glinda: I want everything I've ever seen in the movies (movies)
[personal profile] glinda
So I’m hideously behind on my writing target for the year - even by the standard I was working to last year of having written more at the end of each month than I had the previous year I’m behind - so when I saw that nafs was hosting write every day this month I decided that was probably exactly what I needed. And apparently I was correct? Most days I’ve only written a couple of hundred words but it’s adding up and in some cases it turned out that actually that half written draft article/post I had lurking actually only needed 240 words in the right places to be finished. Very satisfying.

And uh, on Friday I opened my prompt file and stuck its associated playlists on and umm, wrote like 600 words of a fic. I’ve been picking away at it over the weekend and, while it’s not my best work I don’t think it’s terrible. (One of my re-watches the other month was Ocean’s Eight and apparently I had a bunch of Daphne Kluger feelings lurking. The original prompt for this fic was Casual by Chappel Roan but it kinda drifted.) So yeah, first finished fic in almost exactly two years, go me.

Someone You Couldn’t Lose (1341 words) by Glinda
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Ocean's 8 (2018)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Daphne Kluger/Lou Miller, Daphne Kluger/Debbie Ocean, Daphne Kluger/Lou Miller/Debbie Ocean
Characters: Daphne Kluger, Lou Miller (Ocean's), Debbie Ocean
Additional Tags: Friendship, Friends With Benefits, Planning Adventures, Less casual than anyone wants to admit, Thirty-something problems
Summary:

The thing no one tells you, is that it’s kinda hard to make new friends in your 30s. (Daphne Kluger would far rather plan a heist.)

AKICIDW: Ear training

6 Jul 2025 10:19 am
brithistorian: (Default)
[personal profile] brithistorian

I do not have perfect pitch. Not only do I not have good absolute pitch (i.e. "That's a C#."), I don't really have good relative pitch (i.e. "This note is higher than that note."). Which makes it kind of funny, how much I enjoy music, both listening and playing. So that's why I've come here to borrow your ears. In "Stupid in Love" by Max and Huh Yunjin, at around 2:19 when they sing "Book a flight to Paris only one way," am I correct in thinking that he's singing a higher note than her? It sounded that way to me when I was listening to it in the car yesterday, then I started second-guessing myself, thinking it might be an illusion because he was singing in the upper part of his range while she was singing in the lower part of hers. Then I tried listening to it under headphone this morning and I started thinking that maybe they were singing the same note, and now I can't even hear it properly. And so I've come here to borrow your ears. Any thoughts?

umadoshi: (berries in bowls (roxicons))
[personal profile] umadoshi
[personal profile] scruloose and I did make it to the little farmers' market down the road for its opening day of the season, and even managed to get there earlier than later! (I think it's open from 8 to 1, and we probably were there...a bit after 10?)

We made it home with two quarts of strawberries and one of cherries, new potatoes, a dozen eggs, and boneless chicken thighs, plus a bee balm for the garden, which we quickly tucked into a fairly open space in our little garden bed yesterday evening. (What was there before? UNKNOWN. Will I manage to reconstruct it from old posts or something? Also unknown. But hey, a plant!)

Reading: I finished Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi), which was fantastic. On the fiction front, I followed it up with Tamsyn Muir's novella Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower (not really my thing--I continue to rarely bond with novellas, I guess--but interestingly done), Sacha Lamb's When the Angels Left the Old Country (marvelous), and Sofia Samatar's The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain (again, didn't really bond emotionally, but it executed what it was doing beautifully).

Non-fiction: David Chang and Priya Krishna's Cooking at Home: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Recipes (And Love My Microwave), which is, like...primarily actually a David Chang book that Priya Krishna did a ton of heavy-lifting assisting on (which may be very normal for co-written cookbooks, but in this case she was interjecting and clarifying in her own voice as well as doing a fair bit of the actual writing in his voice, and it was all very transparent that it was being done that way, but also a little odd to read). I think I bought this as a sale ebook before hearing that Chang (the Momofuku guy) is something of an asshole, but then when I was reading it, it felt really promising as a book that might be genuinely useful for me (and even by cookbook standards, its ebook is terribly formatted), so I was pleasantly surprised to readily find a used half-price hard copy available on line, which is winging its way to me now. I've also made sure that Krishna's own Indian-Ish: Recipes and Antics from a Modern American Family is now on the wishlist where I keep an eye out for ebook sales.

