#i hate leaf blowers

[weepingfoxfury]

Winter is coming?

Beginning to think we should all check in with Sean Bean every so often.

As my friend put it on this sunny but freezing cold morning, "Thank goodness for that, thought there'd be no winter at all."

My Forsythia plant seems to have other ideas. Another nighttime ramble with Smallest Dog and another unexpected flower.

My friend also apologised for the amount of racket her leaf blower efforts had made the other day. I then smiled to myself as the rest of her message said that it had all been in vain anyway as the leaves were back to covering everything by the following morning.

Let the leaves fall where they may ...

[strangebiology]

[Poem] You Don't Have to Run in Rain

You don���t have to run in rain, or dash through heat or hail, When you use a treadmill you can stay inside, off trails. You don’t have to see the seasons change or feel the sun, Avoid the world, the hills, the friends, and never really run.

You don’t have to feed the cat or take her to the vet, When you buy a plush toy as your only furry pet. You don’t have to feel the warmth of someone you’re fond of, Avoid the purrs, the pets, the play, and never really love.

You don’t have to take the time to draw or paint or write, The AI does that for you in a minute on the site. You don’t have to search your soul or enter a flow state, Avoid new things and building skills; never really create.

You don’t have to see the world, to bond or build a life, Do it artificially and never feel the strife. Living with experience is nothing one must do, But what about the journey is so terrible to you?

[moonwoodhollow]

my neighbours definitely have too much money; their gardener comes more than 3 times a week and no matter the season he's always using a leaf blower because apparently you can't have fallen leaves on the grass or anywhere else in the garden!!

[justalilguyoops]

my enemy #1, my nemesis, the thing i despise more than anything in the world, it's fucking ON SIGHT, i hate hate hate it:

leaf blowers

[fionnaf1re]

[dykefungus]

I wish every leaf blower in existence a very DIE DIE EXPLODE DEATH DIE DIE DISINTEGRATE DIE DIE EXPLODE DIE DEATH DIE

[aroguexenolith]

What’s wrong with rakes. Why are we using leaf blowers when it’s been two days since the last time and there is a total of 18 leaves on the ground. Maybe some dirt.

Why are we cool with exclusively using noisy and polluting tools for something a rake and maybe also a broom are perfectly good for.

[modernmythic]

Me: Oh it's a beautiful, cool morning. I think I'll go enjoy the lovely weather and read a book outside where it is nice and quiet and the birds are singing and the sun is shining through the trees.

The lawn guys: :)

Me: Don't...

The lawn guys: :)

Me: Please don't...

The lawn guys:

The lawn guys: *LEAF BLOWER*

[cecils-dragons]

I wanna draw a couple valentine piece but I’m stumped on who to draw and what would motivate me wah curse you depression, anxiety, and allergy team up!!!!

[stopfunkinwmyheart]

[maddiemuu]

LEAFBLOWER DIRECTLY OUTSIDE MY WINDOW YEA THIS IS HOW I WANTED TO START MY DAY. PERFECT. PEEERFECTTTTT

[weepingfoxfury]

Wind is picking up, orange and yellow weather warnings across the Emerald Isle. Time to batten the hatches, man the lifeboats and put on your water wings! There's leaves flying everywhere and I'm sincerely hoping to see some silly person using a leaf blower picked up by the next gust and blown into the next County! ;-D

In other news ... Busterson should be coming home today. Hooray! My biggest 7.7kg kitty cat has been staying at the 'Ritz' for the past two nights due to problems with an enlarged heart and fluid build up. Fingers crossed that he's now stable and his new medication will do the trick and he has some more happy days ahead of him ... though he still won't appreciate being on a diet.

Had to hit the shiny metropolis yesterday. Not fun at the best of times ... even less fun on a Friday. Busy, busy, busy! Halloween decorations to the left of me and Christmas decorations to the right ... next thing you know I'll be seeing the Easter bunny clad in a Valentine costume bringing me my post.

Time for this Victor Meldrew to sign off and go get breakfast ... wish me luck ... I may just find Santa Claus eating my porridge in the kitchen! ...

[everlocked]

why is the world so loud 😢

[crippled-peeper]

I hate leaf blowers. Shut the fuck up

[contritecactite]

Since @fandomtrumpshate starts up again soon, I thought I would babble a bit about my experience last year! Specifically, let's chat about podficcing. A nice and arbitrary 9 reasons to do the thing below the cut!

