primroseburrows

Previous poll review
In the vegetables poll, 90.4% of respondents clicked fresh vegetables (bought), 46.2% clicked frozen vegetables, and 44.2% clicked fresh vegetables (homegrown). I was surprised; I thought more people would go frozen for the convenience. (I wonder what that says, if anything, about Dreamwidth demographics.)

In ticky-boxes, hugs came first with 78.8%, followed by a tie between "hanging in there until things settle down and I can sort my life out" and "sunbeams playing in a tree, daring each other to peek around the shadowed side" with 63.5% each. Thank you for your votes!

Reading
Still going on The Horse and His Boy (I am slow and distractable) and the Guardian novel read-along (it's on a schedule). Nothing in audio.

Kdramas
We started Tale of the Nine Tailed, a sweeping epic about a powerful immortal, the reincarnated love of his life, and his bratty younger brother. (Nothing at all like Guardian the novel, why do you ask?) I'm hoping it has enough plot and worldbuilding to hold Andrew's interest; he gets bored during extended romance scenes.

More of Sell Your Haunted House with Pru. And in solo-watching, I started Heesu in Class 2; it's pretty adorable, but also Heesu is the living embodiment of Idiots In Love, and sometimes I have to watch through my fingers.

Other TV
This week's Doctor Who

was very silly and meta, set against a background of ominous racism. Hm. But I did enjoy the jokes, and Belinda is great.

Episode 1 of Sherlock & Daughter. We were just going to try out the first ten minutes to get a sense of it, but we ended up watching the whole episode. I can forgive Holmes for being a grumpy old man when he has a reason for it.

Our Deadloch rewatch-with-a-friend continues, plus Jentry Chau vs the Underworld, about which I still have no opinion.

My sister and I watched Into the Night (1985 film; Michelle Pfeiffer, Jeff Goldblum, and a vast number of film directors as extras, the only one of whom I knew on sight was Jim Henson). The caper was silly, and the romance plotline was very thin, but Goldblum and Pfeiffer are so watchable that it hung together despite the weird pacing when it lingered on random extras we were supposed to recognise. Lovely to see David Bowie in a small (albeit violently psychotic) role.

Guardian/Fandom
I archived my Murderbot flashficlet, and wow, Murderbot fans are generous with their kudosing. *hearts so much* (In my experience, some fandoms are just more kudosy than others.)

Audio entertainment
I listened my way through all of The Setup, a romance audiodrama about Juan, an anxious art museum curator in NYC, and Fernando, the con artist who's trying to steal a painting. It's great! I'm really into it. And then I got to the end of the available episodes and realised it's not finished yet, ahhhhh! I need to check these things before I start!

(Is it just me or are depictions of anxiety becoming more common in romances? I feel like there's some wish fulfilment going on: people longing to meet The One who is hot, super into them, and will also be incredibly kind and patient and give them effective tips for handling their panic attacks. Not that romances aren't all about wish fulfilment, so why not? Add dimensions to your dream partner!)

Writing/making things
My little 4k exchange fic is becoming somewhat tortured by all the writing advice I'm trying to enact on it. Hopefully I'm not engineering the spark out of the thing. Also, hopefully I emerge from this process wiser and more capable. (It could happen!) Note to self: this story still doesn't have an ending, oops.

Other than that, I'm spending a lot of my life rolling around in meta discussions, yay!

Life/health/mental state things
Oh, look, let's not even talk about it. /o\

Note to self: I had a flu jab on Saturday.

Online life
I'm switching ISPs on Friday. Wish me luck! If I disappear off the face of the internet, that will be why.

Food
Today marks my first attempt at baked potatoes in the slow cooker. *fingers crossed* I forgot to prickle them with a fork before I wrapped them in foil, so who knows.

Good things
Fandom. Writing. Lunchtime dumplings on the back deck. Cephalopod plushies. Queer audiodramas. Friends coming over to watch stuff. Guardian. Home-made salsa. Trivia quizzes. Music and kindness and laughter and love.

Poll #33020 face blindness extrapolation

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 43

View Respondents

Do you have face-blindness?

