Eddie | 31 | white | queerio | biased in favour of the trans lobby | satanic whore | transmasc but any pronouns work | suspected of being a member of the terrorist group antifa | spoilers are tagged but are here Mobile header by undomielle
Links lead to AO3, unless specified otherwise. Anything NSFW is labelled as such. PROMPTS FOR DADWC OR STAR WARS ARE ALWAYS WELCOME.
Dragon Age
DADWC Writing Info, including prompts.
Assorted Tales of Thedas (one shots)
The Prayer || Blood of the Lion || Blood of the Crow || Two Hands Longing (for Each Other's Warmth) || Tempting Fate || An Unfriendly Wager || Shadows and Tall Trees || Sanctuary || Easy Like a Sunday Morning || From Childhood's Hour || Scathefire || A Rose Upon a Thorn || Let Me Walk (Before They Make Me Run) || An In-Tents Situation || Risk My Hands to Pick Up Shards || All the Time in the World (nsfw) || The Morning After || Fair Game || Blessings of the Hearth || A Path Once Taken || Safe Under Cover || The Beginning of All Things || Aisling Lavellan Makes Her Mark || The Safest Place to Hide (nsfw) || You Will Find Him Next to Me || Wine Upon the Lips || Don't Look Back Into the Sun || Welcome Distraction (nsfw) || Pillow Talk || Planning Permission || The Nug King's Prize
Chaptered Fics
Steps of Faith (Cullen, Eireann, Alistair, Kali) || A Small Quiet Companion (1,2)
The Lion and the Hind
In the Oak, I Found the Arrow || Knight's Gambit
Star Wars
Blessings || A Ghost of Lasan
Star Wars: Children of the Force
Prequel: Saudade
Part One: Awakening
Prologue: Leaving Home | The Exercise | Unmasking | The Scavenger | Interlude: Desperation | Imposition and Invention | Man Against Fire | TIE Hard | Sand and Ruin | The Garbage Does | Truth and Honest Lies | The Ghost and the Runaway | Interlude: Spectres | The Castle of Maz Kanata | The First Steps | Purifying Light | The Lightsaber | Convergence | The Resistance | Battle of Wits | Interlude: An Invitation | Infiltration | Behind Enemy Lines | Stars, Hide Your Fires | Mundicide | Open Wide, O Earth | Restoration | Rarely Pure and Never Simple | The Island | Epilogue: The Day Poe Dameron Broke His Wrist
Part Two: The Return of Skywalker
Prologue: Mirrorbright | Skywalker | The Dreadnought | Paige | Finn Filled In | The Jedi Tree | Interlude: The High Council of Lira San | Silence | The Admiral and the Mechanic | Rose’s Lament | The First Lesson | A Caged Bird
“spicy pillow” jokes aside, I think @flowerkrone’s tags deserve a serious reply:
#my old phone looks like this on my shelf lmao #im too scared to touch it to throw it away #idk what trash this even goes into when its at this point
The pillow-shaped object here used to be the phone’s battery. It’s not a battery anymore. Now it’s a balloon full of corrosive, pyrophoric chemicals and hydrogen gas and it’s one puncture away from burning your house down. I am 100% serious. You should be scared to touch it.
But you gotta touch it, because you gotta get it out of your house before the pressure builds up to the point where the balloon pops. This isn’t going to happen soon – there is no need to panic – but it will happen eventually.
And, indeed, it doesn’t go in the ordinary trash. You put this in the ordinary trash and you’re gonna set the garbage truck on fire. Don’t do that to the garbage collectors, their job is hard enough already.
The first thing you need to do is get a fireproof container. The most common household item that qualifies as a fireproof container is a cast-iron cookpot with a cast-iron lid – often sold as a “Dutch oven.” Any other cooking container that’s unreactive, has a very high melting point, and has a lid made of the same materials will also work: enameled or stainless steel, Pyrex with glass lid, etc.
However: Do not use a pot with a PTFE-based non-stick coating. If the battery does explode, the fire will probably be hot enough to degrade a PTFE coating, producing toxic smoke. (Not that you should breathe the smoke from the battery fire either, but PTFE breakdown products are worse.) Do not use a pot made of aluminium or copper. The fire might even get hot enough to melt those.
Whatever container you use, you might have to throw away along with the phone, so don’t use your good Dutch oven for this. Go to a thrift store and buy a cheap one.
Once you have the fireproof container:
Gently pick up the phone and put it in the fireproof container. If possible, gently tape the phone to the bottom of the container to prevent it from bouncing around. Don’t put any padding in there, that’ll just make a fire worse if it does happen. Put the lid on and tape it shut.