Thing 1: It's so much fun! I am bouncing up and down at the prospect of doing it again. In fact, I am planning to offer a slot for any fandom this year rather than just ones I'm familiar with!

Thing 2: Nobody was bothered by how amateurish my readings are, how basic my recordings were, or by the extra whistle and sibilance and mouth sounds that sneaked in. Nobody was annoyed that I don't do accents or intense voicework/character voices. It's something I want to improve in the future, but it's really not necessary—reading a fanwork aloud is first and foremost about making it accessible in a new format. Anything else is just icing!

Thing 3: People who want their works read are going to be communicative! The folks I worked with last year were happy to go back and forth until we decided which works were the best fit for me, and they were happy to answer my questions about how to read/interpret certain lines, etc. It was so much fun to toss around idea with them (even if we didn't end up using them all)!

Thing 4: This is a zero-entry-cost hobby (assuming you already have a device of some sort to read fic in the first place). You don't need fancy equipment and software. You can get the job done with an inbuilt audio recording app on your phone, and if you're in a quiet and non-echoey place, it can sound just as good as something made with a dedicated mic and such. Don't let "but I don't have a recording space" hold you back! Sit in your favorite chair and put your phone by your face while you read me a story. That's really all you gotta do.

Thing 5: In direct contrast... it is a good excuse to dip a toe into gear and software. There are lots of fairly cheap suitable microphones, and Audacity is free. I recorded one short fic via three different methods just to troubleshoot for fun!

Thing 6: You don't have to get it right the first time! (Or second or third or...) I save outtakes (profanity warning!) for the creators whose work I read. Sometimes a cat walked in and told me a mournful tale at top volume. Sometimes the neighbors turned on a leaf blower. You can even get silly with it on purpose if you need to warm yourself up! I do a lot of yelling "this is so silly and I am so embarrassed!" into the mic before I try a serious read.

Thing 7: You get to spend so much time with a work and its characters! You're gonna read that thing so many times to make decisions and to alert yourself to what's coming next. You'll be able to recite it around a campfire and it'll feel cozy and familiar (or, you know, extra painful if it's heavily angsty).

Thing 8: If you play things back and tweak them as often as I did, it goes a long way toward getting past hating the sound of your own voice or feeling disconnected from recordings of yourself. I've always been so so shy and hesitant to speak aloud in real-life conversations. I won't claim that I'm completely over any of those things, but spending time getting familiar with what I sound like in an objective, task-oriented setting has helped me learn to listen for my own vocal cues when I'm feeling too overwhelmed to process other kinds of feedback. I'm much more aware of what my uncertainty sounds like, for example, and am better able to cover for it now.

Thing 9: If you're also a writer as I am, it helps you look at your own writing through a new lens! I have been known to write 50+-word sentences, but now I (sometimes) stop to consider the punctuation breaks. How readable is this paragraph? Where would I take a breath if I were reading? Where would the emphasis naturally end up and how do I change that of it's not what I wanted?

I think people who are Better At Things might not necessarily have all the same experiences I shared here, but personally, I'm grateful for the opportunity, and I look forward to doing it again!

Here are the works I read for FTH last year:

Evil Plans by Sodium_Azide

The Night The World Didn't End by Aethelflaed

and the one that belongs to the earlier outtakes:

It Came Upon a Midnight Clear by my dear friend QuothTheMaiden, who still seems to like me just fine even though there's a terrible whine behind the whole thing (this was the troubleshooting fic btw. Software updated and defaulted to the wrong device, but I picked the better read over the better sound quality in the end).

[uncleasad]

top ten favorite hosie fics of all time, go

What a fun Ask! 🙏 Also, are you trying to kill me?! 😂

A few weeks ago, TheDarkestHour13 introduced the concept of Hope and Rafael keeping a list of “Landon’s Top 10 deaths” in Such Is Our Fate. I commented that that particular chapter (for reasons other than the deaths list) was a Top 10 chapter of the fic, though I also noted I didn’t have an actual list of my Top 10 chapters—there were approximately 120 chapters at that point. I also thought, in a related manner, that I didn’t have a “Top 10” list of Hosie fics…and perhaps that should have been my cue to start thinking about such a thing 😂

As of late June 2024 CE, there are nearly 2600 fics in the AO3 Hosie tag and I’ve been reading since the latter part of 2019…so I’ve probably read ½ to ⅔ of them…

I came up with 7 fics right away, but as I started to make links and such, I realized that 5 of those were incomplete (ongoing, but mostly either rarely updated or, practically speaking, abandoned); I don’t know what it says about me that my “top ten favorite hosie fics of all time” is full of fics that may never be finished.