View Answers

yes
2 (4.7%)

technically no, but it's not unusual for me to get people confused
23 (53.5%)

especially when they're dressed the same
14 (32.6%)

no
12 (27.9%)

I mix up similar usernames
14 (32.6%)

honestly, they don't have to be that similar
12 (27.9%)

other
1 (2.3%)

ticky-box full of black cats slinking mysteriously in the shadows
28 (65.1%)

ticky-box full of starting a howl
15 (34.9%)

ticky-box of overthinking
21 (48.8%)

ticky-box full of squirrel-dragons with floofy tails, guarding their golden acorns
21 (48.8%)

ticky-box full of hugs
33 (76.7%)

china_shop

( One link behind the cut )

china_shop

The Writing Excuses podcast is doing a series on voice (first, third limited, third omniscient), and mostly their discussions have been great. I've enjoyed them a lot. But I found today's episode on second person (2ndPOV) unsatisfying. They got distracted talking about video games, TTRPG, online recipe essays, and Youtube influencers, and when they did discuss fictional prose, they seemed to think the "you" character had to be a reader stand-in. (Or maybe I misunderstood? Quite possible!) Anyway, now I'm itching to ~~procrastinate on my story~~ talk with like-minded souls about the joys of second person.

Note: If you not into 2ndPOV, that's totally cool. Each to their own! But please don't chime in to tell me or explain why; I'm not interested in defending it today.

( Rambling, so much rambling. )

ION, Andrew sent me a link to Secrets of Writing Snappy Dialogue (Banter) (Youtube video). At first I was resistant, but then I watched it and now I'm overhauling my 4k fic AGAIN. This is killing me, lol.

jesse_the_k

Declaration of Interdependence from queerspacepunk (aka emmett)

A tiny snippet from a lovely thread

i want to be asked to come over and help put my friend's kids to bed as casually as they might text their spouse and ask them to pick up milk on the way home

i want to stop and pick up milk for another friend because i know their spouse hates the grocery store

i want to buy fruit that i dont like because it's on special and i know people who do

i want to pass lemons over the fence and to take my neighbours bins out when the forget

i want group chats instead of rideshare apps, calls in the middle of the night because someone's at the hospital, lonely or hungry or both

i want to do the dishes in other people's houses, extra servings wrapped in tinfoil and tea towels so it's still warm when you drop it off, a basket of other people's mending by my couch

i want to be surrounded by reminders that 'imposing' on each other is what we were born to do

https://queerspacepunk.tumblr.com/search/interdependence

Today I learned there are graphic resources—icons and banners—on the Archive of Our Own!

https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Banners%20*a*%20Icons/works

(Sadly AO3’s metatags don’t create RSS feeds, so I can’t add one here.)

New DW community for people who archive information from the web: datahoarders

timeasmymeasure provides resources for would-be archivists without tech skills: https://datahoarders.dreamwidth.org/3299.html

Of particular interest to me:

AO3 Downloader: a life-saver for any person who has thought, "God, I wish I could download all of my bookmarks, but that would take sooo long to do individually." Another Github download which is saved by its thorough instructions!

isis

What I've recently finished reading:

In eyeball, Against the Tide of Years by S. M. Stirling, the second "Nantucket Trilogy" book. I liked the exploration and expansion of the map, but I really wished there was an actual map in the book, because I only had a vague idea, if any, as to where these various historical/archaic places actually were, and where they were in relation to each other. Even in the exploration across the American continent it wasn't clear where they were, because Stirling used native names (I guess?) for places. (And one of my big beefs with this book is that the exploration across the American continent had pretty much nothing to do with the rest of the book, and it didn't really have a point or a resolution. I assume it will be important next book, but in that case I wish it had been mostly left for the next book.)

I did like the new characters introduced in this one, and most especially I grinned when we met Odikweos son of Laertes of Ithaka, and also Alaksandrus of Wiulusiya, or Vilios, or Ilios. I always love seeing real historical characters show up in historical fiction! (Also I was extremely tickled when Ian quoted Monty Python, hee!)