And now I'm reading An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace by Tamar Adler, which is a cookbook mostly in the form of essays on cooking as a thoughtful/mindful practice.

Watching: One more Murderbot episode to go in this season, and oh, I hope we get a second one. I'm going to miss this little show.

We finished watching the second season of Kingdom (the historical zombies k-drama), which I found very satisfying. The ending very much sets up a subsequent season, and there's a movie out that fills in the backstory of the person/people we glimpse at the end of season 2 who would presumably be extremely central in any further season, but I don't think we feel inspired to watch said backstory movie unless a third season of the show is ever announced and it becomes relevant in that way.

June reading

6 Jul 2025 04:21 pm
littlerhymes: (Default)
[personal profile] littlerhymes
Last Night in Montreal - Emily St John Mandel
Midwinter Nightingale- Joan Aiken
The Witch of Clatteringshaws - Joan Aiken
Little Fires Everywhere - Celeste Ng
36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem - Nam Le
Red Sword - Bora Chung, transl. Anton Hur
A Magical Girl Retires - Park Seolyeon, transl. Anton Hur
The Spear Cuts Through Water - Simon Jimenez
Batman: Wayne Family Adventures 2, 3 and 4 - CRC Payne, Starbite
Batman: Nightwalker - Marie Lu
Nightwing 1: Leaping into the Light - Tom Taylor, Bruno Redondo

books and comics )

Sunshine Challenge #2

5 Jul 2025 10:37 pm
pensnest: Victorian woman with fan, caption Fangirl (Victorian fangirl)
[personal profile] pensnest
Sunshine-Revival-Carnival-4.png

Tunnel of Love
Journaling: The romance of summer! What do you love? Write about anything you feel sentimental about or that gets your heart pumping.

Creative: Write a love poem to anyone or anything you like


I'm going to be a bit wayward over the Journalling part of this challenge, but I think a bit of romantic fiction does squeeze into the category, so here goes.

Beast and I have lately started watching Bridgerton. I don't think it was the reason we decided to spend a little while chez Netflix, but it was one of the first things that sprang to my mind, at least.
Not spoilers, probably, since this is old news, but anyway.... )

The love poem is going to have to wait.
brithistorian: (Default)
[personal profile] brithistorian

A. and I have recently started watching Lie to Me. We're up to s2e7 and I've got a couple of questions. After my recent experience with Person of Interest, I'm coming to you hoping that one of you will either know the answers or else care little enough about Lie to Me spoilers that you'll be willing to try to find the answers:

  1. What's up with the way Lightman walks? He just sort of flops around as he walks, and he tends to stand with his head tilted. I've come up with three possible explanations, but of course it might be none of them:
    1. Something in Lightman's past (which we'll learn about later in the series) explains it.
    2. It's an effort to try to make Tim Roth look shorter. (A. and I were both very surprised when I looked it up and he's 5'8"—we had both thought he was shorter than that.)
    3. It's just How Tim Roth Walks™.
  2. Is the science in the show at all accurate? If so, to what degree is it accurate and to what degree is it handwavium?

Strange dreams

5 Jul 2025 07:18 am
brithistorian: (Default)
[personal profile] brithistorian

I practically never remember my dreams, but I remember part of last night's dream. Not enough to reconstruct any sort of plot summary, but enough to remember that it contained the following elements:

  • Heavy metal music (centered around a band named "Jihaad" — spelled that way to try to convey that the last syllable should rhyme with "bad," not with "sod")
  • Low-quality animatronic dinosaurs (they couldn't consistently count on the stegosaurus to walk, so they had four wheeled platforms that they'd put on its feet to move it out from backstage, then they'd let it take 2 or 3 steps in front of the audience, and pray that it didn't break down during that time)
  • Luchador wrestling (the wrestlers, the dinosaurs, and the band were on tour together in sort of a Mad Max type environment)
  • Male menstrual cramps (which I suppose implies the existence of male menstruation, but only the cramps came up in the dream)
  • Asshole bosses
  • The importance of proper punctuation
umadoshi: (summer swing (never_ender))
[personal profile] umadoshi
At the start of the month I entertained the fleeting thought of trying to post every day in July, especially with [community profile] sunshine_revival (in which I have in no way participated) going on, but. Well. *gestures at current date* And as we all know, something-something-only-perfect-results-matter, etc. etc. etc.

