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fluffyspuffy · 1 month

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I’m obligated by law to post about this since it’s (I believe) only the 4th fic to actually make me cry real tears. That honor goes to the second story in the series (and very nearly the third). The first story isn’t super spuffy, but is obligatory reading due to how amazing the relationship between Spike and Dawn is in it.

The prose seemed a little off to me for quite a bit, but that’s probably just my ADHD talking since I did start to get used to it and then I didn’t even notice it eventually. The story was fantastic and made me stick it out despite having to reread paragraphs when I got lost. I think that’s what made it all the more shocking when I just suddenly started crying during an earlier chapter in ‘Blood Kin’. I didn’t see it coming and it hit me hard.

If you like the potentials (and OC potentials!) and if you like Dawn and some wacky vampire shit - this is the fic for you. It’s got some excellent hurt/comfort which is my food of choice. So much hurt/comfort throughout and I just adore it. The Spike characterization was my favorite- some side characters felt OOC on occasion, but was still immensely enjoyable.

It’s also epic! I love epic long fics. Right when I thought I’d read all the big Spuffy ones, here comes this series. Kept me well fed for days. Wild how I’ve been in this fandom for so long and always seem to miss the huge things.

I’d stop at the 4th story, unless you’re a greedy little masochist (like me!) and just need to read all there is no matter how much it will break your heart. This last story would have also been amazing, I can tell. Unfortunately, as the author is no longer with us, there isn’t even a tiny hope that more will come. I’m so glad that she got to leave us with this beautiful story

tl/dr: Read this! It’ll make you feel things. If you like safe and completed fics, stop at part 4.

Here’s a very brief summary of each part:

1: Spike and Dawn friendship rebuilding

2: fun with SITs (slayers in training) and a better season 7

3: vampire politics and relationship drama

4: more vampire politics and spike trying (failing) to hold it together. Fun t-shirt slogans. Stop here if you want an ending.

5: astral projection and heartbreak. ‘This is all there is, there isn't anymore.’ Incomplete, does not end in a good place.

#spuffy #spuffy fic recs #I usually stick to EF but sometimes it feels like the well is running dry #tried out AO3 again and found this gem #buffy the vampire slayer #btvs fic recs #btvs fic #spuffy fic #btvs #rambly fic rec #can’t string together any thoughts #absolutely feral over this #oldy but a goody #if you hate dawn for whatever reason that I will never understand- skip this #spike & dawn #probably more than spuffy #still love it

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naralanis · 3 years

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Hi. Someone recomend me your blog and I am so glad that they did! I have been having problems with Lamy Safari from Day 1 and it's just breaks my heart to see it unused and just lying around since it was a gift from my girlfriend. I use Lamy T-10 cartridges with it. The nib felt scratchy, so I got that replaced ( day 1) and then the feed keeps getting gunked up if I don't use it for 2 days. I always keep the pens in a horizontal position. I have cleaned it more than twice or even thrice in a month but it still gunks up if unused for more than a day. Oh it's an EF nib by the way, could that be the problem? I have a Metropolitan too ( also EF) , never faceded any such problems with it.

Hi there! I'm glad you found your way here, welcome to this mess.

Sorry to hear your Safari is having issues. I have about a dozen Safaris, and only one of them gave me issues -- and they were pretty similar to what you're experiencing. It was also an EF, and I was using the T10s as well.

(while the pink was the problematic Safari, the crud did not come from any T10 cartridge, but another ink I tried later on. that and the white ink clogging the other one are only here for shock value lol)

The problem went away the moment I tried a new ink. That's usually the first thing I do if the ink flow is funky (after cleaning, of course). With my Safari, I switched to a converter and inked it up with Waterman Serenity Blue. It wrote right away, and my drying, gunky problems were over. And TBH... not a big fan of the T10 blue cartridges in general. This might be just me, but I always think the ink has a weird viscosity, and it's miles different than the bottled Lamy Blue.

