UK people: Scrap The Bathroom Ban

Oct. 25th, 2025 11:33 am
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[personal profile] rydra_wong
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/scrap-the-bathroom-ban

From TransActual and Trans+ Solidarity Alliance. Produces a template letter to your MP which you can customize as much as you can or want to.

Article by Jane Fae of TransActual (who have been absolutely kicking ass):

https://www.scenemag.co.uk/jane-fae-a-director-of-transactual-writes-on-the-eve-of-launching-a-new-campaign-to-get-mps-to-reject-the-ehrcs-bathroom-ban/

There are now a bunch of Labour MPs who are worried and making noises at the government, even if it's only about the impact on businesses of rules which are possibly illegal and impossible to follow without getting sued:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/oct/23/dozens-of-labour-mps-warn-of-chaos-for-firms-over-gender-recognition-advice

It's alleged that Bridget Phillipson was sitting on the guidance because she was worried it'd scupper her bid for the deputy leadership, whereas Powell is actively trans-friendly and has called for MPs to have a chance to debate and vote on the guidance.

The below may be an overly optimistic view but it seems clear there's tension and conflict between the ECHR and government:

https://iandunt.substack.com/p/frightened-and-desperate-ehrc-anti (warning for Substack, in case you are boycotting it)

So this is a moment when leverage is possible, and letters to your MP may actually do something.

Daily Happiness

Oct. 24th, 2025 07:36 pm
torachan: a cartoon bear eating a large sausage (magical talking bear prostitute)
[personal profile] torachan
1. Not only is it the weekend, it's a three day weekend! We're going to Oogie Boogie Bash on Sunday night so I decided to take Monday off since we'll be out late (ish).

2. I love this picture of Jasper so much. Those big eyes! The little glimpse of pink tongue!

Weekly Reading

Oct. 24th, 2025 05:56 pm
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[personal profile] torachan
Recently Finished
Murder in Matrimony
The ending of this felt like it was wrapping up the series, which is fine because I'd already decided not to read any more. antisemitism )

The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State
Finally finished this! It was actually really interesting, I just kept not reading it in favor of other things. In school Prohibition was passed over as basically like "it happened and then they repealed it", with the main focus of the early 20th century going towards the World Wars and Great Depression. I had no idea that Prohibition was so tied to the revival of the KKK, for example.

Artistic Buildings and Homes of Los Angeles
A very short book that is mainly pictures of buildings and houses in LA in the late 1800s, built by architect Joseph Newsom. The book has a forward and introduction written in 1988, and then the rest is a direct replica of a book put out by the architect to showcase his work, complete with ads that ran alongside the photos. It's very neat. Found it in a Little Free Library in the neighborhood.

Don't Hang Up
An Audible Original by the author of Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone. He's done quite a few Audible Originals (the one below being another) and they're all short and free with my subscription, so I gave them a try, but none of them have been great. This one was interesting enough, but the MC was an asshole. He's a radio DJ who's been recently demoted to the midnight shift and one night gets a caller who tells him to stay on the line or a woman gets killed. Had some good twists, but it was just fine, not amazing.

Find Us
I really wish he would stick to writing stories set in Australia. This is the second one of his set in the US and there are always nitpicky things that bug me lol. Also if I'm reading an author from another country, it's because I want to read stories set in that country or at least with characters from that country (especially with an audiobook). But that's just minor stuff. This one felt like it really should have been longer (it's four hours, so about novella length). The MC is a former police detective, now working secretly for the FBI, trying to find school killers before they act by approaching kids who show red flags on social media and forums. One day her own kids go missing and she doesn't wait for the police, convinced she can find them herself. This had some interesting twists but I felt like the aftermath could have used more focus.

spoilers )

My Home Hero vol. 4

(no subject)

Oct. 24th, 2025 12:28 pm
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[personal profile] watersword

T. Kingfisher's latest Sworn Soldier novella, What Stalks The Deep, is enormously comforting, insofar as everyone, even the monster lurking in the depths, is trying their best under difficult circumstances and wants to do the right thing. I needed that, for so many reasons, oh my gosh.

My plan for fixing my life this weekend is going to demand levels of focus and time management and a willingness to confront gross surfaces that frankly I have never exhibited in my entire life, so obviously that's gonna go great.

I have a month to write either the next fake investigative journalism piece or finish the Roman engineer/selkie story. You'd think that the story where I roughly know what happens (emotionally) and have 1.2K words written would be the easy one, right? You would be wrong. I'll try writing the ending first and maybe that will help.

