purplecat: The Tardis against a sunset (or possibly sunrise) (Doctor Who)
purplecat ([personal profile] purplecat) wrote2025-07-08 06:48 pm

Costume Bracket: Round 4, Post 5

Two Doctor Who companion outfits for your delectation and delight! Outfits selected by a mixture of ones I, personally, like; lists on the internet; and a certain random element.


Outfits below the Cut )

Vote for your favourite of these costumes. Use whatever criteria you please - most practical, most outrageously spacey, most of its decade!

Voting will remain open for at least a week, possibly longer!

Costume Bracket Masterlist

Images are a mixture of my own screencaps, screencaps from Lost in Time Graphics, PCJ's Whoniverse Gallery, and random Google searches.
scifirenegade: (blep | marquis)
scifirenegade ([personal profile] scifirenegade) wrote2025-07-07 08:39 pm

Fanfic: Triangle

Title: Triangle
Rating: General
Fandom: Ich und die Kaiserin (1933)
Pairing(s) / Character(s): Didier/Marquis(/Juliette)
Warnings: n/a
Spoilers: not really

Note: For [community profile] fic_promptly. Prompt was "any / any / we're dating the same person so... what are we?" and the This and That challenge on [community profile] sweetandshort
They're getting there.

Read more... )
purplecat: The family on top of Pen Y Fan (General:Walking)
purplecat ([personal profile] purplecat) wrote2025-07-07 06:24 pm

Polccoyo Mountains

Because of all the mix-ups with permits and so on, we were offered an additional "free" activity. We picked a trip to the Polccoyo rainbow mountain area. It turned out that there are two rainbow mountains in Peru of which Vinicunca is the more spectacular, touristy, and better known. Different mineral compositions in the soil - particularly copper - cause the geological layers exposed in rainbow mountains to reveal stripes of bright colours. Our guide for the day, Olmer, was obviously from the Polccoyo area and felt very passionately about it. He explained that it was being opened up to tourists in a bid to stave off a proposed investment from a Canadian mining company who wanted to establish a copper mine in the area.

It was beautiful and remote and while there were two or three parties of tourists, it was easy to feel alone in the landscape. B. and I were a bit dubious that it could both retain its character and generate enough income to hold off the allure of mining company big bucks.

Photos )

The road up to Palccoyo went along multiple switch-backs from tarmac to dirt track, and past alfalfa farmers on the lower slopes (the alfalfa feeds the guinea pigs which are a local speciality - if you are interested they taste a bit like duck) to alpaca farmers on the higher slopes (alpaca is genuinely nice meat, quite lamby but more restrained). On the way back down I tried to photograph alpaca from the taxi resulting in a lot of blurry photos of alpaca of which these are the best.

Photos from the taxi )
scifirenegade: (buster)
scifirenegade ([personal profile] scifirenegade) wrote2025-07-05 06:19 pm
Entry tags:

(no subject)

Saw all of the Fatty Arbuckle + Buster Keaton shorts.



They got better as they went on, but never to the point of genius. Usually ranged from "decent and harmless" to "JUST END ALREADY!". There's quite a lot of racism and misogyny, most notably in the "JUST END ALREADY!" category. The decent and harmless had some clever gags. Arbuckle can juggle knives like it's nothing.

As the shorts go on, Keaton's roles(s) get more prominent (I think it was his second short, he shows up for half a minute as a beggar. By the last short he's Arbuckle's sidekick.)

My favourites were The Bell Boy, The Cook, Back Stage and The Garage. (I didn't dislike Coney Island, it does have Keaton in a lifeguard outfit doing standing backflips and a very funny camera gag.)

Let's see what Ingmar Bergman film I'll watch now. Yesterday I saw Persona, which was good (don't ask me what it's about though).
purplecat: The Sixth Doctor (Who:Six)
purplecat ([personal profile] purplecat) wrote2025-07-05 08:42 am

Random Doctor Who Picture


Book cover for Doctor Who The Shadow in the Glass by Justing Richards and Stephen Cole.  A blue cover with the faces of the sixth Doctor and Hitler behind a transparent globe.  Blue streaks emanate out from the globe.