In audio, Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, which I got from the library because it was one of the fantasy books recommended by Shannon Chakraborty in a NYT article last month. Casiopea Tun is a Cinderella in 1927 Mexico, a poor relation housemaid for her wealthy and unpleasant relatives. She snoops where she shouldn't and, oops, accidentally releases the Mayan death god Hun-Kamé, who was "killed" and imprisoned by his brother Vucub-Kamé. But before the god can take his revenge on his brother and regain his throne, he has to go on a hero's journey to find the missing parts of his body that his brother has scattered across Mexico, and of course Casiopea has to come with him.

I always enjoy stories of asshole gods and the mortals who help them out, and I really enjoyed having a story about gods and mythological traditions I wasn't familiar with. The writing's lovely, and it worked well as an audiobook, although either the reader's voice or the fidelity of the recording didn't play well with my running headphones, and of course I know only some Spanish and no ancient Mayan, so I felt like I missed a lot of names of people and places. I liked Casiopea's defensive sassiness, her desire for adventure finally unleashed, and Hun-Kamé's duality, his godly nature tainted by the vitality he drains from Casiopea to sustain his existence in the "Middle World". And the ending was great - I won't spoil it, but I was worried it would end up in typical YA land, and it did not.

china_shop

( US political shitshow behind the cut (Youtube video & news link) )

And while I'm at it, ( shitty news from the UK, too )

omens

TV:

Voyager

203 Projections: Computer, delete Paris. :D Didn't quite buy into the central premise of this episode, sad2say, it was just kinda goofy (Doctor is human and Voyager is holographic? OR IS HE?!)

I started watching Bluey in Polish and it is really actually charming. The children are right.

Games:

I started a wilderness farm in Stardew Valley! I really like it! But I also think I'm done now (she says, for the third week in a row)

Podcasts & Music:

Basically only listening to the Used or Starset, depending on which wip I'm pretending to work on.

Books: I went and did a reread of Murderbot like many other people seem to be doing right now! :D Very excited about the show. OF COURSE it's going up when Kelly (who also loves Murderbot) is going away so now I have a very serious ethical conundrum on my hands!!!! Got the sequel to six of crows from the library so I have 3 weeks to get r dun

Writing and other wips:

Writing: 681. It felt like more T_T

Language learning: 6h37m (this did not feel like more, struggle week for sure)

bonus chickadee sourcing some homegrown nesting materials

china_shop

Previous poll review
In the Lists poll, 59.3% of respondents make to-do lists on their phone/computer/device, 40.7% use scraps of paper, and 18.5% have a planner or other organisational system. (These options are obviously not mutually exclusive.) "I park items on my to-do list so I don't have to worry about forgetting them" was the most popular purpose of to-do lists, with 61.1%, followed by 44.4% who refer to their to-do lists and try to complete the items thereon, and 24.1% who agree with me that "putting an item on the list is sort of the same as doing the thing."

In ticky-boxes, hugs came first with 75.9%, followed by a near-four-way tie. Thank you for your votes! <3

Reading
Am I reading anything except Guardian? Doesn't seem like it. ETA: Just started A Horse and his Boy by C.S. Lewis.

~~Kdramas~~ Asian dramas
I'm watching my first Japanese drama, Aoshima-kun is a Bully!, on VIKI. It's a sweet m/f office romance with a 9-year age gap. The production values aren't super-shiny, but it hangs together fine. I like older woman/younger man stories for a number of reasons; it might be the first drama I've seen where the woman is like, yes, I do like you, and it's nice when you stay over, but also I really miss having tons of alone time. And I like that the male lead keeps turning to his two step-mothers for relationship advice, aw. Non-standard family relationships for the win!

More of the Sell Your Haunted House rewatch.

Other TV
Finished The Pitt, which was as excellent as everyone's been saying. The ending felt earned, and I'm glad they gave it space to breathe. Now Andrew and I are floundering a bit, unsure what to watch next. (We've spent the last couple of evenings listening to Youtube writing lectures, see below.) We're up to episode 3 of Doc, which is fine but by-the-numbers, and suffers greatly in comparison to The Pitt.

Still watching Krapopolis. Losing interest in Ghosts (UK), though it's interesting discussing why it isn't working for us. Started The Dope Thief, but I was finding the bad decisions and impending disaster too stressful and couldn't finish episode 1. The new Doctor Who, which, the main characters were great, and everything else feels messy to me.