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[personal profile] coffeeandink

Chess is a show I know entirely through the cast recordings; if I recall correctly, it was such a thoroughly Cold War project that the liner notes referred to the two chess players as only "the American" and "the Russian". The new book by Danny Strong turns it into a (even more) melodramatic period piece, with the chess matches not simply a allegory for political tensions or a way of obtaining minor diplomatic concessions but tools for averting World War III. The Arbiter is dragooned as a narrator, who exposits both the global situation and the personal interactions with the characters, partly through a series of very bad and very obvious jokes.

Freddie Trumper, American grandmaster and obnoxious wunderkind, is challenged by Anatoly Sergievesky, mordant, depressed, and engaged in a clandestine flirtation with Freddie's chess second and lover, Florence Vassy. Freddie is notoriously a weak point in the original book, so prone to anti-Communist slurs, misogyny, and temper tantrums it is impossible to extend him much sympathy. The new version mediates this by giving him bipolar disorder and medical noncompliance, and also by casting Aaron Tveit. Tveit is indeed so good and so charismatic that I was on Freddie's side way more than I expected, although not enough to take self-pity anthem "Pity the Child" seriously. (The rest of the audience seemed less skeptical.) Lea Michele as Florence is just as strong vocally, and almost as strong in terms of acting, though unfortunately without much romantic chemistry with either partner. (The closest any scene comes to an erotic charge is Freddie's sleazy half-assed attempt at persuading Anatoly to throw the game in Act II.) Nicholas Christopher as Anatoly is the weak point in Act I, where I had the same opinion as I had of his Sweeney Todd: he's got the potential to be great, but he isn't quite there yet. He really needs to work on his emoting, which is too flat even for the murderous Sweeney or the dour Anatoly. He is greatly handicapped in Chess by having to affect a Russian accent, which I really hope the production drops. But! He pulled out all stops in Act II, both for the songs and the acting, and won me over with his intensity and vocal power.

So basically: the book is still flawed and they need to cut the runtime, particularly in Act I. This was the second night of previews, so there's still time for changes before the show technically "opens". If we're lucky, they'll start by cutting the topical jokes.

But the point of Chess has never been the book; it is the score full of bangers and power ballads. The music is by ABBA's Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus and the lyrics by Ulvaeus and Tim Rice. And the musical performances are GREAT. I am still guiltily fond of the kinda-no-really-very-racist "One Night in Bangkok" (which can plausibly be explained as Freddie's typical white guy take on the city) and which in this production is a camp masterpiece. I am seriously tempted to see the show again just for that.

[syndicated profile] otw_news_feed

Posted by Aditi Paul

The AO3 Fanzine Scan Hosting Project (FSHP) is a partnership between the Open Doors committee and fan-run preservation project Zinedom through which fanfiction and fanart originally published in print fanzines is imported to the Archive of Our Own. Fanworks can be imported to AO3 with the consent of either the creators of the works or the publisher of the fanzine in which the fanworks were published.

Today, Open Doors is pleased to announce a list of collections that it has created since September 2024 to house fanworks imported through the FSHP. A collection has been created for each fanzine from which one or more fanworks have been imported, but these collections do not contain every work from each of these zines, and many so far only include one work each in cases where Open Doors only has permission to import that particular work. For full transparency, Open Doors plans to continue to announce collections as they are created that may or may not grow with additional fanworks as additional permissions are obtained from more creators in the future.

As of August 2025, Open Doors has created the following collections to represent fanzines from which it has imported works:

For answers to frequently asked questions, please see the FSHP page on the Open Doors website. If you’d like to give Open Doors permission to import any of your fanworks that have been previously published in print fanzines, or if you have any other FSHP-related queries, please contact the Open Doors Committee.

We’d also love it if fans could help us preserve the story of any fanzines in which they may have been published on Fanlore. If you’re new to wiki editing, no worries! Check out the new visitor portal, or ask the Fanlore Gardeners for tips.

Thanks for your interest in preserving fannish history for future generations of readers!

– The Open Doors team

Commenting on this post will be disabled in 14 days. If you have any questions, concerns, or comments regarding this import after that date, please contact Open Doors.

Daily Happiness

Oct. 23rd, 2025 08:10 pm
torachan: a cartoon kitten with a surprised/happy expression (chii)
[personal profile] torachan
1. I took a walk after lunch today and while the sun did peek out a few times, it was mostly overcast and made for very pleasant walking. Right now I've been trying to do a midday walk at least twice during the work week, but once we get into cooler weather I'll definitely be upping that, maybe even to daily. I do so much more sitting in one place in this current position than I did as area manager, and it's nice to get out and move around a bit.