But here. It's Friday. The world is terrifying, but at least for this moment the sun is out. I spent most of my workday in a style guide meeting, which was genuinely pretty fun; tonight we're seeing Ginny and Kas because this week it's better for them than our usual Saturday hangout.

Tomorrow the (very) wee farmers' market that's only a few blocks away is getting underway for the season. I have ambitions of actually rolling out of bed and walking over in hopes of strawberries, even though tomorrow and Sunday are also Eevee community day in Pokemon Go, so I'm also hoping to leave the house those afternoons. Leaving the house twice in one day is not exactly a thing that happens often, and as a result, the prospect of it is exhausting. ^^; But here's hoping!

There's been zero doubt for a long time now that my only actual investment in Pokemon Go is the pursuit of shinies, and community days are the best chance to get shinies of a given critter, and Eevee, see, has EIGHT possible evolutions, so if there's any faint hope of ever having a full set of shinies of those, well, it's this weekend.

(I can't remember if I've said here that this is a crystalized perfect demonstration of why it's really, really good that I don't gamble. I'm usually pleased when I catch a new-to-me Pokemon, but it's pretty minor. But rather than setting the game aside, since it mostly hasn't resulted in me actually getting outside and walking much more than I had been, the hope of catching a shiny critter keeps me opening it back up. Nobody get me into slot machines, okay? [That sounds facetious, but I mean it very seriously.])

That's all I've got right now. Stay well, friends.

Dear NFE Writer!

2 Jul 2025 01:49 pm
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
[personal profile] edenfalling
Note: I am repurposing my stock Yuletide letter here, which is why some of the sections may seem slightly off-topic for a single fandom exchange.

Hi, and thank you in advance for writing a story for me! I'm pretty easy to please -- unless you write context-free porn, I'll be thrilled just to get a response to one of my prompts. *grin* But I realize that's not terribly helpful, so here's the (very!) long version. (I am sorry for the tl;dr, but I like to talk about things I love and I figure more details are better than fewer.)

---------------

General Information )

Okay. On to specific prompts.

---------------

Jadis & the Gods of the Narnian World )

---------------

The Secret Life of Lasaraleen's Pet Monkey )

---------------

Arthuriana & Morgan Le Fay )

---------------

Telmarine Aeneid )

---------------

Journey to an Alternate Charn )

---------------------------------------------

And that is that.

June Album Choice

2 Jul 2025 07:39 pm
glinda: a cup of coffee, with a snowflake drawn in the foam (coffee/latte)
[personal profile] glinda
June’s album is Last Summer Effect by Last Summer Effect. This album feels a bit like a cheat, but it is an album that came out last month, and I did have it on heavy rotation for the rest of the month because I liked it. The reason it feels like a cheat is that one of our freelancer’s at work is a sound engineer and worked on it, and the reason I even heard this album is that he dropped the Spotify link in our team group chat the day it came out with a plea to share it about/give it a listen. (By his own admittance they were the band he was in at eighteen, so he might even be playing on it too.) So I stuck it on in the background while making brunch after a night in the pub, to do a colleague a solid on the stats front and ended up really liking the vibe.