Honestly my first recommendation would to get yourself a converter (if you don't already have one). Not only it will give you more ink variety, allowing you to test ink flow with wetter inks and see if that solves your problem, it will also be helpful when flushing out your pen, because it'll allow you to draw soapy water in and out of it. For the Safari, you'll want the Z28 converter. Additionally, if your nib has dried out, you can use the converter to give it a little more ink to get it going again (this is called flooding the feed, if I remember correctly).

That being said, maybe you just prefer the convenience of the cartridges and don't want to deal with bottled inks. That is totally OK! I'll explore some more options below the cut -- I'm sorry, this is going to be a bit... long.

Quick disclaimer: all of the suggestions below are based on things I've done myself. I highly recommend checking out r/fountainpens and The Fountain Pen Network. The pen people there can help with pretty much anything, no matter how specific the problem.

If you don't have a way of testing another ink with a converter or another cartridge, I'm told that a little teeny bit of dish soap into the cartridge will help with ink flow. I have used dish soap for that purpose before, just never in a cartridge so I can't really vouch for its efficacy.

My second recommendation... get yourself a bulb syringe, if you don't already. They're excellent to have around even if you do use converters, but they're especially helpful if you only use cartridges, because now you have a way to push water through your feed.

Whenever you flush your pen, I recommend doing it with some lukewarm water (never hot) and dish soap. Water by itself doesn't do much; the soap will help break up the gunk. Any neutral dish soap will do.

Now, let's say you've tried all of the following:

Thorough flush with water and soap

Switching inks/cartridges

Switching nibs -- checking to see if the tines are not too tight

... and the problem still persists? Well, we can check for a few other things to make sure your pen isn't defective. And if it is defective, you should be able to exchange it under warranty; just contact your retailer.

First: check the fit of your cartridge/converter. They both should fit snugly into your section, and the Z28 converter actually has little notches that click it into place.

You shouldn't have to use force when pushing either one into the section. There's a bit more resistance with a brand new cartridge, of course, but it still shouldn't require a ton of pressure.

If your cartridge feels loose either the pen or the cartridge may be defective, so try another cartridge (I know you probably have, but better cover my bases!).

The way I like to test the converter is to install it without lining up the notches to their slots -- it should still fit snugly in the section without them.

If something feels off no matter the cartridge/converter, your pen might be defective -- contact your retailer!

Another possibility: there may be something wrong with the seal of your cap. You can take a look inside the cap of your pen and check if there's anything off about the inner cap.

You can test this by filling the cap with some water. Seal it with your thumb and give it a little shake; if there is an issue with the inner cap, water will most likely leak out from the holes where the clip is installed -- if water can get out, so can air, and that may be contributing to your pen constantly drying out.

I'll have to be honest though, I've only seen this happen once, and it wasn't a factory defect (though that is certainly not impossible, especially at the scale the Safaris are produced); a friend had removed the clip to customize his Safari, and in the process of re-installing a different clip, he ended up damaging the inner cap.

The only other possible thing I can think of would be an issue with the feed itself, though that's trickier to see. You can remove a Lamy nib pretty easily, and the feed is not difficult to remove, with two caveats.

You can remove the nib and check the part of the feed that sticks out of the section. If that looks fine, there's the possibility of damage on other parts of the feed. And while you could remove the feed like I did above, the main caveat is that the Safari technically was not made to be disassembled.

So yeah, you could remove the feed to check it, but that might void your warranty, at least according to a couple pen friends of mine. Sometimes a retailer will still take it and exchange it, but I have no reliable information to give you that says it will be a guarantee.

The other caveat is that this Lamy feed is fragile. The top that sits under the nib is very thin and flimsy, and it's not hard to break it when you pull it out. So if you're not super confident in it, I would recommend contacting your retailer so you don't run the risk of breaking your pen.

