This week's prompt is:


Assert


Have fun!

P.s. I'll take care of tagging.

Where has the month gone?! All right, a lot of it has gone into writing, but that surely can't be all ... *looks around, waves at everyone* Hi! I'm still here. *g*

Anyway! I wrote longer stories for fffx and highadrenalineexchange, both of which revealed this month, and fffx has already had author reveals. So now that I'm actually posting, of course this is the first thing to post about!

It took me a while to actually settle on what I wanted to write for this exchange. I had another idea that I hope to tackle some day, but I think I picked the right thing in the end! It came together pretty well once I actually decided.

It's Guardian again, canon divergence during the early episodes - set right after the face-stealer case (episode 4) and before the water kidnapping/Butler Wu case (episode 5). Zhao Yunlan gets to interact more closely with the Black-Cloaked Envoy, rather than Professor Shen, and gains some insights. There is coughing up blood and wound-tending and tea and conversation, and all of it takes place in a very constrained space, because I trapped them together. *g*

If you want, there's even a visual reference for the space they're stuck in, because my beta noted that things weren't completely clear, so I made myself a reference for editing purposes. Have a floor plan!

(And many thanks to china_shop for beta-reading, as usual! ♥)

**

Title: Close the Distance, Lock Us In
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018)
Relationship: Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan, Zhao Yunlan & Black-Cloaked Envoy
Characters: Shen Wei, Zhao Yunlan, mini-cameos by SID members
Content tags: Episode Related, Post-Episode 4, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Zhao Yunlan & the Black-Cloaked Envoy, Protective Shen Wei, Hurt Shen Wei, Protective Zhao Yunlan, Trapped Together, Black and White Energy, a bit of Hurt/Comfort, Identity Porn

Summary:

The Black-Cloaked Envoy slammed down into the nondescript little flat like a thunderbolt from the heavens, not a moment too soon.

Zhao Yunlan and the Black-Cloaked Envoy, trapped together early on: how much of a difference can it really make? Turns out, a surprising amount.

• stuff to read before bed
• audiobooks/podcasts to fall asleep to/keep me company when I wake up in the middle of the night
• the weather app
• checking how badly the Twins lost last night
• going to the gym (needs an app) (not that I've had time to go to the gym yet, but knowing that I couldn't -- without trying to get the silent young people behind the desk to help me anyway -- still made me sad)
• reading my DW circle! it's so busy lately with 3weeks4dreamwidth hooray, but I feel so out of touch!
• podcasts to keep me company while I brush my teeth, empty the dishwasher, make tea
• very easy game to play as a like a fidget toy
• messaging the group chat that provides most of my social life these days
• checking my e-mail
• looking up a thing
• taking a picture of a silly thing for social media
• social media
• looking up another thing
• podcasts to keep me company
• messaging the people in my house about tea etc.
• telling the time
• reading that tab I had open
• adding something to the shopping list
• planning when to leave the house to get the bus to transgym
• checking I had booked for transgym
• writing an e-mail
• social media
• texting the neighbor about walking Teddy
• podcasts
• two-factor authentication (luckily I could opt for an e-mail to be sent to me instead)

I'm so tired.

maevedarcy posted a friending meme.

Copy/paste the box below:
<br /><br /><u><strong>Getting to know me</strong></u><br /><b>origin of your username:</b> <br /><b>i always order this food: </b><br /><b>current overused emoji: </b><br /><b>current favorite show:</b> <br /><b>current favorite book: </b><br /><b>current favorite video game:</b> <br /><b>song on repeat:</b> <br /><b>last thing you really got into:</b> <br /><b>oddly specific thing that brings you joy: </b><br /><b>phone wallpaper: </b><br /><b>what smell makes you happy:</b> <br /><b>morning, night, or other type:</b> <br /><b>what’s your work/profession: </b><br /><br />