2. I finished up another puzzle today. This is our third Disney villains puzzle, but it seems to be a very popular theme, going by the fact that when I was looking at puzzles at Target the other day, there were two other villains ones that were not the same as the ones we have. This one is a 750 piece one (only the second puzzle I've done this large) so it has room for more villains. Of course there's overlap in all the puzzles, but it's always interesting to see which ones they pick. This one has the main baddies on the V and their henchmen/women on the border, which was a fun design.



3. Look at that fluffy fur!

[syndicated profile] henryjenkins_feed

Posted by Alex McDowell / Tara Lomax

To celebrate International Production Design Week (IPDW) between October 17th-26th, Pop Junctions presents a range of contributions related to the craft of production design, with particular focus on the art of world-building and the creativity and culture of production design practice. IPDW is an initiative led by the Production Designers Collective and involves a calendar of events that showcase production design around the world.

In this contribution, Tara Lomax asks Production Designer Alex McDowell about world-building, reimagining the production process, and his work across industry and education.

International Production Design WeEK — Event Calander 2025

TL: Alex, thank you for sharing your time and experience in this discussion to celebrate International Production Design Week. I’d like to start by reflecting on the history and transformation of production design in the filmmaking process. Throughout your career, have you experienced much change in production design and the role of the production designer in filmmaking and screen storytelling?

AM: Hi Tara, thanks for your questions! 

There have of course been huge changes in our craft since I started, but not enough to fully integrate Production Design in the opportunities of non-linear production. Rick Carter has one of my favorite quotes for all of us: “the production designer's first job is to design the production”. 

This has always been true, and it's our responsibility as designers to take it on. But the context has changed radically. For over 20 years we’ve been pushing for a change in the relationship between the front end and the back end of production and since the early 2000s we developed an art department workflow that aligned closely to visual effects. But the reality was that the pre-production assets that framed the shoot tended to be discarded and then rebuilt in post. 

With virtual production, non-linear production has kicked in. Now our work is to use the tools we have—and keep them up to date—to design the virtual production. Now we take responsibility to update the production design/art process to drive the full breadth of the production, which means a different make-up of the art department. Increasingly, we are working with illustrators using 3D and game platforms, engineers, designers in Rhino or Maya to drive models informed by photogrammetry scans from drones in a location, reference images to blender or rapid fabrication, etc. At this point, the design development can be distributed to any of the appropriate departments—construction, location, stunts, set dressing, DP, VFX, virtual production—and director.

The art department increasingly needs polymaths. Schools need to teach accordingly, and designers need to hire appropriately. It’s also worth saying that a lot of these processes no longer apply only to mega-productions. The smallest budget can use a drone to scan a location and a single designer to accurately add a set extension. 

Across your career you have worked as a production designer on a range of different projects, including Madonna’s early music videos, The Crow (1994), The Fight Club (1999), Minority Report (2002), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), Watchman (2009), and Man of Steel (2013). How would you describe your own approach to production design and has this changed across your career?

In addition to the previous response, the only thing to add is obvious: every show has different demands. We learn from every show and apply that learning to the next. The designer probably has to adapt to the nuance and context of a script and direction more fully than almost any other department—materials change, crew skills change, vendors change, tools change, location resources change and your knowledge updates exponentially. 

Minority report (2002)

Man of steel (2013)

Your work has been instrumental in the development of a world-driven approach to storytelling, whereby the world is designed prior to and beyond the boundaries of a script. This seems to enable a stronger relationship between production design and other filmmaking crafts across the storytelling and production process. What do you see to be the role of the screenplay within this approach and how does this redefine story ideation, authorship, and collaboration in screen production?

What we have learnt simply is that non-linear production is possible when storytelling meets narrative design. Every world provides unique context and logic from which any number of story paths can evolve. Ideation, authorship, and collaboration in screen production become a single workspace for development. Production design in this context provides an immersive and adaptive container that much more closely mirrors the conditions of production start to finish for all the makers of a film and evolves accordingly. 

minority report (2002) ‘precogs temple’

World building requires an interdisciplinary approach to storytelling, within filmmaking departments and with experts in other fields like computer science, animation, and culture. This seems to require a reimagining or reorganization of the traditional film development and production process. Do you see evidence of this kind of reorganization happening in the industrial context? And is it possible for traditional filmmaking processes to still embrace world-building principles without a complete restructuring of the production process?