Sometimes, a pen just dries a little quicker than we want. I have two Parker IMs that dries out after only an hour or two no matter what ink I put in it -- the model itself has a pretty crappy seal overall. I just dip the nib in some water (my dad just... licks his. which... works, I guess? but also no thank you) to get it running again. It's not an elegant solution, but it works for me because... lazy.

That is pretty much all I can think of -- I really hope it helps, and my apologies if some of these seem a bit redundant.

Do check out r/fountainpens and The Fountain Pen Network if you're still stuck -- people there have tons more experience than I do and may have some other/better tips.

Let me know if your pen starts behaving!

#really hope it does #few things frustrate me more than a pen that just won't write #happened a lot with my first Pelikan Pelikano #and then the rogue Safari #and a couple others #funnily enough all with cartridges #anyway #hope this helps!#wannabemeowww #ask naralanis and maybe she will deign to respond #pen asks #pen talk #fountain pen

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preserving-ferretbrain · 5 years

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23 boxes of tissues on the Jellicoe Road

by Wardog

Thursday, 05 February 2009Wardog tops off her run of utterly amazing books with On the Jellicoe Road.~

My father took one hundred and thirty-two minutes to die. I counted. It happened on the Jellicoe Road. The prettiest road I'd ever seen, where trees made breezy canopies like a tunnel to Shangri-La. We were going to the ocean, hundreds of miles away, because I wanted to see the ocean and my father said that it was about time the four of us made that journey. I remember asking, "What's the difference between a trip and a journey?" and my father said, "Narnie, my love, when we get there, you'll understand," and that was the last thing he ever said.

Are you in tears, yet? On the Jellicoe Road (or Jellicoe Road, as it was published over here, for some inexplicable reason) is an incredible book, a perfectly judged juxtaposition of beauty and pain, like the Jellicoe road itself introduced here in the prologue. I'm probably failing to sell this from the get go book: On the Jellico Road is not an easy book - in fact, sometimes, it's almost unbearable - but it's also superb in every conceivable way, and so full of hope and wonder that if I believed in books could change lives, this would be one of those books. It's a buy and give to everyone you know sort of book.

On the Jellicoe Road is a complex book, with complex characters and you'll spend at least the first hundred pages faintly bewildered because it just throws you straight into the action of the story, but it's incredibly carefully structured and comes together in remarkably coherent and satisfying way. Everything that happens, everything it tells you, is there for a reason. There are two storylines, one set in the past and one in the present; they seem to run in parallel but, as the book unfolds, they turn out to be intimately connected. The Past tells the story of five teenagers who were brought together in tragedy on the Jellicoe Road. In the present, we have Taylor Markham, a teenage girl who was abandoned at 7/11 by her mother on the Jellicoe Road. She becomes the reluctant leader of her school in the annual territory wars between the Jellicoe school students, the Townies and the Cadets, who come in for six weeks from the city, but she's really searching for family she's lost and a sense of belonging in a world she thinks is "just a tad low on the reliable adult quota."

I've deliberately kept my attempt at a plot summary sparse: there is no way I can do such an intricate book justice in a summary and a large part of the pleasure of reading it comes from piecing the past and the present together, and learning how the one informs and influences the other. The sections of the novel set in the present are told in the first person from Taylor's point of view; the past comes to us in fragments from the novel written by Hannah, the woman who has acted somewhat as a surrogate parent for Taylor. I can't say simply what On the Jellicoe Road is about: it's about love, I think, love and pain, and hope, and how to find it. I'm not a sentimental person, and it's not in any way a sentimental book, but I cried all the way through it. I'm kind of welling up a bit writing this review, and remembering. The thing is, because I am not the sort of person who cries at things, I usually get quite angry by books that try to make me. I feel resentful and manipulated: although it is impossible to read On the Jellicoe Road without being moved, the emotion it never fails to evoke feels natural and cathartic.