It’s kinda…It’s kind of an emo album I think. A bit Hundred Reasons I think, all crunchy guitars and soulful emoting singing. It’s not really my taste in music any more, but twenty years ago it would have been absolutely my jam and I’d have loved this album. (This album came out last month, but the only reason it couldn’t have come out twenty years ago is that the band would have barely been in double digits at that point, but my point stands, it should have come out on Chemical Underground some time between 2005 and 2009 - which is not far off given that the band were officially together between 2010 and 2013!) It feels like stumbling across an album released by a tiny band I saw at a gig when I was twenty, that I saw twice, followed on MySpace and bought a hand-burned EP off the band at the back of the gig. If one of those bands had miraculously got hold of some decent production values, the harmonies and production are pretty lush - Steve does know what he’s about. It sounds like sunny hungover mornings in friends flats after gigs, or big nights out. (The smell of stale sweat, flat beer and other people’s dead cigarettes hanging in the air.) I’m really not sure if there’s actually a market for this that isn’t millennial nostalgia, I probably wouldn’t have listened to it if they weren’t friends of friends, but that could go for a great number of bands I listened to from that actual period of time too. I keep putting it on to listen to while I do other things so nostalgia or not, so clearly present day me rather likes it too.

wherein Liz has moved!

2 Jul 2025 12:26 pm
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
[personal profile] edenfalling
Hey, quick update: I am IN MINNESOTA!

More specifically, I am in my parents' basement, because apparently this is my current millennial life milestone to hit. *wry*

Anyway, the U-boxes were delivered on Monday, we sorted and packed Tuesday and Wednesday, and then decided to order a third U-box because my dad was uneasy about the weight limits. So on Thursday the delivery guy (who is also apparently the local warehouse manager) picked up one box that we had completed and dropped off an empty replacement. We finished packing both boxes that afternoon and moved on to packing the cars and cleaning. Friday morning the delivery guy picked up the two remaining U-boxes, we finished cleaning, and I turned in my keys to Landlord Dude in return for my security deposit refund.

(I stayed in my parents' hotel room Wednesday and Thursday nights, since we packed my bed on Wednesday.)

Then we drove from Ithaca to the Twin Cities in two days (Friday and Saturday), which was kind of a lot and included two stints on local city streets in downtown Chicago because of a nasty traffic jam on I-90. My mom kept going through stoplights just as they turned yellow so I had to follow on red; it was extremely stressful. But we made it!

I have spent the past few days changing addresses with assorted companies and getting my license, car title, and car registration switched from NY to MN. Today I may or may not see about getting a local library card and visiting a Verizon store to see if they can clear some unwanted apps off my phone (I would do this myself but they came pre-installed and don't seem to have a delete option) and also ask about international calls to/from Canada. Also I will try switching my car insurance and AAA membership to MN -- I couldn't do either of those before I got my car paperwork dealt with.

We have been eating down some food brought from my fridge and freezer, since my parents' freezer was very full already. I have seen Vicky briefly when she picked up Alfie (her dog) Sunday evening -- my parents were watching him while Vicky and some friends were staffing a booth/table at a local Pride festival. Also my dad had a colonoscopy yesterday, my mom had a cardioversion this morning (for her afibrillation), and my aunt should currently be getting knee replacements. It has been a medically exciting week!

I believe I still have one refill left for both of my prescriptions, and my Ithaca pharmacy said that although they can't mail medications, I can have a Minnesota pharmacy contact them and they can transfer the authorization. So that is a relief, though I should still find a local primary care doctor sooner rather than later.

Oh! And signups for the 2025 Narnia Fic Exchange are open until July 11, so if you have any interest, please check that out over at [community profile] narniaexchange!

Sunshine Challenge #1

2 Jul 2025 12:12 pm
pensnest: bright-eyed baby me (Default)
[personal profile] pensnest
There are at least a dozen bee-esque insects bobbing against the perspex roof of the verandah outside my craft room door. I'm not sure if they are confoozled honey bees or... not, but I have never seen such a collection of them in such a place before.

*

Sunshine Challenge Time!

Sunshine-Revival-Carnival-1.png

Challenge #1

Journaling Prompt: Light up your journal with activity this month. Talk about your goals for July or for the second half of 2025.

Goals for July

1 Complete UCAS application
2 Communicate with potential new Mosaic members
3 Work on Rainbows song
4 re-think the progress of Dragon in the Woods
5 finish the Gardens of Giverny scarf
6 block the big shawl
7 try to actually post to DW instead of composing things in my head and forgetting them

Creative Prompt: Shine a light on your own creativity. Create anything you want (an image, an icon, a story, a poem, or a craft) and share it with your community.. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.