A friend came over, and we watched the first episodes of Deadloch (a rewatch for me) and Jentry Chau vs the Underworld which I was too tired to judge.

Also: Frankie and Johnny (1985) starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino, a romance in which the female lead should have taken out a restraining order (interesting comparing it to Aoshima-kun, in which "mature woman stays single" is presented as a viable choice, not a death sentence), and Dead Again (1991) a "neo-noir romantic thriller" starring Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh as reincarnated lovers who look identical to their past-life selves (so I couldn't help connecting the dots to Guardian in that regard). Neither film has aged well.

Guardian/Fandom
Working on my 520 Day Guardian fic. Having some lovely discussions on

sid_guardian. Didn't sign up for

bitesizedfandomsex in the end, because the sign-up summary didn't look promising. That's okay.

Audio entertainment
Writing Excuses this week was about 3rd person omniscient, and it made me go back and start to re-read this week's Guardian chapters with voice in mind. Wow, priest is so good at this. It feels very natural, even to me who mostly reads 3rd limited. The example that came to mind most when I was listening to the podcast was actually The Spear Cuts Through Water, where a lot of the omniscient/non-main-character voices are there to support the worldbuilding and theme; that works so well. But in Guardian, it's not a theme thing; priest is just telling the story.

The Daily Stoic on Virtue Ethics, which wasn't as explanatory as I was hoping.

And a bunch of Brandon Sanderson's Youtube lectures on plotting which, as I've mentioned previously, I'm trying to apply to a 4k fic. (I broke it into segments and reassembled them, theoretically with more build/progression; now let's see if this thing will fly.)

Writing/making things
My writing energy is pretty good. I'm getting things done and having a good time doing so. I have two things I want to finish this week (one is most of the way there; the other, I'd be happy if I could get a complete draft), and if I have time after that, I'll write another flashfic for the Pink round on

fan_flashworks. I'm thinking of doing something with P!nk song titles or lyrics.

Life/health/mental state things
I seem to be permanently not on top of things, ahhhhh! How is it mid-April already?? Every so often I look at my consolidated to-do list and go, "Okay, okay, I did a couple of these ~~by accident~~, I can cross them off." I don't think that's how to-do lists are supposed to work.

I did manage to get my four-year term submission in yesterday, so that's something. (It was very cranky.)

Cats
Halle's on 3x daily medication for the next 5-7 days. She is so good about it. I can't get over how chill and compliant she is, especially compared to our previous demon siblings.

Korean
I got a bilingual children's picture book out of the library, and yeah, it's above my (very low) reading level. But I've also printed out the Korean subs for episode 8 of Guardian, and that's a bit more successful, since I know pretty well how it goes. I just need to make some more time.

Good things
Biking weather. Library books. Writing. Guardian. Guardian fanart. Cooking experiments. Podcasts and Youtube. Polls. Movie night with my sister. Figuring out I can play file types that aren't supported by my TV through my Blueray player. Flowering hibiscus and fruiting lemon tree. Boy and cat.

Poll #32985 vegetables

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 52

View Respondents

In general

View Answers

fresh vegetables, bought
47 (90.4%)

fresh vegetables, homegrown
23 (44.2%)

frozen vegetables
24 (46.2%)

no vegetables
2 (3.8%)

other
4 (7.7%)

ticky-box of hanging in there until things settle down and I can sort my life out
33 (63.5%)

ticky-box of a lion librarian strangely obsessed with books/DVDs/resources on penguins
24 (46.2%)

ticky-box full of polls
25 (48.1%)

ticky-box full of sunbeams playing in a tree, daring each other to peek around the shadowed side
33 (63.5%)

ticky-box full of hugs
41 (78.8%)

scriggle

I had a dream last night. I was in some sort of bar/club playing some sort of card game. There were multiple small rectangular table that could seat 3 or 4 people on one side with a dealer/bartender on the other side. Anyway I was playing the card game and told the bartender I wanted water not another cocktail. The next thing I know CKR comes up beside me and gives me a hug. And I said to him "You just made my day." He gave me that blinding smile of his and a little peck on the lips. Then he sat down and played cards with me.