Getting to know me
origin of your username: I originally wanted it to be 'Raederle' for my favorite fictional female character but that was already taken, so I tried 'Moonheart' for a beloved book, but that was also taken, so I substituted 'selene' for 'moon' and came up with Seleneheart. I didn't think about doing Raederle-of-An until much later.
i always order this food: At Mexican restaurants, I always order fajitas the first time I go there. How else am I supposed to evaluate them and compare? We can have only one independent variable.
current overused emoji: ^_^
current favorite show: Hard to say. I just finished Bridgerton S4 but it's probably Heated Rivalry.
current favorite book: What ever book I'm reading. Which at the moment is The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.
current favorite video game: Always and forever Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
song on repeat: The entirety of Amercian Idiot album by Greenday.
last thing you really got into: Really got into? What does that mean? If it means couldn't stop thinking about, kept me up at night sort of thing, that would be moving out of Texas.
oddly specific thing that brings you joy: the birds outside my bedroom window waking up and twittering with dawn
phone wallpaper: My lockscreen is a sea turtle art piece by someone who's name escapes me at the moment. My homescreen is a marker art piece that I did.
what smell makes you happy: Smelling my kids - they all smell different.
morning, night, or other type: Just glad to be here.
what’s your work/profession: Attorney

Hosting some drabblethons over at seventhdoctor and first_doctor, for any Classic Doctor Who fans out there.

And also hosting a drabblethon over at conradveidt, for any silent film and Old Hollywood enthusiasts.

Title: Close Range
Fandom: Viola come il mare (Italian TV show)
Author: veronyxk84
Pairing: Viola Vitale/Francesco Demir
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: safe use of guns in controlled environment (shooting range)
Word count: 200 (Ellipsus)
Spoilers/Setting: Set during S2.
Summary: At the shooting range, Viola hits the target’s heart on her first shot. Francesco jokes about it, but he knows he’s the one at risk of being figuratively shot through the heart—at close range.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction created for fun and no profit has been made. All rights belong to the respective owners.

Challenge: #436 - Inch

Crossposted: My journal (with bonus Italian version), “Chiamami Ancora Amore” - the Series

—
( READ: Close Range/Double drabble )

☙ ☙ ☙

This year during Three Weeks for Dreamwidth, I'm writing about reading as a way of becoming an expert in a given subject. Read Part 1: Introduction to Becoming an Expert, Part 2: Architecture.


Three Weeks for Dreamwidth Part 3: Dance

Dance is a performing art about moving the body, usually but not always to music. It exists in many styles. Every ethnic group or other cultural identity tends to have their own dances. Here on Dreamwidth, check out beautifulmechanical and first_nations_freaks.



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These are some posts from the later part of last week in case you missed them:
Poem: "Our Homemade Safety Nets"
Birdfeeding
Friending Meme
Today's Adventures
Philosophical Questions: Different
You Don't Have to Stay
Science
Birdfeeding
Today's Adventures
Birdfeeding
Follow Friday 4-24-26: Metal
Vocabulary: Scabrous
History
History
History
Community Thursdays
Earth Day
Poem: "When You Learn to Read"
Wildlife
Birdfeeding
Hard Things

Poem: "Walnut Park" has 41 comments. Early Humans has 22 comments. Philosophical Questions: Pregnancy has 66 comments. Safety has 77 comments.


Three Weeks for Dreamwidth is running April 25-May 15. People aim to make a new post each day, or participate in various activities to celebrate the platform.

Three Weeks for Dreamwidth: Introduction to Becoming an Expert
Three Weeks for Dreamwidth: Architecture




"No Faster or Firmer Friendships" belongs to Polychrome Heroics and needs $45 to be complete. Josué makes friends with Maria-Vera.


The weather has been mild here. We got some rain the other day. Seen at the birdfeeders this week: a mixed flock of sparrows and house finches, a male cardinal, and a fox squirrel. Red-winged blackbirds have been singing overhead. I heard a bluejay screaming but didn't see it. Currently blooming: violets, tulips, anemone, Solomon's seal, pansies, violas, sweet alyssum, bleeding heart, chokecherries, alliums, lilies of the valley, marigolds, honeysuckle, raspberies, snapdragons, lantana, million bells, blue lobelia, petunias, portulaca, nemesia, wild chives, star of Bethlehem. Flower buds: peonies. Green fruit: mulberries.

So many Vietnam photos still to be posted orz. Sorry for the complete silence after. I am alive, just eaten by brainworms the past few weeks. It makes me second guess everything I say, which makes posting/replying a little hard.