Industrial is the right word. We are finally moving from a 19th century Victorian-industrial linear production process to one of the most agile and effective non-linear practices in the world. I’ve experienced a broad range of industries outside entertainment media, and our industry can compete with any of them. But it absolutely requires a restructuring of the traditional production process. This assumes that the traditional creative skills remain and are still vital, but we all have to work with new tools as we always have. These tools speak to each other in ways that make ideation and creativity more intuitive, closer to our imagination, and we have to adapt to take advantage of that. We are biological, cellular creatures, but we’ve been forced to work with straight lines. It’s fun to see us getting closer to our intuitive selves. 

Your work sits at such an interesting intersection between design, technology, and education and you have been instrumental in promoting the critical role that production design plays in world building and storytelling. Can you discuss some of the work you have been doing as part of the World Building Institute at USC, particularly the Project JUNK consortium? Why has it been so important for you to also work across education and support the development of future world builders? What has been the most rewarding part of working at the interface of industry and education?

Most rewarding and valuable continues to be the demands of the students when they see that the edges of their work are unconstrained, and when they understand that world building demands cross-disciplinary co-creation. I hope we are developing the base for new generations of polymaths, who can work across media, in industries within and outside entertainment, and in fields that do not yet exist. If we are able to focus on the need to break down the silos of disciplines and understand the power of folding together the craft skills and toolsets across media, we need to train generations that can navigate and exploit these changes as they happen. 

The JUNK project is a world building program that we are now teaching globally that originated in a collaboration between USC SCA and Austral University in Buenos Aires. It is not only reaching students in entertainment media but also in trades as wide reaching as engineering, biology, anthropology, architecture and social politics. It’s a true test of how what we are learning through the intersection of the advances in media and world building can change the world. 

Finally, how would you characterize the twenty-first century production designer based on creative and technological developments in screen practice and the film industries?

Our work is to stay on our toes, be aware of every change in tools and resources, interface more deeply with the full breadth of production, and increasingly demand that the technology keeps up with our imagination. 

future world vision – mega city 2070 project

Biographies

Alex McDowell. Designer. Royal Designer for Industry (RDI). Creative director, production designer, professor, world builder. British citizen, US citizen, living in the US since 1986. He has been a production designer and creative director in film, game, animation, theatre and other media for over 30 years. McDowell is an advocate and originator of the narrative design system world building. His practice incorporates design and storytelling across media in education, research, institutions, corporations, and entertainment media. He is co-founder & creative director of Experimental Design, Professor of Cinematic Practice at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, Director of the USC World Building Institute & World Building Media Lab, USC William Cameron Menzies Endowed Chair in Production Design, founder of the the JUNK Consortium, Associate Professor at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, The Bridge Institute. He’s written and talked a lot about narrative design, for a long time, in many places, to many people.

Tara Lomax is an Associate Editor at Pop Junctions. She has expertise in entertainment franchising, multiplatform storytelling, and contemporary Hollywood entertainment and has published on topics such as transmedia storytelling and world building, creative licensing, seriality, virtual production and visual effects. Her work can be found in publications that include JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Senses of Cinema and Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and the book collections The Screens of Virtual Production (2025), Starring Tom Cruise (2021), The Supervillain Reader (2020), The Superhero Symbol (2020), The Palgrave Handbook of Screen Production (2019), and Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling (2017). She is the Discipline Lead of Screen Studies at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) and has a PhD in screen studies from The University of Melbourne.

(no subject)

Oct. 23rd, 2025 05:21 pm
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[personal profile] tptigger
Dear Yuletide author,

If you're seeing this, I'm sorry it's still a placeholder or otherwise incomplete. I will try to get this filled out over the weekend.

The last couple weeks have kicked my butt.

tptigger
Optional details from signup under cut )
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Ahoy there, adventure gamers! [community profile] monkeyisland is a community for the beloved classic game series Monkey Island, featuring the comedic swashbuckling adventures of the improbably-named Guybrush Threepwood, Mighty Pirate™. Anything about Monkey Island is fair game: your own fanworks (art, fic, videos, games, music, cosplay, memes/silliness, whatever), recs of others' fanworks, livestreams/let's-plays, discussions, news and articles, tips for messing about in the game resources or scripting, requests for hints, screenshots, all that good stuff. If Monkey Island is your jam rum rum and jam (it's an old pirate favorite, everybody knows that), then come on over and have a grog.

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