What the actual hell subconscious?! That was just so random.

china_shop

Andrew and I were talking about the Narnia books. He hasn't read some of the middle ones, and I was all, "Oh, you should try The Silver Chair. It's really interesting, and it has a great Eeyore character."

him: Oh, yeah, Pond-drizzle.

Consider the dangers of listening to Brandon Sanderson's lectures on plot, while attempting to write a < 4k exchange fic.

My eyesight is getting noticeably worse, and I'm dreading the day I can't start the morning reading my phone and seeing the texture of my cat's russet-black fur as I stroke her, without glasses.

I realised that I listened to Me & AU (f/f podcast about two fans and their new tiny fandom) as a mood enhancer. The POV character is going through some big emotions, but her affect is upbeat in a distinctly fannish way, and I enjoy how that bleeds into my own behaviour (right up until it wears off).

I wrote a little Murderbot flashfic for petra yesterday: Known Issues (432 words, G-rated gen; fan_flashworks link). Look at me being not 100% mono/duofannish!

Speaking of which, I wrote a ridiculous mess of a fic for the last fan_flashworks round: Untitled Cat Story (The Time of Fever, Go Hotae/Kim Donghee, 2.5k, G-rated, coming out to a parent, sort of implied cat shape-shifter idek; AO3 link). Note to self: if you want to set up a shape-shifter scenario in an otherwise real-world setting, and you want to keep the story short, maybe stick with the affected character's POV, lol.

omens

I don't feel like fucking around with all the photos in my food post so I'm posting these misc thoughts instead! A week or two ago Liam heard a little scritchy scratch when he was in his bathroom and opened the window to THIS GUY:

(the guy is a vole)

Look at this lil chonk! Tiny ears! Do not want him in my house! All the screens in our window wells (and our neighbours') are torn to shit from rodents. They really need lil ladders to get out of there - we found a toad in there before. I put a board from the windowsill to the top of the well and came back in ten minutes and he was gone. Cute af though. Idk what to do about the screen problems, though. I don't really want to open the downstairs windows with holey screens.

In bird news,

A lady downy woodpecker I saw yesterday! We get a lot of woodpeckers here, with a little dead tree lot behind us. Merlin (the app) said there was a red-bellied as well, but I never saw it. I haven't managed a picture of one of them yet! This morning I woke up to a flicker, but it flew off before I got out the binoculars. I neeeeeeed a flicker picture 🥺🙏

isis

We have recently finished watching all three seasons of Warrior on Netflix!

As I said in my pre-review, it's sort of Peaky Blinders set in the late 19th C San Francisco Chinatown Tong Wars, with a generous helping of Game of Thrones-ish nudity and sex; come to think of it, there is more Game of Thrones feel to it than just that, as a large part of the plot is the rivalry and fights for dominance between two tongs. Also the fight by the Irish immigrants to be hired as laborers, when the Chinese work much more cheaply. "Fight" is a literal term here - every episode has at least one (fistfight, or knife and axe fight, or swordfight, or gunfight - or more usually, someone bringing a gun to a fistfight and having it kicked out of his hands) and two or three is not uncommon. So much fighting! Sometimes gory, though fortunately usually not pushing my limit (though a few times it was UGGGHHH yuck).

I mostly liked it a lot, though I also felt ready to be finished with it as it wrapped up. Most recurring characters were interestingly complex with very mixed motivations, though there were some stock drama bad guys, and the wealthy white men were all terrible human beings. Probably my favorite characters were Ah Toy and Chao, the most mixed-motivation characters of all - Ah Toy is the perhaps mostly lesbian madam of the bordello where the Hop Wei hang out (also an accomplished swordswoman and crafty businesswoman), and Chao is the weapons dealer who is "friend to all" tongs (for a price) and the bland and obsequious face of Chinatown to the police. But there are so many cool characters!

There is both canon m/m and f/f (and plenty of het), but my favorite relationships were the prickly platonic ones, in particular between Father Jun and his son Young Jun, and between Ah Sam (the main character of the show) and his sister Mai Ling.

