...The Rest, Slashed! - Stargate SG-1 icons
Dec. 20th, 2025 06:25 pm
Check out the rest here. <3
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A couple of Biggles promptfics
Dec. 19th, 2025 09:46 pm1. Friendly fire: Algy and EvS
200 wds - Also on Tumblr
( Under the cut, with prompt )
2. Drug that mimics death - Erich & Biggles
700 wds - Also on Tumblr.
( Under the cut, with prompt )
Philosophical Questions:
Dec. 20th, 2025 01:15 amWhat would happen to a society in which no one had to work, and everyone was provided enough food/water/shelter/healthcare for free?
( Read more... )
Poem: "The Community Couch"
Dec. 19th, 2025 10:25 pm( Read more... )
The December Comfort Watches 2025, Day Nineteen: The Big Short
Dec. 20th, 2025 04:17 am

There was, to be clear, nothing very comforting at all about the 2008 global economic crisis. It was a deeply messed-up time, and even if one was not in danger of losing one’s home in the mess, the reverberations of the collapse of the US housing market echoed through people’s lives in strange and unexpected ways. In my own, there is a line of dominos that goes from the collapse of the housing market to me walking away from a contract for a five-book YA series in early 2009. I was pissed about that, I want you to know. But I assure you that what I experiences was a glancing blow compared to the very real hits lots of other people took. People lost houses. People lost jobs. People’s lives were ruined. And, apparently, no one saw any of this coming.
No, one, that is, but a few finance dudes who, in the mid-2000s, looked at how mortgage-backed securities were being put together by banks and financial companies, realized they were a time bomb waiting to happen, and did what finance dudes do — figured out a way to make a shitload of money when the timebomb went off. These men (and they were all men) were not heroes or good guys. They made money when everyone else had the ground beneath their feet crumble into dust. They did by betting on the misfortunes of others. But no matter what else happened, they did see it coming when no one else could see it, or, more to the point, wanted to see it.
The Big Short is based on the book of the same name by financial journalist Michael Lewis, who, it must be said, has had enviable success in getting his books turned into films; aside from this, his books Moneyball and The Blind Side found their way to the big screen as well. Those books had an approachable hook in that they were about sports as much as they were about money, and everyone (in the US, at least) knows about baseball and football. For The Big Short, the question was: was there actually an audience for a movie about mortgage-backed securities? And how would you find that audience if there were?
Director Adam McKay, who previous to this movie was best known for a series of funny-but-not-precisely-sophisticated films with Will Ferrell, including Anchorman and Step-Brothers, had a two-step solution for the problem of making trading interesting. First, he absolutely packed the film with big names: Brad Pitt. Steve Carell. Christian Bale. Ryan Gosling. That’s a pretty stacked cast right there. Second, any time he had to explain an abstruse financial concept, he gleefully broke the fourth wall and had some other incredibly famous people tell you what the concept was, in a way that didn’t sound like a bunch of boring exposition. So: Anthony Bourdain using fish soup to explain collateral debt organization, Selena Gomez making bets in Las Vegas to elucidate credit default swaps, and, most memorably, Margot Robbie in a bubble bath, explaining how mortgage-backed securities worked in the first place.
Yes! It’s a gimmick! But it’s a gimmick that works to give everybody watching the information they need to know to keep watching and understanding what happens next. McKay has the characters in the main story break the fourth wall every now and again as well, to let the audience know when the story on the screen deviates from what happened in real life, or, in the case of Ryan Gosling, to act as the narrator for the story. This could be obnoxious but it mostly works, largely because the story being told is, actually, gripping.
Why? Because it’s about the end of the world, economically speaking — a financial collapse so big that the only other economic collapse in living memory to compare it to was the Great Depression of the 1930s. Financial folks were taking mortgages, the unsexiest and presumably most stable of financial instruments, and finding new and ever-more-risky ways to repackage them as investment properties, aided by greed and a regulatory system that either didn’t know how to evaluate these risky securities, or, equally likely, simply didn’t care to look. By the time we enter the picture, a few years before the collapse, the downsides are there if someone wanted to look.
The people who looked were Michael Burry (Bale), a clearly autistic nerd running a hedge fund who pored through the numbers and saw the inevitable; Jared Vennett (Gosling), one of the first bankers to look at Burry’s numbers and figure he was right; and Mark Baum (Carrell), who takes a meeting with Vennett, hears his pitch about the collapse, and decides to see how far down this mortgage-backed securities hole goes. Later on we meet Charlie Geller and Jamie Shipley (John Magaro and Finn Witrock) two small-fry fund managers who stumble upon Vennett’s pitch and then recruit Ben Rickert (Pitt) to get them the access they need to make their own short bets. All of these folks with the exception of Vennett are total outsiders, and when all of them come around to buy their shorts, every bank and financial firm is happy to take their money, because they think they are fools.