I've no memory of reading this at all. The back makes it sound both interesting and memorable - a retired brigadier stumbling upon shenanigans from WW2 recruiting the sixth Doctor for help. Richards and Cole are both solid Doctor Who authors who I rate but none of it stirs a memory.
purplecat: A ruined keep. (General:Castle)
purplecat ([personal profile] purplecat) wrote2025-07-04 07:06 pm
Entry tags:

Random Castle


Tall turrets of a castle with a bridge on one side then the buildings of a town, but castle walls extend beyond.  All in front of a river or estuary.  An overcast sky.
Caernarfon
purplecat: Hand Drawn picture of a Toy Cat (Default)
purplecat ([personal profile] purplecat) wrote2025-07-03 06:19 pm

Moray and the Salt Mines of Maras

We had a "free" day in Cusco, but there were some suggestions of activities that our guide could organise for us. Two other people in the group were interested in seeing the Moray Ruins and the Salt Mines of Maras and we were happy to tag along and make the excursion cheaper.

Moray was the first Inca Plant laboratory we encountered. As noted previously, it wasn't quite clear to us why it earned the status of laboratory.

Pictures under the Cut )

The Salt Mines are not actually mines, but a salt extraction plant that predates the arrival of the Spanish and which are still worked today. Mineral rich water from the mountains comes in and fills clay lined pools. The water then evaporates and the salt is collected. They are owned by 300 families and there were people working them - flattening the clay lining - when we visited. I bought salt.

Photos under the Cut )
scifirenegade: (columbo)
scifirenegade ([personal profile] scifirenegade) wrote2025-07-02 03:24 pm

Zonneschijn Opleving Uitdaging: Een

Missing (as of now): Snowflake Challenge number 8 and number 12.

Challenge #1

Journaling Prompt: Light up your journal with activity this month. Talk about your goals for July or for the second half of 2025.
Creative Prompt: Shine a light on your own creativity. Create anything you want (an image, an icon, a story, a poem, or a craft) and share it with your community.. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.


I want to finish uni once and for all!

As for ~ creations ~



Guess who?

Crummy picture, drawing is erhm, but it's alright.
purplecat: The Tardis against a sunset (or possibly sunrise) (Doctor Who)
purplecat ([personal profile] purplecat) wrote2025-07-01 07:16 pm

Costume Bracket: Round 4, Post 4

Two Doctor Who companion outfits for your delectation and delight! Outfits selected by a mixture of ones I, personally, like; lists on the internet; and a certain random element.


Outfits below the Cut )

Vote for your favourite of these costumes. Use whatever criteria you please - most practical, most outrageously spacey, most of its decade!

Voting will remain open for at least a week, possibly longer!

Costume Bracket Masterlist

Images are a mixture of my own screencaps, screencaps from Lost in Time Graphics, PCJ's Whoniverse Gallery, and random Google searches.
purplecat: Two dummies wearing Edwardian dresses. (General:History)
purplecat ([personal profile] purplecat) wrote2025-06-30 06:01 pm

Sacsayhuaman

Sacsayhuaman is a massive Inca fortress, called the House of the Sun, on a hill top above Cusco. We were taken up their on our first day in Peru, walked around the site and then walked back down into Cusco.

It is quite a thing )
scifirenegade: Herr Veidt lying down on a sofa. No idea what he's thinking. (connie)
scifirenegade ([personal profile] scifirenegade) wrote2025-06-30 12:02 pm
Entry tags:

Same, Leo. Same.

Women are evil and christianity is cool. Or so Flesh and the Devil tells me.

Typical American 1920s self-righteousness aside, one can see where each and every characters are coming from.

Spoilers for an almost one-hundred-year-old movie
I am forever angry at Leo trying to strangle Felicitas, though. That bit was brutal.


One thing you'll see in hardcore Veidt girlies is that, once you experience Die Veidt (TM), you are pratically immune to everything that is remotely sensual. Nothing can top him (this sentence is hilarious). And yes, that man is made of sensuality and bones. If you've been here long enough, you know how I feel about him.

Anyway, I howled at the screen every time Greta Garbo and John Gilbert were doing whatever this. (Not seen here, that cigarette scene)


(gif by [tumblr.com profile] ironmaidenhead)

(Also not seen here, the homoeroticism between Leo (that would be Gilbert) and Ulrich (Lars Hanson). They're bi4bi.)

Another film that could be solved with polyamory.

EDIT: Last Night in Soho. First half is ace. Great representations of the horrors of being a woman and the romanticisation of the past. Second part threw it all away for psycho-biddy shtick. The eleventh Doctor and Emma were there.
scifirenegade: (enjoy the silence | DM)
scifirenegade ([personal profile] scifirenegade) wrote2025-06-30 12:02 pm
Entry tags:

Stats: June 2025

Films Watched

  • Body and Soul (1925)

  • Everything Everywhere All at Once (2020)

  • The Last Warning (1928)

  • The Constant Nymph (1933)

  • Last Night in Soho (2021)

  • Dune: Part Two (2024)

  • Flesh and the Devil (1926)



Books (for leisure)