I have been going to a drawing class for the past three weeks—to my chagrin I won't be going today, because last night at about nine pm I was smitten with a vicious sore throat and a miserable nose. Having in consequence had far too little sleep, and being now obnoxious to be around, I won't inflict my woes on anyone else. (It's not Covid, at least not according to the test I took. But yuck.)

Anyway. I'm very pleased with this:




Excuse the dots at the bottom—I 'drew' a polar bear on the other side of the paper!

monthly word count - june

1 Jul 2025 05:48 pm
askerian: Serious Karkat in a red long-sleeved shirt (Default)
[personal profile] askerian
TOTAL: 1 718...
... uuuuuuuuuuuugh. i mean for 10 days of that i was on vacation in greece but i had so much free time AND air conditioning and the rest of the month was also dead, so what gives, self. maybe it's the heat... :/

upside, i posted quite a bit! nice, nice.

POSTED !!! :
-cosplaying in another dimension with my tamagotchi! Chapter 2 (svsss, shen yuan/original luo binghe, adventure, OCs. (42 words XD)
-in This Economy chapters 9 and 10 ( bleach suburban ot4), seriously self post them slower BUT i managed to edit/fluff up the biggest issues i had with chapter 10, so it does in fact count like i wrote it this month.

IN PROGRESS
-cosplaying in another dimension with my tamagotchi! Chapter 3 (481 words)
-bleach suburban ot4 chapter 21 (946 words)
-naruto - cherry wine - madatobiizu ABO (180 words, very cool bit buuuut it contradicts early canon so hrthghgmmghghgh if can't fix then might not keep. not gonna post it.)

--
teaserssss )
brithistorian: (Default)
[personal profile] brithistorian

A book has to really impress me to get a reaction before I've finished it, but Ada Palmer's Inventing the Renaissance has definitely done that. I had read some of Palmer's science fiction and been very impressed by it, and I knew before reading this that she is a historian, so when I first heard of this book, I immediately requested it from my local library.[^1] Not really knowing anything about it when I requested it, I thought it was a history of how the Renaissance came to be. Then I started reading it, and from the way she talked about historians creating the idea of the Renaissance, I thought it was a Renaissance equivalent of Norman Cantor's Inventing the Middle Ages.[^2]. Then I read on and saw that it's both of those things and more. It's also Palmer's academic biography, and an explanation of how academia works, and an exploration of the processes that created the Renaissance (and that created similar shifts in society at other times and places. It's the best history book I've read recently.[^3]

Besides the major historical themes of the book, Palmer has also included a number of interesting trivia and also Easter eggs for science fiction fans: - The genetic changes in Europeans that makes the Black Death no longer the huge plague that it was in the Middles Ages took several hundred years to come about, and also caused Europeans to be more susceptible to "autoimmune disorders like rheumatoid arthritis, celiac, and (in [Palmer's] case) Crohn's disease."[^4] - She refers to Florence in the Renaissance as a "wretched hive of scum and villainy."[^5] - She uses the board game Siena as an illustration of how government worked in Renaissance Florence.[^6]

I particularly love this paragraph about the chronology of the Renaissance, and how it's exceedingly different depending on who you ask:

All agree that the Renaissance was the period of change that got us from medieval to modern, but people give it a different start date, because they start at the point that they see something definitively un-medieval. If we leave the History Lab a moment and visit my friends across the yard in the English Department, they consider Shakespeare (1564-1616) the core of Renaissance, while Petrarch's contemporary Chaucer (1340s-1400) is, for them, the pinnacle of medieval. When I cross the walk to visit the Italian lit scholars, they say Dante (1265-1321), despite being dead before Chaucer's birth, is definitely Renaissance, and often that Machiavelli is the start of modern, even though he died before Shakespeare's parents were born.