The thing is, none of these people were just working on a hunch. Burry looked deep into the numbers, while Baum had his people go down to places like Florida, where extremely risky mortgages were being written up, specifically so they could be shoved into, and hidden by, these securities that were allegedly low-risk investment opportunities. These scenes in the movie, where exotic dancers own five homes and are unaware how much risk they’ve exposed themselves to, renters are shocked to find their landlords aren’t keeping up with their mortgage payments, and mortgage underwriters simply do not give a shit who they give a loan to, are like a punch in the face. We see what Baum and his people see: all these people are screwed and there’s no way out of an economic slide into the abyss.
Mind you, not everyone understands it in the same way. When Geller and Shipley manage to wrangle a series of shorts on some exceptionally risky loans, they start dancing and pumping their fists thinking about their little victory — until Ricket makes it extremely clear to them what the cost of their being right is going to be. What? Consequences? Yes. Consequences.
We all know how this ends: The housing bubble collapses, century-old banks go under, foreclosures shoot through the roof, and the Great Recession misses becoming the Second Great Depression only by the smallest of margins. There is wreckage, and all of the main characters in this movie get their payday, although in some cases, it’s a near thing indeed. They get what they wanted, and not a single one of them is happy about it.
Damn it, Scalzi! I hear you say. This movie is depressing as hell! How can you say it’s a comfort movie? Because ultimately it’s about smart people doing smart things. These people don’t get where they end up in the movie because they’re lucky, they get where they end up because they of all people are willing to actually pay attention to what’s directly in front of them. They’re not just going with the flow; they understand the flow is actually an undertow, and it’s going to take everything down with it. And because no one else in the world wants to or is willing to see, then they’re going to do what’s available to them: Make some money off it.
Again: This does not make them good people. It makes them opportunists. Baum, at the very least, seems to be appalled by it all, not that the opportunity exists, but that it exists because other people can’t see the disaster they’re helping to make. He seems genuinely angry that people really are just this stupid. He still shoves his chips onto “collapse,” like everyone else in this film.
Here is the film’s implicit question: Even if any of these guys had screamed to high heaven about the risk of collapse, who would have listened? They weren’t going to do that — these are not those guys — but if they did, would it have mattered? The banks and the regulators and the financial gurus were all on board for everything being great. And there were Cassandras, people who pointed out that these securities were primed to explode, and just like the actual Cassandra, no one listened. If you could yell at the top of your lungs and still no one would give a shit, what’s left? As an investor, either find some part of the market that’s going to weather a global collapse, or short the crap out of it and fiddle while everything burns. We know what these guys did. What would you do?
The Big Short changed the career of Adam McKay, who walked away from this film with an Oscar for screenwriting and a license to make movies that aren’t just goofy (his films in the aftermath of this one: Vice, about Dick Cheney, and Don’t Look Up, about the actual end of the world). Good for him. I would like to say this movie also served as a warning about the dangers of blind and heedless capitalism, but look at the AI Bubble, where seven tech companies, all besotted by “AI,” are 40% of the S&P 500’s market capitalization, and are sucking the US dry of energy and water. The look at the current state of the housing market in the US, where in most states buying a home is unaffordable on the average income, and tell me what we’ve learned. The tell me whether the people running the country right now are equipped to handle the collapse when it happens, or will just try to short it themselves.
This movie isn’t a comfort movie because it has good people or a happy ending. It’s a comfort movie for one reason: Some people actually can see what is going to happen before it all goes off the rails. It’s comforting to know that in this, one is not alone.
— JS
Can someone actually DO their jobs?
Dec. 19th, 2025 08:27 pm1. Call vascular surgeon because no signs of my blood thinners. His nurse says Oh, your script was rejected. How did that happen? she asks herself
Me- Why did no one CALL me and tell me this?
Oh, I'm not sure. I'll make sure the doctor signs this today. If he did I don't think it was sent.
2. CVS after specifically being told not to fill my insulin filled my insulin. Now they'll have to put it back.
3. Been tracking my adagio tea order. It left NJ made it to Pittsburgh which sent it back to where it started in NJ. Made it to Pitt again. Wed they put up a can't deliver to that location. Meanwhile I have 2 boxes from Adagio in my bedroom proving they can. Go to the post office and the package it there and the substitute postmaster didn't put the delivery notice in the box. At least it was there
wrote a story that I think is really good but will probably get little notice. Ah well. I'm proud of it regardless
Title: Red Rain Is Coming Down All Over Me
Summary: Angel has gone back to Valentino because what choice does he have? That’s what he tells himself. That’s the only thing that will keep his friends safe. Being constantly high is his only solace but even drugs can only do so much. How long before he breaks?
Rating: Mature
Notes:Written for spikesgirl58s six word challenge. The words were Fireman Draw Pay Undo Exciting Frog
Also written for the allbingo prompt of (What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue and the lyrical titles bingo prompt of Lyric with "red" "green" or "blue". I chose Red Rain by Peter Gabriel.
