hamimi_fk: (d.va)
[personal profile] hamimi_fk
I got deep into video games in recent years, with my biggest addiction going to Genshin Impact. I do try to pull away because of how many hours I can dump into the game. I skipped a year of play my second year into the game, then some months here and there. My most recent sabbatical was just after the 5.3 update at the end of 2024 (Okay, I did participate in the Lantern Rite this year! But I missed the final mission). I got in heavy when Natlan came out, so I guess I hit a bit of a burnout. I was also getting frustrated that my pulls were ass after ass. Sometimes I have great luck with my pulls, like when I pulled both Chiori and Itto during their shared banner run, back to back. But I pulled a Jean during a banner she had no business being on and I think that was what set in motion my last burnout. (I love Jean, as a character, but I have Kazuha so she's somewhat useless to me.)

The point of this post is that I stumbled across the new video for the summer event and I NEED to play. Woe unto me.

Wishlist -- all the prompts!

Jul. 18th, 2025 12:52 pm
china_shop: Close-up of Zhao Yunlan grinning (Default)
[personal profile] china_shop
[community profile] guardian_wishlist is returning next month, yay! It's my favourite event. It runs like [community profile] fandomtrees: people sign up with a wishlist of things they'd like to receive, and then anyone can make them gifts. One of the things I love about it is that every year I make things that would never have occurred to me otherwise: the SID Team writing RPS, Arthurian-inspired AU, tea shop AU, Zhu Hong learning martial arts, Li Qian joining the SID, etc.

I find most of my own prompts revolve, by default, around my main /-pairings, so I try to make a conscious effort to include gen and &-pairing prompts in my signups too. And (speaking not as a co-mod, but as a co-participant) I'd like to gently encourage everyone else to do the same, if they'd like to receive that kind of thing, because I love writing little gen and other-pairing things (as well as SW/ZYL), and prompts are love. :D

Productivity

Jul. 18th, 2025 11:20 am
china_shop: Raja from Aladdin saying "What?" (Whut? Raja)
[personal profile] china_shop
From Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman, chapter 4:
  • As Marie Curie understood, our default stance is to measure our actual accomplishments against all the things we could, in principle, still do.

  • This is the lesson we insecure overachievers could do with getting into our skulls: actions don’t have to be things that we grind out, day after day, in order to inch ever closer to some elusive state of finally getting to qualify as adequate humans. Instead, they can just be enjoyable expressions of the fact that that’s what we already are.

Me-and-media update

Jul. 16th, 2025 03:16 pm
china_shop: Close-up of Zhao Yunlan grinning (Default)
[personal profile] china_shop
Previous poll review
In the Companions poll, the emotionally unavailable alley cat and the trivia-obsessed fennec fox came first equal with 42.1% each, followed by the stoic capybara with 35.1%. Hugs won the ticky-boxes with 66.7%, followed by frittered-away time with 38.6%. Thank you for your votes!

Reading
Audio: Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, read by Arian Moayed. Full of cultural specificity and lots of wonderful observations about humanity in general, and art, and death. More emotion-driven and theme-driven than plotty. Beautifully written. So good!

Audio: Swordcrossed by Freya Marske, read by Omari Douglas. I just finished this, and oh my goodness, it mashed all my buttons! It's a light, secondary world, urban-historical m/m romance with guild politics and secrets, swordplay and skulduggery, and people being messed up by their rich guild-house families. I hereby declare (for myself, at least) a sub-category of enemies-to-lovers that is "playful-enemies to lovers". You know, when there are compelling reasons not to trust each other, but they like each other enough that they can't help teasing, admiring, and developing inconvenient loyalties, despite the suspicion. (There are tons of other examples, and I would like to read some more of them. In fact, the Guardian drama falls squarely in this category, as does White Collar a lot of the time.) The two leads of Swordcrossed clicked so well -- I laughed out loud at the banter, and again, often, in sheer delight.
Thoughts about depictions of falling in love in fiction.