Reading this book makes me both sad and glad, in varying degrees at different times, that I never got my PhD and entered academia, depending on whether I feel at that particular moment that by having done so I would have been placing myself in cooperation or competition with Palmer. But leaving that aside, I'm exceedingly glad to be living in a time that I get to read this book, and I'm eagerly looking forward to getting to read more of Palmer's books.


[^1] Apparently a lot of other people had also heard of it, because I only got it about a week ago.

[^2] Although much more fun to read than Cantor.

[^3] I almost said "easily the best history book I've read recently," but I'm also currently reading Geoffrey Parker's Global Crisis: War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, which gives Palmer some serious competition. But since I feel compelled to write a pre-completion reaction to Palmer's book and not to Parker's. . .

[^4] p. 116. All the MAGAts who keep yammering on about herd immunity with regard to COVID need to know that, but they probably wouldn't listen anyway.

[^5] p. 136.

[^6] pp. 65-8.

umadoshi: (lilacs 01)
[personal profile] umadoshi
With Canada Day rudely falling on a Tuesday, [personal profile] scruloose and I both booked today off. I haven't managed a whole lot of manga work yet, but hopefully between today (as soon as I finish this post) and tomorrow I'll get a reasonable amount done. While I'm doing at-my-desk things, [personal profile] scruloose is working on the next step(s) in getting a dedicated hose set up for our individual townhouse.

Last night we finally got around to switching the desk chairs in our offices, cut for the uninterested )

It occurred to me very late in the game that I might do better at spending non-work time at my desk (where, y'know, most of my writing used to happen) if I didn't hate my chair; I've been attributing the fact that I spend 95% of my evenings down in the living room these days to the fact that Sinha's such a lapcat, and that's definitely a huge factor, but...being able to sit comfortably in here would sure help.

Another pleasing tech-related development has to do with my phone keyboard. again, cut for the uninterested )

Speaking of things that feel so much better now, Saturday also involved Ginny chopping my hair off for me. I've been leaving it alone (other than the undercut) since whenever the last time we buzz cut it was, and maybe a month ago I found that it was long enough to easily ponytail. That was pleasantly novel for about a week, even though the front bits weren't long enough to get into the ponytail and quickly started to need clips or something when it got hot. By last weekend, I was very, very done with the whole thing, and this weekend Ginny was able to deal with it. Such a relief.

My younger nibling and their spouse of eight months or so stopped by a few days ago to pick up a few years' worth of my spare comp copies from Seven Seas. Only one box, since I've technically scaled back my freelance workload (and I think there's also a backlog of comps that I should be getting sooner rather than later), but a hefty box that was bulging a bit at the seams, so it's nice to have that all sent off to a new home. It was lovely to see my nibling and meet their spouse, however briefly. (They politely rolled with the "we're going to stand in our driveway and chat while masked and overheat more than a little" element.)

A final thing before calling this a post and getting to work: last weekend [personal profile] scruloose and I gave the Sensation lilac a long-overdue aggressive pruning (and it should probably get the same amount cut out of it in a year). The poor thing was all spindly limbs and mostly-high-up blooms, so hopefully this will help it for next year.But what to do with the mutant hybrid? )

Game reaction: Relooted

30 Jun 2025 09:39 am
brithistorian: (Default)
[personal profile] brithistorian

A South African video game studio (not a phrase I think I've ever typed before) has created a game called Relooted, a heist game where the objective is to rob museums and steal back African artifacts. I'm pretty sure my computer isn't powerful enough for me to be able to play it once it's released, but I love the idea and I look forward to seeing more games like this.

SOTD: Green Day, "Fancy Sauce"

30 Jun 2025 09:32 am
brithistorian: (Default)
[personal profile] brithistorian

I recent listened to Green Day's latest album Saviors (édition de luxe) for the first time. I liked the whole thing, but I've especially latched on to "Fancy Sauce." The chorus is like a Russian nesting doll of Easter eggs: The tune of the chorus is like a greatly slowed down version of the can-can song (Offenbach?), while the lyrics of the chorus contain call-outs to Suicidal Tendencies ("I'm not crazy, you're the one that's crazy") and Nirvana ("stupid and contagious"). Enjoy!