But in terms of recommendations for reading, I know lots of folks will not want to start reading a work that hasn’t been updated in years and has a high likelihood of never being finished, no matter how amazing it is (or how much someone else liked it). And even for ones that are currently ongoing, it’s possible (though unlikely) that the author could do something crazy to make me hate the fic later on. So I thought I’d spin off all those works that were incomplete into a separate list and come up with 10 favorite finished fics…I could mamage that, right? As I started trying to do that…nope, that’s not done, either; that’s been abandoned 😳 oh, what about that fic? wow, how did I forget that one?! (Like I said, are you trying to kill me?! 😂)

So…to save my life (and to stop spending hours upon hours on this), the end result is about 30 fics all-told, completed and incomplete. (I further subdivided the incomplete fics into those that are updated at least once every few months and those that…aren’t 😢) They’re ordered roughly by time, with the earlier/older fics towards the tops of the lists and the more recent ones (mostly) towards the ends of the lists. Two of the fics on the “Completed” list had promised an epilogue that has never appeared, but you can read the entire story arc, so I think it’s fair to label them as complete.

So without further ado…

Completed:

it's a date (the only problem is it's fake) by avengerskye / @avengerskye

Coffee on Monday, Flowers on Friday by Redezzy

The Missing Piece by intribridsname 

slept next to her but I dreamt of you all summer long by hackingxbiochemist

what you got (cause I want it all) by ToriWritesStories / @toriwritesstories

summer lovin' had me a blast (wait, no, that's just the leaf-blower) by AdeleDazeem

Our Last Life by taengoo1 / @taengooxlove

I'll Never Give Up Hope by O_M_Jee

HM+JS by tellingtouch

Invisible String by luthorbae

Then why's it feel so good? by callipoicepole (Killing Eve AU)

This Is Your Home by Shadowmama55 / @shadowhuntermama

Shivers (A Lifetime of crimes, but the worst was loving you.) by ch8rlie

The Stages of Grief by endgamesonly

'tis the damn season. by wandererghost (complete, though promised epilogue still outstanding)

Lizzie Saltzman, Matchmaker by TheNutcase (complete, though promised epilogue still outstanding)

In-Progress – still updating regularly or at least every few months:

Such Is Our Fate by TheDarkestHour13 / @persevereforahappyending (updated every Friday)

The Power Field by Joho_meh

4 Years, 6 Months, 8 Days by Limon_Skittles

To Know My Heart The Best (You’d Have To Cut It Out My Chest) by mambaregz

Incomplete – rarely updated, on hiatus, or orphaned:

Dive bar on the east side by Bluejay720 (7 chapters to go)

summer rush by sabrinasfadingmoon / @sabrinasfadingmoon (incomplete)

im not gonna let you go so easily by allweseeislight (1 chapter to go 🤞)

'tis the damn season by blckmaqic, LizMikaelson (1 chapter to go 🤞)

Redemption by MysticSlurp (Red Dead Redemption AU, incomplete)

Sad Bedroom Eyes by EvilPenguinRika / @evilpenguinrika (on hiatus)

Hell Hath No Fury by ElegiesEulogizeMe (Ringer AU, 6 chapters to go)

the stages of waking by dandelionlighters / @dandelionlighters (incomplete)

let’s watch it all burn down together by iris_on_the_moon (zombie apocalypse; orphaned)

A number of the authors are no longer active in writing Hosie fics (not surprising in 2024, considering), but many of them (including the authors of the incomplete works I like) have substantial catalogs, so if you read and enjoy one of these, be sure check that author’s list of other works (and of course leave kudos and comments! 🙏)

—

If anyone would like to see other fics I’ve enjoyed, there’s the fic recommendation tag here on my tumblr that captures a few from the last couple of years, and I also have a few AO3 collections of specific themes/subjects:

Hosie Zombie Apocalypse (HosieZombieApocalypse)

Hosie Summertime Vibes (SummeryHosie)

Hosie Season 2 “What If?” (Hosie_Season_2_What_If)

Hosie Post-Season 4 (Hosie_Post_Season_4)

Sorry I couldn’t get it down to 10, @tribridsireline 😂 But I hope everyone reading finds something new and exciting to read!