There was one thing it did particularly well, for the main pairing, that I'm still emotionally and analytically rolling around in. I think it's quite hard to show people falling in love: I've seen it done via one character obsessing about the other's secondary sex characteristics, which I don't find convincing or interesting. Or sometimes an author has a character notice how good-looking the other is, and from that, the reader is supposed to intuit attraction and emotional curiosity/investment -- but it's never quite clear to me if the "good-lookingness" is subjective or objective, and there are plenty of objectively good-looking people that I don't want to even be in the same room as. Other times, what we're shown is physical attraction as a stand-in for emotional connection, followed by kisses and/or sex as a stand-in for a lot of things. (I've done all of these, of course; fandom is particularly rife with all of this because most of the time a fic author and their readers go into the story pre-invested in the ship.) Anyway, in Swordcrossed, Marske teased all these layers out by having the couple acknowledge their attraction and start an intense "casual" thing with an expiry date, semi-independently of catching feelings. The development of loyalties and being on the same side (in cahoots!), and the delicately depicted tenderness, understanding and mutual care were wonderful precisely because they weren't implied just by sexual attraction, and because it was the feelings, not the sex, that disrupted the characters' plans. It was delicious. (Perhaps I just need to read more fuckbuddies-to-lovers, with a side-order of people-in-denial-in-love, lol.)

tl;dr I found the "falling in love" part very satisfying, and it's making me think about how I might be able to do that better in my own writing.
In terms of the audiobook, Douglas's narration was fantastic and very hot for the sex scenes. A++++ (And for people who've already read Swordcrossed, there's an excellent 18k fanfic for a background pairing by [archiveofourown.org profile] marquis, which works as a supplement to fill in some gaps.) (How is there not more than one other fic for this book, though? I went to AO3 expecting a "Red White & Royal Blue"-sized fandom.)

Audio: I'm two chapters into Meditations for Mortals: Four weeks to enhance your limitations and make time for what counts, written and narrated by Oliver Burkeman, and approaching it, as recommended, one chapter per day for now (though I'm not sure my limitations need enhancement).

Ebook: I'm sort of dithering between The Black Cauldron and getting back to Werecockroach, and consequently not reading anything... and now I've opened The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing for a re-read, but not actually started that either. Also, Guardian -- we're in the home stretch.

Paper: Having reached the end of my third and last library loan renewal period, I finally sat down and read No Rules Tonight by Hyun Sook Kim and Ryan Estrada in about two and a half hours. It's a graphic novel about a university traditional-dance club going on an overnight hiking trip in 1980s Korea. The military regime is a constant looming presence, but it's gently funny and sweet as well as eye-opening. I really appreciate how this and Banned Book Club, by the same authors, depict life, friendship, and resistance under authoritarianism. Also, it made me want to try Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving, one of the banned books mentioned.

Btw, does anyone else remember [livejournal.com profile] obsessive24 and her amazing fanvids? Looks like she has a queer fantasy trilogy coming out soon.

Kdramas
I finished My Dearest Nemesis and loved it; an adorable depiction of whole-hearted fannishness and the search for love and acceptance. Am now an episode into First Night with the Duke and still in that "not yet hooked, but willing to be" state of quantum uncertainty. I've also randomly picked up my abandoned rewatch of the Cdrama noona romance, Nothing But Love. (This is a rewatch I started with my late friend J, way back when; he bounced off it because he hated all the male characters.)

Other TV
Finished Murderbot, Poker Face and Étoile, which I enjoyed in that (descending) order.
Just me grumbling about Étoile; please skip if you love it! My deep loathing of Crispin overshadowed a lot of my enjoyment; they kept making him quirky, and I was worried they might try to redeem him. And lo, by the end, Jack was turning to him for advice, wtf??? I don't super enjoy incompetent management (Jack seemed to have no idea what he was doing most of the time; who hired him?) or artistic people being assholes (Tobias, sit down and let the dancers do their jobs!). Mostly, though, my problem was Amy Sherman-Palladino's tendency to let her characters chat endlessly with no story or drive; the party episode was very rambly. I thought she'd got better with Mrs. Maisel, but this was (fittingly, I guess) more like Bunheads, just on a grander scale.