Status quo ante

30 Jun 2025 09:25 am
brithistorian: (Default)
[personal profile] brithistorian

Between finally getting off of Keppra (with its side effects of lethargy and sleepiness) and finally starting to get caught up on all the things I fell behind on during my long Keppra-induced nap, I feel like I'm finally starting to get back into my usual life again. Barring unforeseen events (which is never a safe thing to do, and yet I persist on doing it anyway), you should start seeing me around here more often, hopefully even reading and commenting on your posts.

Random cdrama rambles

30 Jun 2025 02:18 am
geraineon: (Default)
[personal profile] geraineon

On idol or non-idol drama


Due to a recent post elsewhere, and some cdrama conversations with friends, we've been trying to define idol vs. non-idol (or prestige vs. not prestige) dramas, and also trying to define what we think of as good acting.

One of my friend's definition of idol vs. non-idol considers things like, the production (set, makeup, lighting, filters, etc.), the focus of the highlight scenes (is it on the actor/actress [to make the actor/actress look good], or is it on the overall plot/emotions?), cast (now, this is a thorny one to bring up and can change over time), acting style (subtle? overact?).

Mine was just: "Pores or no pores?" But everyone I've spoken to seems to agree that it cuts to the core of the issue XDD

(Anyway, Joy of Life is not non-idol, in case you are one of the ones who thought so! But it is a very good show.)

Some dramas I've been watching


Because of covid, I've been binging dramas. So, here are some thoughts on the dramas I've watched!

Blossom: I can't say I watched it properly because I watched it on 1.5x speed and skipped scenes... I don't know why I was watching a time travel redo/revenge romance drama for the revenge and not the romance (so yeah, I skipped all the lingering looks, all the romance coded things). The ML's acting was quite stiff and left me mostly emotionally cold. I did enjoy the FL's story a lot more though and my favourite parts are actually all the FL's side, especially when she's with her grandmother/cousin/friends. I wish it had gone harder on the court politics, but hey, that's on me for expecting something different from a drama that honestly did very well for what it set out to do, which was a fun tropey time travel redo drama. It's fine. Bingeable.

An Ancient Love Song: I'm at 11/14. There were some parts that didn't quite work for me, but on average, I'm really enjoying this show a lot! I'm still watching it at normal pace (no speeding up, no skipping scenes), and they are delivering the core gimmick of this show extremely well, imo.
Spoilers for the gimmick [you know about it in ep. 1, really].ML and FL meet each other in reverse because of time travel shenanigans. Kinda like River Song and The Doctor, if you're familiar with Doctor Who.
The emotional beats are done well, the heartache, realizing that this is very likely going to be doomed for them, is great. It's short, it knows what it wants to do, so yeah. I'd recommend this if you're looking for a shortish drama (14 eps is a rarity). Don't expect complex court politics, go in and just feel the vibes!

Legend of Zang Hai: I've only watched two episodes, and that's only out of curiosity because I've read such polarized views on this drama. Seems like it's either praised as the next Nirvana in Fire and Xiao Zhan's acting is amazeballs, or that it's trash, DNF, not worth watching. But I suppose anything that has Xiao Zhan in it is going to inspire passionate love or passionate hate (or passionate indifference I guess). The story starts in a very chronological way, with the ML (as a kid) witnessing his entire family being killed by this guy who wants something from his father, and so he swore revenge. The rest of the story is likely a revenge story. Halfway through episode 2, the boy grows up. The adult version of the ML is acted by Xiao Zhan.

So, thoughts, from two episodes: 1) imo, eps 1 and 2 were fine but it didn't really pull me in (I will give it till ep 4, for a fair chance, since it's still setting up the story and all), 2) XZ afaik wasn't trained in acting from acting/performance schools, so knowing that, I think he did well, 3) that said, it still feels like XZ is an actor playing a role, rather than embodying the role, if that makes sense.

CDrama related links


Somehow, from Zang Hai, I went to watch random other clips and okay, this FMV with Zhang Ruoyun in Novoland, with blue eyes (and terrible taobao sets and worse wing prop) intrigued me XD (though I do enjoy ZRY's acting, I must say, he, like most actors now, can't do fight scenes well ahaha).