Anyway, this is merely an "I'm alive" post.

I should start watching Witch Hat Atelier. It looks very beautiful and I've always wanted to read it and friends tell me I'd love it. The only anime I really ended up catching this season so far is Liar Game, a death game[1] type story I loved many years back. The first game is really not that interesting so I'm glad we are past first game now. Hopefully not too many people dropped it because of eps 1-3... I've been eyeing Awajima Hyakkei (all girls opera school) and Nippon Sangoku (I've heard someone say it feels like Golden Kamuy, and that's a point in its favour).

What are you watching right now, if you're watching anything?

Oh right, here's a plug for a new DW community for joseimuke stuff here: joseimuke

Check it out!

[1] Death game stories do not have to wager lives. It just has to have consequences so dire that it's like losing your life anyway, and in Liar Game's case, losers will be 100 million in debt.

Hi all, we have eight post-deadline pinch hits available! These are all due Friday, May 1, noon Eastern time (Countdown), though we can be flexible if needed.

If you would like to claim a pinch hit, please comment on this post with the name/number of the pinch hit you would like. Make sure to include your AO3 username! Comments are screened.

( CLAIMED PH 9 - Fireworks (1947)/Succession (TV 2018), O Fantasma (2000), O Fantasma (2000)/Succession (TV 2018), The Sergeant (1968), Succession (TV 2018) )

( CLAIMED PH 17 - Original Work, Chess Pieces (Anthropomorphic), Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, Ancient History RPF, Nibelungenlied, Norse Religion & Lore, Mesopotamian Mythology, Tarot (Divination Cards) )

( PH 18 - Liar Game (Manga), Liar Game (Manga), Persona 2, Persona 2, 时光代理人 | Link Click (Live Action TV), 时光代理人 | Link Click (Live Action TV), BlazBlue Series (Video Games), BlazBlue Series (Video Games), 宇宙戦艦ヤマト2199 | Space Battleship Yamato 2199 (Anime), 宇宙戦艦ヤマト2199 | Space Battleship Yamato 2199 (Anime), Tales of Rebirth (Video Game), Tales of Rebirth (Video Game), Kamen Rider Zi-O, Kamen Rider Zi-O, Kamen Rider W, Kamen Rider W, 全职高手 - 蝴蝶蓝 | Quánzhí Gāoshǒu - Húdié Lán, 全职高手 - 蝴蝶蓝 | Quánzhí Gāoshǒu - Húdié Lán, Keroro Gunsou | Sgt. Frog, Keroro Gunsou | Sgt. Frog )

( CLAIMED PH 19 - Trigun (Anime & Manga 1995-2008), Trigun Stampede & Trigun Stargaze (Anime 2023-2026), 时光代理人 | Link Click (Cartoon), 凸变英雄X | To Be Hero X (Cartoon), Space Vehicles (Anthropomorphic), Astronomy (Anthropomorphic), Original Work, 極楽街三番通の件 | Gokurakugai (Manga), 勇者刑に処す 懲罰勇者9004隊刑務記録 - ロケット商会 | Yuushakei | Sentenced to Be a Hero (Anime) )

( CLAIMED PH 20 - Formula 1 RPF, Project Hail Mary (2026), Smosh (Video Blogging RPF) )

( CLAIMED PH 21 - Project Hail Mary (2026), Heated Rivalry (TV), Wicked (Movie 2024), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Ted Lasso (TV), Andor (TV), Superman (Movie 2025), Wednesday (TV 2022), SPY x FAMILY (Anime) )

( CLAIMED PH 22 - Dance of the Vampires (Broadway version) - Steinman/Kunze/Ives, Project Hail Mary (2026), The Terror (TV 2018) )

( CLAIMED PH 23 - Katekyou Hitman Reborn!, SK8 the Infinity (Anime), Twisted-Wonderland (Video Game) )

These are the Notes for "Our Homemade Safety Nets."

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This poem came out of the March 17, 2026 Bonus Fishbowl. It was inspired by a prompt from dialecticdreamer. It also fills the "Thread" square in my 3-1-26 card for the National Crafting Month Bingo fest. This poem has been sponsored by fuzzyred. It belongs to the Mercedes thread of the Polychrome Heroics series.

