod for ramming home the charge in a muzzle-loading firearm; a ranch or trail foreman, responsible for getting the work done; a demanding overseer, a disciplinarian. v., to force with or as with a ramrod.

That last includes the colorful idiom of ramrodding a bill through the legislature, which produces an interesting image when you apply the original context. The original ramrods were, indeed, rods, thus the name.

---L.

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1word1day

maquette [ma-ket, muh-]

noun
a small model or study in three dimensions for either a sculptural or an architectural project.

examples
1. we make midnight a maquette of the year: "on new year's eve" by Evie Shockley
2. This hand-painted cold-cast porcelain maquette of Owlman is based on art from the highly anticipated Warner Home Video made-for-DVD animated original movie, Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths! DC Comics for February 2010 | Major Spoilers - Comic Book Reviews and News 2009

origin
1900–05; < French < Italian macchietta, diminutive of macchia a sketch, complex of lines < Latin macula mesh, spot

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux's maquette for the fountain he donated to Valenciennes

tamaranth

2025/198: Snake-Eater — T Kingfisher

Walter would . . . Her thoughts stopped there, because Walter would already have dropped dead of shock weeks ago. She was in a world where Walter no longer applied. [loc. 3355]

Selena is down on her luck when she heads, with her beloved dog Copper, to the remote desert town of Quartz Creek. She has $27 to her name, and has left behind a job in a deli and a gaslighting ex who's destroyed Selena's self-confidence. ( Read more... )

Current Mood: cheerful

dine

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common_nature

3 for the Memories' 2025 session will be open for posts on January 3, 2026 and will run for 3 weeks until January 24. Event participation is as follows:

1) Three photos only per person during each annual session. Members are encouraged to discuss the reason for their choices.

2) Photos can be hosted at Dreamwidth or elsewhere, and should not be larger than 800 px width or height.

3) All three photos should be in the same post. Cut tags should be placed after the first photo.

3 for the Memories is not a competition, and entries are not being judged. Rather, participants are encouraged to share photos they took in 2025 that they find meaningful in some way or which represent how they experienced the year.

Questions? Visit the announcement post at

threeforthememories

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Title: Heading Out
Fandom: FAKE
Author:

badly_knitted
Characters: Dee, Ryo.
Rating: PG
Written For: Challenge 482: On The Road Again.
Setting: After Like Like Love.
Summary: It’s great to get out of the city for a couple of days.
Disclaimer: I don’t own FAKE, or the characters. They belong to the wonderful Sanami Matoh.
A/N: Double drabble.

Heading Out

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: my desk

m_findlow posting in

fandomweekly

Theme Prompt: #284 - Home for the holidays
Title: Home is where the heart is
Fandom: Torchwood
Rating/Warnings: PG.
Bonus: Yes
Word Count: 1,000 words
Summary: Jack is right where he’s meant to be.

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dine

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1word1day

contemporaneous [kuhn-tem-puh-rey-nee-uhs]

adjective:
existing, beginning, or occurring in the same period of time

Examples:

Some economic data, such as last month’s unemployment rate and consumer-inflation numbers, can’t be compiled retroactively, the Labor Department has said, because they rely on contemporaneous surveys. (Nick Timiraos and Matt Grossman, Wholesale Price Gains Hint at Muted Rise in Fed’s Preferred Inflation Gauge, The Wall Street Journal, November 2025)

These moments of reckoning - in which something that once felt exciting begins to seem noxious, mephitic, dangerous - are important to heed. (Alex Ross, At Ninety, Arvo Pärt and Terry Riley Still Sound Vital, The New Yorker, November 2025)

In addition to contemporaneous comics, architecture, and music, the film explores the influence of the space race on everyday life of the 1960s. (Ben Sachs, Lewis Klahr’s Sixty Six is a masterful journey through inner space and the American past, Chicago Reader, May 2017)

It gave the explanation, gave sanity to the pranks of this atavistic brain of mine that, modern and normal, harked back to a past so remote as to be contemporaneous with the raw beginnings of mankind. (Jack London, Before Adam)

Origin:
'living or existing at the same time,' 1650s, from Late Latin contemporaneus 'contemporary,' from the same Latin source as contemporary but with an extended form after Late Latin temporaneous 'timely.' An earlier adjective was contemporanean (1550s). (Online Etymology Dictionary)