Put a label on the container, something like “DEFECTIVE LI-ION BATTERY – FIRE HAZARD”.
It is now reasonably safe to move the container around. However, if the battery does explode, the container is very likely to leak smoke and get hot, so keep it in a well-ventilated area and away from things that will be damaged by heat. Don’t leave it exposed to the weather, either.
You need to find either a hazardous waste disposal site, or an e-waste recycler that will accept defective Li-ion batteries. I can’t help with that because I have no idea where you live.
However, your local fire department, if you have one, will probably be happy to help. Call their non-emergency number. Nothing is on fire yet, so this isn’t an emergency, but things that can easily start a fire are still within the fire department’s responsibilities. Tell them you have a phone with a bulging lithium-ion battery, you put it in a fireproof container, and you want to know how to dispose of it safely.
If the fire department tries to tell you this isn’t dangerous or it’s okay to throw it out in the regular trash (with or without fireproof container), hang up on them and write a cranky letter to your local government representatives, then keep looking for a proper disposal site.
When you do find a a hazardous waste disposal site or an e-waste recycler, call them and make sure they will take defective Li-ion batteries, before showing up. That’s also a good time to ask if they will let you have the fireproof container back.
“Much as I love playing Grace, who is a very good man, I sometimes find myself desperate to break out and do something else.”
Under the cut: Daily Telegraph interview with John Simm (April 2025)
John Simm: ‘Finding out my dad was not my biological father? It explained a lot’
The Life on Mars star on the truth about his parentage and why he doesn’t have time for underprepared actors
The first thing I ask John Simm is whether his new character, Gray, an angry, washed-up record producer in Chris Lang’s new family drama I, Jack Wright, was written especially for him. Not that Simm is washed-up in any way, rather that across a career stretching more than 30 years he’s established a reputation for playing volatile, pugilistic, screwed-up men. Yet Simm is flustered by the question. “Hang on, what’s this interview for again?” he asks. “Oh, you mean Gray. Not Grace. Sorry. I need to get my head straight.”
You can understand the confusion. The week after we speak, the police procedural Grace, in which Simm plays the eponymous sensitive detective, returned to ITV for a fifth season. The highly bankable star of Life on Mars and Doctor Who has played the “very straight, decent copper” since 2021 and the role has been his longest consistent job – a godsend, he says, in an increasingly budget-stricken TV industry in which many of his actor friends are finding themselves “out of work”.
Simm, a restless, self-confessed workaholic, is one of the lucky ones. He never seems to stop. “Much as I love playing Grace, who is a very good man, I sometimes find myself desperate to break out and do something else.”
Hence Gray, who is not a good man at all. It’s a vintage Simm part – a nasty piece of work who tasted success during the then roaring music industry in the 1990s, but who squandered it on drugs and booze and is now in debt to the tune of 50 grand to a local bruiser, who often likes to remind Gray of the fact by punching him in the face.
Estranged from his obscenely wealthy father (played by Trevor Eve), Gray has great hopes of a lifeline when his dad dies in an apparent suicide. Yet the titular Wright has instead split his wealth between his granddaughter and various charitable causes, violently upending the expectations of his remaining feuding relations and leaving Gray, whose 1990s swagger is long past its sell-by-date, a bitter desperate mess.
“I don’t think Gray’s a bad person, I just think he’s had a really difficult life,” says Simm of a flailing manchild who finds himself, along with the rest of the family, a suspect when Wright’s death is revealed to be murder. “At heart he’s a damaged little boy who felt rejected by his parents and who took the wrong path. And if you are in the music business, that’s easy to do. It’s easy for the world to leave you behind.”
Simm knows a bit of what he speaks. Having grown up playing gigs with his musician dad in the working men’s clubs of the north-west, he spent the early 1990s in his band Magic Alex, touring with Echo and the Bunnymen and playing venues such as the Brixton Academy and the Royal Albert Hall.
“I saw a lot of casualties,” he says of a scene on which he also drew heavily for his roles in Human Traffic, about the late 1980s club culture, and Michael Winterbottom’s 2002 Madchester comedy 24 Hour Party People. “There was a lot of drugs, a lot of excess.” Does he see in Gray a case of there but for the grace of God? “I guess in a way I did feel a bit of that. We nearly got signed, but by that point I was working as an actor, and starring in [Jimmy McGovern’s] The Lakes. I’d chosen acting instead.”
