Me-and-media update
Apr. 22nd, 2025 06:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
china_shopPrevious 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
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.
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
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%)
Poetry month: For the New House by Ursula K. Le Guin
Apr. 21st, 2025 02:38 pmresonantFor the New House by Ursula K. Le Guin
May this house be full of kitchen smells
and shadows and toys and nests of mice
and roars of rage and waterfalls of tears
and deep sexual silences and sounds
of mysterious origin never explained
and troves and keepsakes and a lot of junk
and a flowing like a warm wind only slower
blowing the leaves of trees and books and the fish-years
of a child’s life silvery flickering
quick, quick, in the slow incessant gust
that billows out the curtains for a moment
all those years from now, ago.
May the sills and doorframes
be in blessing blest at every passing.
May the roof but not the rooms know rain.
May the windows know clearly
the branch and flower of the apple tree.
And may you be in this house
as the music is in the instrument.
May this house be full of kitchen smells
and shadows and toys and nests of mice
and roars of rage and waterfalls of tears
and deep sexual silences and sounds
of mysterious origin never explained
and troves and keepsakes and a lot of junk
and a flowing like a warm wind only slower
blowing the leaves of trees and books and the fish-years
of a child’s life silvery flickering
quick, quick, in the slow incessant gust
that billows out the curtains for a moment
all those years from now, ago.
May the sills and doorframes
be in blessing blest at every passing.
May the roof but not the rooms know rain.
May the windows know clearly
the branch and flower of the apple tree.
And may you be in this house
as the music is in the instrument.
Come speak to me of Second Person POV
Apr. 21st, 2025 05:44 pmchina_shopThe 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.
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.
Movie rec
Apr. 19th, 2025 09:30 pmgwynHey, if you are going to theatres to see movies these days, I can highly recommend Sinners, with Michael B. Jordan, Wunmi Mosaku, and Hailee Steinfeld. It's about twin brothers (played by Jordan) who return to their town in Mississippi in 1932 to open a juke joint, and run up against vampires. I'm not much of a vampire person at all, but I think this would probably satisfy both the vampire loving crowd as well as the crowd like me, because the whole first hour is mostly a slow build of who the twins are and who the people in their lives are, and what's happened to them to make them what they are (not the least of which is of course generational trauma from racism), and also background for the character who becomes central to both their story and to the vampires' story.
The music is fucking off the charts amazing (Ludwig Göransson does the soundtrack and a lot of the music stuff) and worth it alone. There are two music sequences that left me kind of gobsmacked. I've never seen anything like it.
There's definitely gore and jump scares, but overall I didn't find it too horror-y, more like a modern monster movie in terms of the violence and such. It was definitely R-rated, with some very sexual scenes. Anyways, if you were considering it, I loved it. (It was directed by Ryan Coogler of Black Panther fame.)
The music is fucking off the charts amazing (Ludwig Göransson does the soundtrack and a lot of the music stuff) and worth it alone. There are two music sequences that left me kind of gobsmacked. I've never seen anything like it.
There's definitely gore and jump scares, but overall I didn't find it too horror-y, more like a modern monster movie in terms of the violence and such. It was definitely R-rated, with some very sexual scenes. Anyways, if you were considering it, I loved it. (It was directed by Ryan Coogler of Black Panther fame.)
What I'm Doing Wednesday
Apr. 16th, 2025 07:43 pmsage( books (Krishnamurti x3, Lhanang Rinpoche, Zopa Rinpoche) )
food
Thanks to getting a bag of trail mix (yes, they do now make mixes I'm not allergic to!), I upped my weekly fruit and veggie type count by 6! I've got a lot more variety in this week's grocery pickup, too.
( healthcrap )
( dirt )
family
I went to my parents' for my brother's early birthday party over the weekend. (I didn't take any yarn, which was weird.) I mulched flower beds and counted bluebonnets and helped rip out a giant dead elaeagnus, and I spent *several* hours working on their new laptop and ancient desktop, both of which had a number of viruses. I installed Brave on the laptop, so hopefully that will minimize any new infections. And when I got home I binged on the gf peanut butter cookies mom made me, because I cannot control myself. Which messed up my blood sugar in my labs for today's doc appt, oops. Oh well.
#resist
April 18: Economic Blackout 2
April 19: #50501 Nationwide Protest #2: FREE KILMAR!
April 21 to 28: General Mills Boycott
May 6 to 12: Amazon Boycott 2
May 20 to 26: Walmart Boycott 2
June 3 to 9: Target Boycott
June 24 to 30: McDonald’s Boycott
July 4: Independence Day Boycott
I hope all of you are doing well! <333
food
Thanks to getting a bag of trail mix (yes, they do now make mixes I'm not allergic to!), I upped my weekly fruit and veggie type count by 6! I've got a lot more variety in this week's grocery pickup, too.