There isn't much more to say about On the Jellicoe Road without starting to pick it apart in order to look at why it's so wonderful. But it's a sublime butterfly of a book and I have no wish to stick a pin through its heart. I simply can't remember the last time I was so profoundly affected by something in fiction. It's quite a slow-paced read and far from easy but it's undoubtedly worth it. It's such a powerful story, beautifully written, elegantly structured and full of flawed, complex well-drawn characters. And although it's full of grief and pain and despair, the darkness is never absolute: hope and love are always there when you are sure they can't possibly be. And, if you can possibly believe it, it's far from a grueling emotion-fest. It's also extremely funny (Taylor, for example, has a dry, sarcastic narrative voice that suits her difficult, lonely character perfectly) and there's plenty of adolescent bickering and flirting and relating to keep the book grounded. On the Jellicoe Road is quite simply an essential read. It makes me want to have children so I could give them copy when they got to be teenagers. Even though I hate children. It's that good.Themes:

Young Adult / Children

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Isabel

at 09:42 on 2009-05-23Kyra thanks SO much for writing this review. Just finished it (was anal enough to get my cousin in Australia to buy and post me a copy because I don't like UK edition) and would never of heard of it if you hadn't written this. Fucking LOVE this book. It's just amazing.

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Wardog

at 10:51 on 2009-05-23Thank you so much - I'm glad somebody else has read it because it's such an amazing book. And I have no idea what they were thinking of with the UK cover (big red poppy of pointlessness??).

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Isabel

at 19:04 on 2009-05-25And especially renaming it Jellicoe Road – that really irked me!

I think what I really loved was the way that everything in it was there for a reason and also because the big points or important sentences and moments didn’t stick in my mind because they were obviously This Is Significant (something which after five seasons of Lost is really. Pissing. Me. Off.) but just because they were the most beautiful – opening paragraph and the ‘more’ stuff being the case in point.

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Guy

at 06:59 on 2009-07-29Hey Kyra, just wanted to add my thanks to Isabel's because I just finished reading this book and it was amazing. If you hadn't written this review I never would have given this book a second glance because I would have (shamefully) misjudged it on the basis of having seen the film of Alibrandi and sort-of liked it and thought that was all I needed to know about Melina Marchetta. I'm half-tempted to write a review of this book in which I ramble endlessly about the hundred and one things that it makes me think of, but I guess the succinct thing I'd say about it is that it's the kind of book that I remember reading that made me Believe In Literature when I was younger and that's an experience I've missed for a long long time.

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Robinson L

at 20:30 on 2009-09-09Oh my god.

Oh my

god

(I promised myself I'd restrict this comment to just the one repetition.)

By great good fortune, my library system has this on Playaway (a sort of combination audiobook and player, just add headphones) and I just happened to stumble across it when browsing the online catalogue (I'm pretty sure I didn't go out looking for it).

I listened to it over the summer and was completely blown away. Easily one of the best books I've read in years. Maybe

the

best.

This story is so incredibly beautiful. Tragedy and I have been on difficult terms for a long time, and once or twice I've considered issuing a restraining order. This summer it feels like I've been saturated with more angsty melodrama than at any time since I gave up

Legacy of the Force

in disgust. (At some point when I've got my thoughts better collected I'll have to write a post about the peculiar penchant in the entertainment industry to assume more angst = more literate.) Then again, that may've mostly been due to the third and fourth seasons of

Battlestar Galactica

, a show which must've been pitched like this: “We've got to show the Brits we can produce something even

angsty than their new version of

Doctor Who

.” (Ooh, look at all the pretty tangents.)

'Course, some of the tragedy was better than that. I listened to both Jodi Picoult's

My Sister's Keeper

and Audrey Niffenegger's

The Time-Traveler's

(which, incidentally, also had a major character die in a car crash and accidentally shot by a loved one, respectively) this spring and they were all right, but even they felt somewhat forced and melodramatic.