In truth, it’s hard to see much shred of screwy psychology in the amiable Simm, who is married with two children, and who cuts a surprisingly small and slight figure in the London hotel where we meet, almost dwarfed by the overstuffed armchair in which he is sitting. Some performers channel hidden bits of themselves into the parts they play; Simm opts for characters that take him as far from his seemingly equable, stable, untroubled life as possible.
For many years in the late 1990s and throughout the Noughties he was TV’s leading pin-up in painfully-flawed characters, probing the wayward excesses of masculinity in blistering roles from the gambling addict Danny in The Lakes to a disturbed teenager in Cracker, his edge sharpened by his self-described reputation as a “chippy northerner” who could be tricky in interviews and prickly about his fame. That Simm is long gone – “it was more a reflection of who I was then”, he says of a youthful penchant for being twitchily defensive, although a pathological shyness also had a lot to do with it.
He prefers to see the characters he plays simply as acting exercises in understanding. “Hamlet, Macbeth, [Crime and Punishment’s] Raskolnikov, Caligula: the f--k-ups are simply more fun to play. The point is to always find the humanity where you can.” He’s careful never to push it too far. “Some actors take the part home with them. But I go down the pub and have a beer. You have to remember it’s not you.”
The one exception was Crime, the 2021 TV adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s foul and filthy detective caper in which he played – in a turn of wincingly mesmeric grotesquerie – the psychotic paedophile Mr Confectioner. “He had a milky eye, so I tried to shed him each night when I took it out,” Simm says, squirming. “But it was very hard. I always said I’d never play that kind of part. I find it abhorrent; I’ve got kids of my own. To be honest, I only took it because it was so different from Grace.”
It was while filming the fifth season of Grace and also wrapping shooting on Jack Wright that Simm discovered, on ITV’s DNA Journey, that his biological father was not his beloved dad Raymond, who had died in 2015, but a long-dead club manager from Lancashire called Terence.
The revelation both rocked his world and didn’t surprise him. “It explained a lot. I always felt guilty for feeling a bit different to my family and for leaving at 16 [for a three-year performing arts course in Blackpool]. So when I found out, I felt vindicated. I hadn’t been going mad.”
What did throw him was the realisation he would have met Terence on numerous occasions. “He used to run a couple of the clubs where me and my dad played. I’d have shaken his hand, he would have watched us and paid us, and he’d have probably seen me on TV. And yet none of us knew anything. That’s a crazy Life on Mars, Back to the Future-style scenario.” He’s okay about it now. “I’m not damaged by it. My dad is still my dad.”
He still sometimes watches Life on Mars, the much-loved genre-hopping BBC show in which he played the time-travelling policeman Sam Tyler. “You get nostalgic. Me and Phil [Glenister, who portrayed the distinctly non-woke, straight-talking cop Gene Hunt] sometimes get together with a bottle of wine and stick it on the TV.”
There were rumours the programme would make a return, but Simm says the idea got lost in development. He thinks that’s probably for the best. “As Phil says, you couldn’t have a character like Gene on TV anymore. You’d have to water him down. We got away with it then because I’d roll my eyes at everything he said, but you can’t do that now.”
He finds it hard looking at his younger self. “I watched The Lakes again recently and thought, ‘My God! My God! I don’t look like that anymore!’ I was lamenting those cheekbones.” He’s accepted he’s unlikely these days to be offered the young firebrands he made his name with at the start of his career, although there’s definitely something of the arrested twentysomething agitator about Gray. “I get it. I think, ‘Okay, I’m now the dad. Soon I’ll be the grandad.’”
He likes to slip in the stage work wherever he can, partly because he trained in classical theatre and partly because he gets appalling stage fright if he leaves it too long. He once fantasised about faking a heart attack during the West End run of Speaking in Tongues in order to avoid going on. “And then suddenly it was my cue and I had to get on with it.”
Getting on with what he is there to do is, in fact, very much Simm’s style – a work ethic engrained in him by his father, and honed by the uncompromising demands of those early northern working-class audiences. “They’d worked all week, they had one night out, they wanted to be entertained, and so if you weren’t very good you got booed off.” It’s been a warning to always be prepared ever since. “We’ve had a spate of Hollywood stars doing shows in the West End and not getting great reviews, although I should say I haven’t seen any of the plays. But they must get out there and think, ‘Oh s--t, I didn’t train for this’. Instead they just assumed they could do it. And you can’t if you haven’t put in the work.”