( healthcrap )
( dirt )
family
I went to my parents' for my brother's early birthday party over the weekend. (I didn't take any yarn, which was weird.) I mulched flower beds and counted bluebonnets and helped rip out a giant dead elaeagnus, and I spent *several* hours working on their new laptop and ancient desktop, both of which had a number of viruses. I installed Brave on the laptop, so hopefully that will minimize any new infections. And when I got home I binged on the gf peanut butter cookies mom made me, because I cannot control myself. Which messed up my blood sugar in my labs for today's doc appt, oops. Oh well.
#resist
April 18: Economic Blackout 2
April 19: #50501 Nationwide Protest #2: FREE KILMAR!
April 21 to 28: General Mills Boycott
May 6 to 12: Amazon Boycott 2
May 20 to 26: Walmart Boycott 2
June 3 to 9: Target Boycott
June 24 to 30: McDonald’s Boycott
July 4: Independence Day Boycott
I hope all of you are doing well! <333
Signal boost: US politics
Apr. 17th, 2025 09:37 amchina_shop( US political shitshow behind the cut (Youtube video & news link) )
And while I'm at it, ( shitty news from the UK, too )
And while I'm at it, ( shitty news from the UK, too )
archery!
Apr. 15th, 2025 06:18 pmthe_shoshannaGeoff found a local archery club that offers adult beginner lessons, and we are taking six weeks of basic archery!
He did it briefly as a teen, I think; I had a toy bow as a child, but that's it. Lessons are held once a week in the basement of a church(!) about a half-hour walk from us, and as it gets warm I hope it will be an absolute pleasure to walk there and back in the evenings.
We've had one lesson so far. There were about a dozen students and two teachers: we were probably the oldest people there, and it went down to a couple university students. Seems like a nice group; there wasn't a lot of chatting, since we were there to listen and learn and do, but everyone was fun and friendly -- and the teachers were fun and friendly and also absolutely no-nonsense, as is appropriate. They showed us how to tell which eye is dominant, distributed bows and armguards, and told us that there are twelve steps to shooting, and each week we'll learn two more; week 1, unsurprisingly, concentrated on correct posture and on the rules of the range, i.e. not shooting anybody. We got to shoot at targets from a ten-yard line, and I was pretty good! Some people were all over the map, even missing the target entirely: I ended up with one in the bullseye and a couple in the first ring around it, as well as several further out. But, as I said when someone complimented me, in week four they'll teach us to aim, and then I'll lose it completely :)
By the end of the lesson, Geoff was already asking about buying bows of our own. (The club has loaner bows for lessons, but if you want to join the club itself, shoot on their outdoor range, etc., you need your own equipment.) I doubt I'll want to get that into it; we didn't do as much hiking and kayaking last summer as we wanted to, and do we really want to buy pricy equipment to split our outdoorsy-sport-time even more? But it could happen! Anyway the club offers adult intermediate lessons as well, so we can keep going after this without having to pony up if we don't want to.
This is such a fun city sometimes!
He did it briefly as a teen, I think; I had a toy bow as a child, but that's it. Lessons are held once a week in the basement of a church(!) about a half-hour walk from us, and as it gets warm I hope it will be an absolute pleasure to walk there and back in the evenings.
We've had one lesson so far. There were about a dozen students and two teachers: we were probably the oldest people there, and it went down to a couple university students. Seems like a nice group; there wasn't a lot of chatting, since we were there to listen and learn and do, but everyone was fun and friendly -- and the teachers were fun and friendly and also absolutely no-nonsense, as is appropriate. They showed us how to tell which eye is dominant, distributed bows and armguards, and told us that there are twelve steps to shooting, and each week we'll learn two more; week 1, unsurprisingly, concentrated on correct posture and on the rules of the range, i.e. not shooting anybody. We got to shoot at targets from a ten-yard line, and I was pretty good! Some people were all over the map, even missing the target entirely: I ended up with one in the bullseye and a couple in the first ring around it, as well as several further out. But, as I said when someone complimented me, in week four they'll teach us to aim, and then I'll lose it completely :)
By the end of the lesson, Geoff was already asking about buying bows of our own. (The club has loaner bows for lessons, but if you want to join the club itself, shoot on their outdoor range, etc., you need your own equipment.) I doubt I'll want to get that into it; we didn't do as much hiking and kayaking last summer as we wanted to, and do we really want to buy pricy equipment to split our outdoorsy-sport-time even more? But it could happen! Anyway the club offers adult intermediate lessons as well, so we can keep going after this without having to pony up if we don't want to.
This is such a fun city sometimes!