That said, I loved Mishi and Cheyenne's mother, and I liked Geneviève. Cheyenne was funny some of the time, and I enjoyed her sojourn in the cemetery with her mother (despite it literally not going anywhere), and Geneviève's advice to her about The Slip. And I liked Tobias' breakup.

tl;dr: I should have stuck with the gifset.


More Fringe with my sister. The cases of the week are more interesting than the season arc to the point that we both forgot, in a ten-minute break between episodes, that Olivia was kidnapped.

The Secret Genius of Modern Life with Hannah Fry s02e01, which was fun like always, but with disturbing "look how effective surveillance is" undertones.

And a whole bunch of Bluey, the kids' cartoon, which is omg so adorable and funny. I'm not even into kidfic, and I love it!

Guardian/Fandom
Guardian!!! <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3

Also, [personal profile] mific and I are working on an intentionally Dreamwidth-specific comm for people to post or link to meta discussions about writing. Watch this space.

Audio entertainment
Writing Excuses, random episodes of Letters from an American, Midnight Burger, possibly some other things but I'm having technical problems with Pocket Casts atm. (The app controls are obscured by the phone controls, as if the app thinks my screen is bigger than it is; anyone else having this problem?)

Films
Jurassic World: Rebirth -- this was such silly fun. I'm pretty sure the bad guy was built from a template, but the dinosaurs were wonderful. Favourite part:
spoiler the dozing T-rex -- so tense, yet so funny.


Writing/making things
The glittering ice sculpture of my oomph has become a puddle. Anyway, this was my entry for the Science round of [community profile] fan_flashworks:
Title: Winging It (600 words) [General Audiences]
Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018)
Characters: Ya Qing, Lin Jing, Zhao Yunlan, Zhu Hong, Original Yashou character, Da Qing
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Yashou Renewal, Education, A New Era for the SID, Kidfic, Drabble Sequence
Summary: The Crows need a science tutor.

Life/health/mental state things
The weeks are flicking past at a frightening rate. I'm constantly in a state of "is this just my baseline sore throat, or am I coming down with something?" Note to self: that online Harvard course you signed up for? Do it.

Cats
Cure for ongoing minor cat health niggles: book a vet appointment for later in the week. Within two days she was fine, and I cancelled the appointment.

Korean
I randomly listened to a TTMIK episode (the texting vs phonecalls one) and understood maybe 10% of it? That's not nothing. (Aside: Hyunwoo's theory of why young people take phonecalls on speaker is that the young people were all on FaceTime as babies, so they didn't acquire the "hold phone to ear" habit. I was pleased with myself for catching that, then realised he'd reiterated it in English. ;-p)

Food
My sister brought me a packet of Selena Gomez Oreos, for the laughs; I'm pretty sure those were my first oreos ever. (Selena is mildly cinnamon-flavoured, if you were wondering.) | I made lemon honey last week (10/7/25); I always go through a few rounds of buying lemons and not getting started before they go a bit squishy, but in the end, it never takes as long to make as I think it will. | Also made enchiladas, including the sauce, and a no-recipe beef casserole. Yesterday I made pumpkin and kumara soup. I have plans to try lemon chicken (via [personal profile] autodach) and to make no-recipe risotto this week. It's hard to fathom that a few years ago I rarely cooked.

Good things
Sunshine! Audiobooks with great narrators. Kids' cartoons. Ginger in everything. Fandom and Guardian. Writing (*presses face against the shop window*). Washing on the line. Dreamwidth.