He has no patience with actors, particularly younger ones, who have a flakier relationship to commitment. “I’d come down on anyone at work who isn’t prepared. I’d be so p---ed off. When someone doesn’t know their lines, I find that unforgivable.” To some extent he sees this in his 18-year-old daughter. “Me and my wife [the actress Kate Magowan] are constantly telling her: ‘In our day, you just had to get on with it.’ But then I’m from the power-through generation. And I learned that from my dad.”
like many people have said this better than me but no it IS odd that we've come to think of potatoes as so quintessentially european that their presence in historical fantasy where they're anachronistic doesn't jar. and yes people are trying to have the trappings of post-colonial europe without engaging w the icky colonialism part and yes people are neglecting to imagine what a european cuisine without potatoes would be like.
im fully in favour of 'let people have fun w their fantasy world' but is considering how the potatoes got there in the absence of colonialism not a fun exercise? maybe every year the dragon riders go on a great transatlantic potato pilgrimage
if you put potatoes in your medieval european style fantasy world people will by and large not find it jarring and accept it as a normal fantasy trope
if you put, say, black people in your medieval european style fantasy world a whole demographic of people will get very angry and accuse you of breaking their immersion
this is in spite of the fact that black people were a lot more common in medieval europe than potatoes.
I'm writing historical fiction where I've literally tossed dragons into Real Life history.
I've had more people get upset at showing Jews--and period-correct antisemitism--than I've had at showing dragons.
Ditto for black people in the story, from both sides of the aisle--I've had people tell me that showing the historically attested rates of sub-saharan societies' slavery rates is engaging in "Neo-Confederate apologia", and still others get upset that there are black people and queer people in the story at all.
During a summer heat wave in Alaska growing up (yes it’s a thing), my dad had several sprinklers and a tractor sprinkler going in the yard. From the woods behind the house suddenly came two young babies and a very large mother.
They came directly towards the tractor sprinkler and sat right down.
My dad verrrrry slowly pulled the hose of the other sprinklers, and repositioned them in the backyard so they would spray grass under the shade of several trees.
Lo and behold, the mother moose got up, walked over to the water now pooling beside these trees, and plomped down. The two babies followed after and just fell over in the cool water.
#rickman has the tragic bearing of a man aware that there’s a fanlore page devoted entirely to his character’s dick #this is a dude who has been asked to autograph zines with names like “purple mountain majesties” #he gives iconic performances of shakespeare knowing 20% of his audience is thinking about the mak'tar triple prostate hypothesis #galaxy quest (via @deadpanwalking)
and if i said nolan's odyssey starring no greek actors and with no recognizable aspects of greek culture or involvement by greeks, is the direct legacy of white supremacist colonialism that treated ancient greece as not just the pinnacle of ancient culture, but of an artificially created "european" culture, which white western europeans and their settler descendants, as the new pinnacle of culture, were the sole spiritual inheritors of.
I'll say right away that I like palm trees, but I've replaced the palm trees with pine trees because I like pine trees more.
1. Family Park
Sports complex, children's creativity club and a large playground
lot type: park
lot size: 50х50
DOWNLOAD (SFS)
My galery ID: Yellowduck3
Only NO CC building
Use bb.moveobjects
add the files to your “Tray” folder
2. Cocktail bar
lot type: Cocktail bar
lot size: 20х20
DOWNLOAD (SFS)
My galery ID: Yellowduck3
Only NO CC building
Use bb.moveobjects
add the files to your “Tray” folder
3.Library and cafe
lot type: Library
lot size: 30х20
DOWNLOAD (SFS)
My galery ID: Yellowduck3
Only NO CC building
Use bb.moveobjects
add the files to your “Tray” folder
4. Two houses on one plot
Fully furnished, three bedrooms each
lot type: Residential
lot size: 40х30
DOWNLOAD (SFS)
My galery ID: Yellowduck3
Only NO CC building
Use bb.moveobjects
add the files to your “Tray” folder
5. Townhouses cristal
Two fully furnished, one empty
lot type: Residential
lot size: 30х20
DOWNLOAD (SFS)
My galery ID: Yellowduck3
Only NO CC building
Use bb.moveobjects
add the files to your “Tray” folder
6. Large house for moving
I built this house for my Sims. It's big, has 5 bedrooms, a large yard, a greenhouse, and a garage. It's empty because I'll be furnishing it gradually from scratch for myself.
lot type: Residential
lot size: 20х15
DOWNLOAD (SFS)
My galery ID: Yellowduck3
Only NO CC building
Use bb.moveobjects
add the files to your “Tray” folder
I'm gradually posting items to the gallery - ID: Yellowduck3, that's why they appear there earlier. I wish everyone a good game without bugs and lags. 🤞🤞🤞
