Chemistry's Bitch

Here's my full piece for @novaandmali and @dames-zine's My Liege: queer knights in love art book! There's only about 30 hours left on the crowdfunder so now's your last chance to back this project!

I'D LOVE TO ELABORATE because this is one of my favorite astronomy stories.

Okay. So in the field of Radio Astronomy, there's this phenomenon called a "fast radio burst", a very short, strong radio pulse picked up by a radio telescope. They're still poorly understood, and are considered very exciting to radio astronomers because of how rare they are.

In the 2010's, astronomers working at Australia's Parkes Radio Observatory identified a number of radio signals picked up by the telescope that appeared to resemble fast radio bursts, which they called Perytons.

However, they quickly realized that the signals had to be terrestrial in origin due to the strength of the signal.... as well as the fact that they always occurred during weekdays, around the same time.

The signals tended to be clustered around midday... hmm...

Further evidence that the signals were man-made... this trend also followed daylight savings!!!

(Unless aliens also follow Australian daylight savings conventions, which is highly unlikely...)

It took the astronomers several years, but they eventually tracked down the source to a microwave oven in the facility's break room.

They were unable to recreate the signal, until they tried opening the microwave door before it beeped. Turns out the microwave was letting out a tiny amount of radio emissions when the door opened, which the nearby telescope was sensitive enough to detect.

The Peryton signals had been popping up in the data for over a decade, presumably because astronomers taking their lunch breaks had been opening the break room microwave prematurely for the same reason cited by OP.

I imagine they must have a big sign reading "LET THE MICROWAVE FINISH BEFORE OPENING" hanging in the break room now.

TLDR: If you work in radio astronomy, let the microwave beep before opening it and removing your lunch.

it's done!!!! 🎉🎉🎉🎉

Take My Hand is a short dark fantasy / horror toxic yuri VN about a woman imprisoned for (alleged) murder who is in a situationship with her cellmate and a sleep paralysis demon.

featuring:

nearly 9000 words about women's wrongs (30-60 minutes to read)

tea parties

prison yuri

100+ hand crafted images (some even animated!)

graphic depictions of hand holding

middle aged women yuri

this is a kinetic VN, no choices, one ending. intended for grown-ups.

Thank you for the ask.

I don't know. But it sure looks like http://ralst.com is dead.

The Wayback Machine's last capture of the landing page is from May 2026.

The last update was apparently in April 2023, announcing that that "Passion and Perfection is now closed to new submissions."

The last two reblogs on @ralst's tumblr were from December 2023 and December 2022.

The is a fanlore page, but it is relatively short.

I an sad that this site is gone. I have a lot of fond memories and am very grateful that ralst maintained the site for so long. It was one of my main fic sources before AO3.

I hope ralst is OK.

These were what we had before AO3, and I'll be forever grateful for all the time and work put into creating and maintaining them.

@pinkrabbitpro's tumblr was last active in January 2020. The is also a fanlore page.

That means that of the three multi fandom femslash sites that I used to use a lot before ff.net and AO3 only one remains active alive mid 2026:

https://realmoftheshadow.com/ (and: fanlore page)

As there is no year listed in the "new stories" page, I am not sure when this site was last updated, but I think it has been a while.

And sadly also a lot of the sites I mentioned in my Xena and Buffy femslash fic guides seem to be gone now. (I'll need to do some digging next week).

A big thank you to everyone who maintained these amazing websites that brought me so much joy!!!