One thing I particularly liked about the show was the way they handled language. In the first episode there are a few bits where Chinese morphs into English as the camera shifts, so you know that the characters are speaking Chinese, even though they are speaking English. (I think Vikings did something similar.) Some of the Chinese characters speak perfect English, but others, you can tell when they are speaking "Chinese" (fluent and casual English) vs. "English" (accented, with simple grammar). And of course when there are English-speaking whites around, the Chinese characters who "don't speak English" speak Cantonese. (Apparently the actor playing Young Jun spoke fluent Cantonese, everyone else had to learn it, and Cantonese speakers can tell :-) I also liked the slang used by the Chinese, which - I don't know how accurate it is to actual Cantonese idiom, but it added a nice flavor - the white people are "ducks", the white section of San Francisco is "the pond", sex is "sticky" (as a noun), money is "chop", a fight is a "scrap".

Probably my favorite episode was the spaghetti western one in S1, though I also really liked the arc with Rosalita Vega in S2, and the S3 banger with Chao and Lee. Warnings for basically everything, though - violence, rape (mostly implied and attempted), nudity, drugs, racism, sexism, horrible white male politicians, hopeful dreams dashed against reality.

Now we are watching S3 of The Wheel of Time, which we are up to episode 3 tonight. I'm having the problem that I don't really remember S2 because I read the books between then and now, so I'm remembering book events and trying to figure out how they match up with show events. And of course there are the very big changes that have been made in the interest of bringing it to TV.

Oh, one more thing - I was going to post this yesterday but ran out of time writing it, because last night we went to see the Cirque Mechanics show "Pedal Punk", which was amazeballs! The group was founded by two former members of Cirque du Soleil, and the show is a spectacular display of core strength, flexibility, and hand-eye coordination, all framed in an entertaining comic mime play about a bicycle shop, using props that look like bicycle parts (juggling seatposts, a penny-farthing used as an aerial hoop, etc). It's stunning and if the show is near you you should definitely see it! (Looks like from here they are going to Chandler AZ, Albuquerque NM, Alexandria LA, and then Texarkana and Houston.)

jesse_the_k

Yesterday I accompanied MyGuy to his colonoscopy. We entered a small room with a surgical bed, vitals station, the now-ubiquitous bedside computer, and a parking space for me. After he donned the hospital gown, nursing staff connected him to the vitals station, and started a saline drip. They wheeled him off to the procedure while I waited in the cubicle. I distracted myself with some Sherlock fanfic.

Suddenly the door was opening. An unfamiliar nurse was wheeling a complete stranger backwards into the space—I asked should I remove my husband’s clothing if someone else was using the room. She said, “Of course not, he will be putting them back on in a few minutes.” Seeing my puzzled face, she said, “Don’t you recognize him?” I was still stunned—who were these people? She swung the bed around so I could see his eyes. The estranged swirl of jamais vu vanished, and I saw his lovely face, his smile enhanced by recent doses of fentanyl and midazolam.

All went well, and 45 minutes later we were in the taxi back home. I’d read of the vu triplets—presque, déjà, jamais—in Catch-22 when I was a teenager, but this was my first experience of jamais vu.

Very disconcerting—have you experienced this?

omens

I did not break up with Stardew Valley 🫣🫣🫣

Books:

I did break up with the Reappearance of Rachel Price. I wanted to read this book since I saw it on a kobo sale and me and the library kept sending it back and forth forever, but the premise sounded fun: 18 yo girl grown up under the mystery of her mother's disappearance (when she was 2) and all that comes with that (crime podcasts, her dad being charged with murder, town gossip, emotional problems), in the middle of filming a documentary with her family when her mother suddenly reappears. I got to her mother reappearing and a bit after but I just had to accept that I don't read mysteries because I really just don't like mysteries! I want to shake all the characters and be like JUST BE STRAIGHT WITH ME >:( I have no patience for figuring shit out or red herrings or any of that. Unless it's a mystery in a sci-fi book or a fantasy book and I have worldbuilding to contemplate while I ignore that mystery, bleh

Writing and other wips: ~1680 words written on two wips, mostly actually writing, too. Language learning: 7h18

rants and ramblings of utter randomness

Me-and-media update

US politics

Come speak to me of Second Person POV

boost: Declaration of Interdependence & 2 AO3 Resources

wednesday reads

Signal boost: US politics

media update

Me-and-media update

Dream

A number of things

misc stuff

thursday things

Evidently, this was jamais vu

media update

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June 2018

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