And this bilibili link has my fav trash character acted by Kwong Wa, Ha Suet Yi, that bastard (and also the only part of the story I remember from this Jin Yong story because the MC is so bland). It's a 3 min 3 seconds video, no dialogue, just scenes of Kwong Wa as Ha Suet Yi.

And then I dug out a 4 mins 44 secs Kwong Wa role compilation FMV, here. The range XD (My grandma like this actor! She said he is great at acting as emperors/those type of characters).

And then, I thought, "what about Esther Kwan, one of my fav TVB actress?", so here's a 3 min 33 secs music video of her roles!

(Still testing positive for Covid, but hey, symptoms are mostly gone! Just some lingering cough)

Two weeks' worth of reading

29 Jun 2025 03:16 pm
umadoshi: (books 01)
[personal profile] umadoshi
A weekend post never happened last weekend, but here's what I'm been reading over the last couple of weeks. (Watching has been basically unchanged: we're up to date on Murderbot and continuing to slowly work through Leverage season 4.)

I finished reading Tchaikovsky's Service Model, which I thought was...fine? It was interesting enough, but if it had been my first exposure to his work it wouldn't have made me rush out and try more right away.

I read and liked Margaret Owen's Little Thieves in April, and Jenny Hamilton on Bluesky was recently talking about the trilogy as a whole (and this reminds me that now I can go read her "How to Break a Heart: Subverting the Hero’s Breakup Trope"), so when I decided a week or so ago to finally burn through all of my Kobo points and clear at least a bit of my wishlist, I included the second book, Painted Devils, which I enjoyed enough to want to read the third (Holy Terrors) right away. I try not to buy many ebooks at full price, though, given how many more I buy overall than I'm ever going to manage to read, and thankfully my library not only has it but had it available right away.

Consider that a recommendation, but beyond it I'm just going to quote the non-spoilery part of Jenny's essay that describes the series (and the essay then details how things stood at the end of book 2, so consider that the spoiler warning):
This year brought us Margaret Owen’s Holy Terrors. It’s the third in a trilogy about an angry, selfish girl named Vanja who made it through a lifetime of neglect and abuse with a crop of emotional and physical scars, a talent for picking pockets, the favor of the gods (sometimes), and a healthy hostility for rich people. Against both their better judgment, she falls in love with prefect Emeric Conrad, whom she variously describes as a “human civics primer,” an “accounting ledger made flesh,” and an “intolerable filing cabinet.”

(Here the author of this piece has been compelled to delete a ten thousand–word manifesto about the greatness of the Little Thieves series. If you like the TV show Leverage, or you enjoy digging your teeth into solid character development, or you just hate rich people, you should read it. The first book is Little Thieves. Thank me later.)

For a dramatic change of pace, I'm now reading Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 by M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi (also a with-points acquisition), which I keep wanting to file under non-fiction, although the title will clearly tell you that it's speculative fiction. (IIRC I learned about it from [personal profile] skygiants' post.) Its fictional interviews build a distressingly plausible picture of global collapse through this decade and the couple to come, but also offer glimpses into how we could come out on the other side, if we're willing to largely raze and rebuild ~human society~ in a way that actually takes care of people. (The book came out in...2022?...so it in no way accounts for the most recent and current forms of the political hellscape.)

On the non-fiction side, I read Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen, a book of essays and corresponding recipes that I'd previously read maybe ten years ago. Colwin died in 1992 (I think I've got that right), and this book (and the follow-up, More Home Cooking) is a food-writing classic for good reason, although also very much of its place and time--very American, very '80s.

(The rest of my using-all-my-Kobo-points haul: The Hands of the Emperor, We Are All Completely Fine, Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower, All Under Heaven: Recipes from the 35 Cuisines of China, and Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World. Did this put a visible dent in my Kobo wishlist [which is a relatively curated list of books I keep an eye on for preorder purposes and sighting sales]? Yes. Has the dent since been filled in? Also yes.)

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to remember

"When you make the finding yourself— even if you're the last person on Earth to see the light— you'll never forget it." —Carl Sagan

October 2016

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