dorinda - Top 5 comfort movies? Or comfort reads, if you'd rather

Oh goodness. I don't know that I can rank these!

Pacific Rim - Truly wonderful chemistry between the leas, Guillermo del Toro can direct like anything, and it's a shockingly hopeful vision of the future.

Mamma Mia! - It's a musical where the stakes are subterranean and the music is super fun.

Muppet Christmas Carol - This is probably my favorite film. It's a musical, it's a shockingly accurate period piece, it's Michael Cane's favorite film.

The Court Jester (1955) - If you have not seen this film, you have seen its impact on 'period' Hollywood movies for decades. It's also stunningly funny, incredibly well put together, and a delight.

In Other Lands by Sarah Reese Brennan -This book stars a sarcastic queer protagonist who falls in love too hard and can't really understand other people very well, and hurts people's feelings a fair amount. He finds love and acceptance and happiness anyways, without having to be a different person than he is, but while also understanding that he doesn't get to be a jerk to people because it's easy.

norah - Top five things you would tell your 25-year-old self

5. "You'll get better at this." Fundamentally, a lot of the worries I had at age 25 were about being bad at being around other people. The short version is that I got better at it - I figured out how to make conversation and chat and also when it wasn't worth it. Overall, I hate the implication that older=wiser, as we have all fallen into company with an old fool at least once. But for the most part, yeah, I got better at all the things I was worried about, compared to myself at 25.

4. "You're allowed to quit." I have quit so many things! So many things I did not want to be doing are now out of my life! It's amazing.

3. "You're allowed to start and restart things." I have spent so much stupid wasting time trying to figure out how to start doing something without looking stupid, and now I am so happy to look stupid and admit that I don't know what I'm doing. It's great. Starting things is so hard, give yourself time to be a bit shit at things. You're always going to hate something because it's new - keep going.

2. "You don't have to earn help. You can just ask for it." I am still working on this. I would not have been able to hear it at age 25, but I would have needed it, and I still need the reminder.

1. "Take lots of pictures of yourself naked. Lots." Look. I really enjoy my body, it's a good body, I am taking care of it. But I'm a ways out from 25 and I truly deeply did not know how hot I was because I was comparing myself to other people, and now I am comparing myself to past me, and I would like to have some proof. I would like some souvenirs of how the terrain used to look!

runpunkrun - Top five things you like to have at/on hand (prompts compiled by and for resonant )


5. Lip balm - I am absolutely intolerant of dry skin, so I have lip balm on every surface near where I sit.
4. Full spectrum light - I live in New England, we need fake sunlight. 
3. Books - I have never read a single book at a time in my life - I always have a few in progress and I am notorious for forgetting which one I was reading last and starting a new one. 
2. Coffee - I drink far more tea these days, but man, I really love coffee and miss it. 
1. Notebook - I have no brain sticking. Uh. Memory. I have to write things down or add them to my calendar to make them stick in my head, so I have a notebook and do a stripped down version of bullet journaling to keep things from disappearing out of my head entirely. (For books, I have an app called Storygraph that I'm pleased with for keeping track of my upcoming reading.)

In an effort to do a little more on DW, I'm going to try and post daily during December! This idea is borrowed from resonant's annual December Daily meme, who gave permission to share their prompts - visit their posts if you want to see the evolving list and suggest prompts! -

Top five pairs of characters, cross-fandoms as needed, that need to sit down and have a conversation and share life experiences so that at least one of them can benefit from it. - Destina

5. I think Norrington from Pirates of the Caribbean would be a fantastically absurd person to pair with any character from Our Flag Means Death, but especially Izzy Hands. "I'm in love with a pirate king who loves someone else and is changing in ways I can't follow" is a niche problem but a real one!

4. I think Murderbot and the Terminator would have nothing to say to each other except stories about stupid humans are and all the ways they try to get themselves killed, and that would keep them going for literal years.

3. I think both Thomas Barrow from Downton Abbey and Velasin from A Strange and Stubborn Endurance would have useful things to say to each other the trauma of being outed in a world that is wildly unkind about their sexualities, but Thomas would have to be in like, his mid-40s before he could unclench enough and Velasin's end situation is so much kinder than Thomas's ending that they would probably just end up sitting in polite silence and seething.

2. This is a weird one, but I kind of want Admiral Thrawn from Star Wars and Captain William Laurence from the Temeraire series to compare notes about working for corrupt governments and how to deal with that. Thrawn's much more in the spying and long term gamesmanship set, while Laurence is more about making noble but strategically unsound decisions. In either case, Dealing With Emperors could be a fun subclass.

1. Eugenides from the Queen's Thief series and Maya from The Goblin Emperor would have some really interesting viewpoints to share with each other about rule and culture and how to be cleverer than the people who would want to harm you. I would 100% see this as a mentor relationship with Eugenides going, "Well, is anyone going to parent this abandoned child who going to have ultimate power in a few years?" and not waiting for an answer.

Edit: Wow, something went wonky with the editing when I first posted that. I think I fixed it!