  • Gay Berlin by Robert Beachy (as always smh)

  • Continental Strangers: German Exile Cinema, 1933-1951 by Gerd Gemünden



Arts

  • 1 finished full piece (Above Suspicion)

  • 1 unfinished piece (FP1)

  • Lots of dumb doodles



Words Written

  • That One Oberaertz Thing: 221 words (total 5024 words)

  • Barbara's Great Wine Search: 0 words, ugh

  • Pre-canon AadA fic: 292 words

  • Unfinished miscellaneous short fics: one fic (total 63 words)


Total: 576 words
lyssie: (S & B Stairwell this show was so pretty)
lyssie ([personal profile] lyssie) wrote2025-06-29 03:57 pm

Narnia, fic, the heat is terrible

- that latter is entirely true. Heat is terrible. (it was windy and heat index of 100+, and gross out and just awful)

- I need to make myself a Narnia icon.

- Aside from the bits I've been gathering up and posting from the 3SF (I need to get 2024 up, too), I have actually written two Narnia fics. One of them far more crack-filled than the other.

Detours by Lamplight - just gen, me ranting in polite text about that stupid lamppost. I blame the BTS conversations, since they were all so pleased about how it looked like it grew out of the ground in the movie.

The Recruitment for the (Averted) Apocalypse Job - Leverage fusion, because that's how my brain works at 11 at night when absently thinking, Susan is Sophie, isn't she... It's a modern AU.

Aside from that, I've been reading through all of the Narnia tag (again), or the type of thing I want to read, at least. Reader fic? No, get that shit away from me, I've been muting those authors. Self-insert/OC/Girl Marries Peter and/or Ed fic? Not read, but not muted since it's not as terrible. Most slash I'm giving a pass (I'm sorry, dudes are boring, I don't read most of the Peter & Edmund on their own fic, either).

I have absolutely picked up Pevensies/everyone and Caspian/Pevensies even more than I had, though. Like, Caspian Had A Goal, and that was to bang each of them once they were old enough. I also don't mind Caspian/Peter or Caspian/Edmund. I don't mind Caspian/Susan, though if it's Susan's Only True Love Ever I'm very meh on it. Caspian/Lucy is adorable.

I am less bothered by the Pevensie incest fic than I once was. (I can't throw stones here, I've written it, even if I posted it anon) I don't mind it in any configuration, but I'm also... ambivalent about it. Once I've made up my mind how I want to load it on AO3, I'll upload the bulk of the 3SF fics (it's the titles, ok, it's always trying to come up with titles that stalls me. I hate titles. And summaries, while we're at it. Fuck them)

And on that note, I'm going back to glaring at this stupid fic that won't write itself. Maybe I will shift gears and work on something else.
purplecat: A ruined keep. (General:Castle)
purplecat ([personal profile] purplecat) wrote2025-06-27 06:58 pm
Entry tags:

Random Castle


A rectangular entrance building with battlements and a large wooden door, next to a taller building - also with battlements and a rounded corner.  All in reddish stone.
Powis Castle
purplecat: Hand Drawn picture of a Toy Cat (Default)
purplecat ([personal profile] purplecat) wrote2025-06-26 05:33 pm

So, what else did you do in Peru?

Our Inca Trail holiday actually started with three days spent in and around Cusco, the ancient Inca Capital. Our first day started with a walking tour of Cusco. Because of the various mix-ups with permits, this was with a guide called Arturo who should have been our guide for the whole trip, but wasn't.

Photos under the Cut )
purplecat: The family on top of Pen Y Fan (General:Walking)
purplecat ([personal profile] purplecat) wrote2025-06-25 06:55 pm

Machu Picchu

Then Wilbert showed us around Machu Picchu.

Photos )

The story of Machu Picchu, as Wilbert told it to us, was that it was under construction as a district capital when the Spanish arrived. Intimating that things were going badly with the Spanish, the Inca moved 700 people and all their gold from their capital of Cusco along the Inca trail to Machu Picchu, destroying the roads behind them with landslides. They remained there for 80 years but were aware that the Spanish, in search of the gold, were getting closer aided by a generation of half-Peruvian, half-Spanish collaborators. After 80 years, therefore, they hid the gold in the surrounding hills and some moved back towards Cusco where they were captured by the Spanish and others moved east into the Amazon where their descendents were briefly encountered by archeologists in the 1970s. The Spanish eventually reached Machu Picchu but found no gold. This story does not appear anywhere else I've looked (but, as noted, information at the level of detail I'm accustomed to for historic sites is much harder to find for Machu Picchu), but it wouldn't surprise me if it isn't the legend as told among the local Andean people.