( Story at the above link or below the cut )
Courting Disaster Torchwood
Style Icon FAKE
Not Fun The Fantastic Journey
Five Times the Knights Lie to Protect Merlin
Got My Eye On You Hazbin Hotel
Always And Forever Torchwood
Mistakes The Murderbot Diaries
Oh, That WAS Niffty! Hazbin Hotel
A Loser Gave to Me Hazbin Hotel
Cowley's the Boss The Professionals
First Aid. due South
My Best Friend Hazbin Hotel
Blue Christmas Hazbin Hotel
Snap, Crackle, Pop Hazbin Hotel
Professional Courtesy Torchwood
Pragmatic The Murderbot Diaries
Etched in Charcoal Hazbin Hotel
Floating on Sunshine Hazbin Hotel
Meliorism The Amazing Digital Circus
brothers in arms 陈情令 | The Untamed (TV)魔道祖师 - 墨香铜臭 | Módào Zǔshī - Mòxiāng Tóngxiù
It Broke His Heart to Hurt Her So, and Yet He Had to Do Hazbin Hotel
The Aftershow The Amazing Digital Circus
Touchin' Me, Touchin' You Hazbin Hotel
Climate Change
Dec. 19th, 2025 09:47 pmNew research reveals when glaciers around the world will vanish and why every fraction of a degree of warming could decide their fate.
Poetry Fishbowl Report for December 2, 2025
Dec. 19th, 2025 09:36 pmParticipation was down slightly, with 7 comments on LiveJournal and another 36 on Dreamwidth. A total of 9 people sent prompts. You have new donor
Read Some Poetry!
The following poems from the December 2, 2025 Poetry Fishbowl have been posted:
"Never -- Ever -- Quit"
"Protect the Inner Core"
"User Interfaces"
"Mamalokshen" (1-9-23, outside fishbowl)
Buy some poetry!
If you plan to sponsor some poetry but haven't made up your mind yet, see the unsold poetry list from December 2. That includes the title, length, price, and the original thumbnail description for the poems still available.
This month's donors include:
The Poetry Fishbowl has a landing page.
Poem: "Mamalokshen"
Dec. 19th, 2025 09:11 pm( Read more... )
White Elephant Gift Exchange
Dec. 19th, 2025 09:24 pmThe White Elephant gift exchange was fun. I "stole" a bobble-head of Jane Austen, which would be great for my library room, and wound up with it. That got me wondering if there are bobble-heads of other famous authors. There are on eBay! I foresee a collection.
I emailed in sick for a half-day because I was dizzy and took a nap. Slept for an extra hour than I had intended.
My singing lesson was amazing. We were doing warmups when she told me to imagine that I was a stereotype of an opera singer singing Wagner. And my voice completely opened up! It had some power to it! We were practicing Christmas carols because I didn't have anything that I needed to practice, and she told me to sing with that voice. So I did. She said, "You found your voice!" She is worth every penny that I pay her. I've learned more with her than I did with several teachers before her.
Fed us all. I want to go to bed soon so that I get up early and get to the post office.
Story Index 2025
Dec. 19th, 2025 09:36 pmI can't focus on long things, but by all that's unholy, I can write limericks and drabbles! I wrote other things, too, but golly.
My best story of this year:
Stand back, I'm going to try science!, in which Obi-Wan accidentally gives Anakin a complex about his body, and Anakin 3D prints himself helpful things. This one is deeply silly, and yet affectionate.
My favorite and/or truest story of this year:
The leaves grow bright before they fall wins this one for me, with Anakin and Obi-Wan doing the Hades and Persephone dance, in their own particular, backward, inside-out and upside-down sort of way.
( Read on )
Unsold Poems for the December 2, 2025 Poetry Fishbowl
Dec. 19th, 2025 07:53 pm( Read more... )
Friday five
Dec. 19th, 2025 04:55 pm2. What’s the best discovery you made in 2025? The song "Where Did You Sleep Last Night," Curti, the game Neko Atsume 2, etc
3. What’s the best feel-good story of 2025? The cat that was rescued after the Palisades Fire (since the fire, I keep seeing the word "Palisade"..weird lol). I definitely donated to the "get well" fund! Everything else has just been so negative :(
4. What was your best small win in 2025? If it’s the same as your answer to # 5 last week, what’s next on the list? Being able to say "have a good day!" to customers at work..out of nowhere I was able to say it. It gives good feelings to both me and the customers!
5. What was the kindest thing a stranger did for you in 2025? Hmm..maybe holding a door open for me? I'm too tired to think too deeply haha
This week was work's Christmas party..for some reason it was in the morning, so we wore pajamas and had breakfast (pancakes, eggs, etc). Like last year we did stocking stuffers, which was cool. They also brought cookies to decorate, but me and Juella had to leave to open the bookstore..still fun though! I have one more day of work and then I'm off until January 2. I definitely need a break, I'm so tired haha. The store has been busy though, yay! Lucie said she hired a new manager, who will start January 7th! I hope she's nice lol
( dec 13-19 )