On the Jellicoe Road

singlehandedly restored my faith in tragedy, and reminded me that yes, it can be an intensely beautiful thing. (Anybody else here think tragedy is a lot harder to pull off satisfactorily than happy stories?)

Which is not to say, I hasten to add for the benefit of anyone who hasn't yet read the book, that it's all tragedy. The ending is bittersweet: tragedy and joy blended to perfection and served in a porcelain bowl with luscious fudge topping.

It's hard enough to get my eyes to tear up, but I was crying all through the last three chapters. The epilogue was such a downer note that I just kept on listening and got the prologue and first nine chapters all over again. (Approximately one million things leaped out at me and had me going “Oh, so

that's

what that part's about. Another sign of excellent writing.)

And though it's sad, the story is also uplifting. I think this is because at the end of the road, despite all of the pain, all of the heartache, all of the betrayals and perceived betrayals, everyone is forgiven, everyone is loved. I'm tearing up again just writing that.

In terms of plotting, the book is effing fantastic. To borrow a line from Kyra's

“Incarceron” review

Read it and weep, JK Rowling, this what a backstory should be.

(Also what tragedy should be.)

Even the serial killer plot thread managed to tie into the whole in the most perfectly unexpected way. *David Tennant voice* Brilliant.

I attended a Young Adult Fiction panel at a Convention this weekend, and at one point realized they were having recommendations from the audience. I gave this book a special shout-out (and Catherine Fisher, too).

Unfortunately, my youngest sisters are too young to read this—I just know it would break their hearts—and the older one has already expressed her disinclination to let me tell her how much

loved the book, let alone recommend it to her (which I wasn't going to do anyway, because teenager though she is, I suspect she'd find it overwhelmingly sad as well).

My version had the red poppy too, but it's so abstract I didn't mind, because the Australian cover looks like some kind of ghost story of only middling quality to me. As for the title—I got both versions. The US cover has the truncated title, but the dramatization is Australian and the reader gave it in full.

May I also just give a shout-out to the audio version, by the way? Narration can primarily enhance a story experience, detract from it, or execute it neutrally (I say “primarily” because most have at least a little of each). Rebecca Macauley's reading of

On the Jellicoe Road

lands squarely in the first category. Her Taylor is flawless, and the other voices are good-to-amazing. With her narration, she brings the rich emotions of the book to life.

(Although due to only listening to the book, I was momentarily thrown off rereading this post to learn that Webb's sister is called “Narnie” rather than “Nani.”)

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Wardog

at 12:58 on 2009-09-10I am increasingly pleased I wrote this review - the book had such an impact on me that I'm glad other people reading it as a consquence.

I'm so glad it effected you as strongly as it did me - it's a truly remarkable and wonderful book. I did cry pretty much the whole way through it but I never resented the fact it made me do that, nor did I find it was unpleasant, the way strong emotions can sometimes be.

It's such a hard book to recommend to people because it is such an emotional read.

But, God, yes it's remarkable - and you for commenting, I really think everyone should read this book.

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Robinson L

at 22:02 on 2009-09-10Thank

you

for reviewing it, and putting me on to such a fabulous thing.

(Yes, it is a hard book to recommend, although I seem to be getting the unshakable urge to proselytize it now.)

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Jamie Johnston

at 19:59 on 2017-07-13This review has really stuck in my mind for all these years, so much so that I've come to remember it as possibly the first thing I ever read on Ferretbrain – which is clearly wrong because I'd been not only reading but contributing to the site for over a year before the review was posted. I also remembered 'On the Jellicoe Road' as being the first book I put on my 'to read' list when I got a Goodreads account (over two years after reading this review) and that memory does turn out to be right.

And after all that, I recently got round to actually tracking down a copy and reading it! No need to say any more than that I completely agree with everything you said about it, Kyra, and thank you for the recommendation.

#Ferretbrain #On the Jellicoe Road #Wardog #Jellicoe Road #Melina Marchetta

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