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For 3weeks4dreamwidth this year, I thought it would be fun to run an icon request fest! I'm largely basing this on the one run on smallbatchicons by goodbyebird in 2022. Thanks for the inspo!

The Basics

• Anyone is welcome to join in to request and/or fill.
• This fest is open to any fandoms and stock.
• If you're interested in filling requests, you might want to track the comments on this post.
• Comments on icons are always appreciated, and be sure the credit the maker if you snag an icon.
• All icons will be sharable and usable by anyone.
• Requests are open through May 15.

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The more the merrier! Here is code for sharing this fest at your own journal if you'd like:

<center><a href="https://reeby10.dreamwidth.org/274995.html"><img src="https://imgur.com/U4PPBlE.png"></a><br />Join the Icon Request Fest for <user name="3weeks4dreamwidth"></center>

Link: fictionalidols
Description: Are you into idols? More specifically fictional idols? Or are you in a fandom that involves music in some way? Then this is the community for you!

Fictional Idols is a generalised community for all idol and idol-adjacent media. This includes any anime, manga, video game etc. that revolves around musicians or has a lot of overlap with idol media in general. Just as long as it's fictional. For a more detailed explanation of what media counts as 'idol' or 'idol-adjacent', check out our rules post.

We also have a friending meme as well as some low-pressure community events if that piques your interest (mostly for recs so far but there may be more in the future).

Thanks to a donation from fuzzyred, there are 50 new verses in "No Faster or Firmer Friendships." Josué and Maria-Vera begin reading The Last Calabash together, a story about family loss and recovery.

Official AO3 newspost: “Below is a list of different types of spam comments that have been posted on AO3 over the last year. […] None of the accusations these spam comments make are true. The bots are merely spamming false accusations in order to alarm or harass AO3 users. It is generally safe to ignore these comments once you’ve removed and/or reported them as outlined below.”

“When one five-year-old said, “I love you,” to the toy, it replied: “As a friendly reminder, please ensure interactions adhere to the guidelines provided. Let me know how you would like to proceed.”” (This article claims professionals are “divided” over the potential of LLM toys…even though they only managed to find professionals who say the toys are bad for kids.)

“Back in August of last year, Grammarly shipped a feature called Expert Review, which allowed you to get writing suggestions from AI-cloned “experts,” and reporters at The Verge and other outlets discovered that those experts included us. It included me. […] I’ve been an editor for over 15 years. I’ve literally never said anything like that.“

“Ikonomou emailed the journal on September 23 requesting the removal of the article and also asked for an explanation for “how this submission was accepted given the fake email address and affiliation.” On October 6, a representative from the publisher named Dwayne Harrison emailed back saying the journal would need a “confirmation regarding the withdrawal charges,” telling Ikonomou he would have to pay a fee.“

“There were several other instances where it wrote c++ code that was technically correct, but horrible inefficient […] I also had a instance where a file was being read from the wrong path and instead of prepending the right path it tried to completely rewrite my library. Ironically it also had a problem with const. It recompiled the program three times randomly changing where const appeared. I feel for ya. I have spent a lot time over this experiment correcting AI.“

“Last week, Anthropic surprised the world by declaring that its latest model, Mythos, is so good at finding vulns that it would create chaos if released. […] But just how many problems have they really discovered? According to VulnCheck researcher Patrick Garrity, the answer is…drumroll…maybe 40. Or maybe none at all.”

“The flagship demonstration document [of “Mythos”] turns out to be like the ending of the Wizard of Oz, a sorry disappointment about a model weaponizing two bugs that a different model found, in software the vendor had already patched, in a test environment with the browser sandbox and defense-in-depth mitigations stripped out. Anthropic failed, and somehow the story was flipped into a warning about its success. Whomp. Whomp. Sad trombone.“

(I have to post every day for the event, you see.)
I updated my post for DW noobs, although I had to change a lot less than I thought I'd have to. I just changed some wording, added a details tag, and added two suggested communities (fictional_fans and agonyaunt).