Poll #33363 Retribution
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 42


The best revenge

View Answers

is living well
33 (78.6%)

is sweet
9 (21.4%)

is served cold
9 (21.4%)

requires two graves
5 (11.9%)

leaves everybody blind
1 (2.4%)

other
0 (0.0%)

ticky-box full of writing theory
13 (31.0%)

ticky-box full of brain being empty, but not in a meditation way
21 (50.0%)

ticky-box full of dabbling your toes in a tray of soft, cool, shimmery sand
17 (40.5%)

ticky-box full of the ancient language of shadows and flight
22 (52.4%)

ticky-box full of hugs
31 (73.8%)

I'm back to save the universe!

Jul. 14th, 2025 09:35 am
newredshoes: Domo-kun doing victory arms! (domo-kun | victory arms!)
[personal profile] newredshoes
I AM 41.

I AM EMPLOYED.

I HAVE A NEW BIKE.

For real!!

So much has happened!! Things are very good right now! Kpop Demon Hunters holds up well the second time you watch it! Gingko defended me/picked a fight with three asshole dogs behind a fence and is very proud of herself and her battle scars! I am publishing a story either this week or early next week that will make absolutely everybody mad, so I need to figure out how to protect myself on social media! I was finally able to BUY NEW BRAS and I hope they fit???

But yeah... yeah! Birthday last week was really excellent! I have a full-time job now, and it started last week! I have been sleeping so much since that started, just because I think I've been holding a decade's worth of stress about where my next paycheck is coming from and now I just... get to stay. (It is journalism and it is public media, so no, the guarantees are not 100%, but it's an amazing group of people who absolutely adore me and I'm on the softball team and I tested out my biking commute yesterday and it is less than half the time it takes on public transit! Imagine getting more than 15 years of workplace trauma healed with one gig that appreciates you and fights for you!)

I'm just very excited about things now. I'm watching a lot of decent/fun TV (mostly cdramas; League of Noblemen, A Dream Within a Dream, The First Night with the Duke, The Blood of Youth). I finally deep-cleaned and organized my kitchen so that I'm able to cook again, which I did this weekend, hurrah! My DnD party is confronting our Final Boss, and my beautiful dumbass tiefling monk took down the first of the three dragons we'll be fighting. Summer in Chicago is very, very good! I am eager af to make art and write fiction and play music again! Do all these exclamation points sound deranged? I'm just. Very happy right now, and I will ride it out as far as I can! ✶

(no subject)

Jul. 13th, 2025 04:44 pm
shinsengumi: a place further than the universe (star gate heaven)
[personal profile] shinsengumi

I don't think I can write paragraphs outside of fiction anymore! Here's a collection of non-sequitor bullet points that have been sitting here waiting for me to post them.

  • There's such a bloodthirsty ness to most justice seeking. Like, people will say "nothing will ever bring them back/make this better" but they revel in punishment as though it's equalization. I know our penal systems aren't actually reformatory but they're meant to be.
  • Itzy's at their best performing sassy teen music.
  • I need to learn how to be happy.
  • I don't understand people who don't engage with series where quote 'everyone is unlikeable'. I'm obsessed with the shitty human beings and the distances we'll go.
  • Goro-chan is easily the best part of Pirate Yakuza. I want to replay a TRPG or Baten Kaitos instead of finishing.

Me-and-media update

Jul. 9th, 2025 03:06 pm
china_shop: Close-up of Zhao Yunlan grinning (Default)
[personal profile] china_shop
Previous poll review
In the Crowd-sourcing randomness poll, heads got 19.4%, tails got 22.2%, edge got 25%, and zero-g (the coin never falls) got 38.9%. Either a) the laws of probability have ceased to function in a localised manner, b) Dreamwidth is surprisingly popular in space, c) we've stepped into an alternate dimension, or d) these results are not statistically robust.

In ticky-boxes, hugs came first with 75%, followed by surviving AO3 outages (69.4%), and grumbly cats in search of treats (66.7%). Thank you for your votes!

Reading
Two chapters to go in The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander. It hasn't hugely grabbed me, maybe because of my stop-start reading habits, but I am very much enjoying mentally casting Grover from Sesame Street as Gurgi. I have an omnibus of the Chronicles, so I may continue on to The Black Cauldron.

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, read by Arian Moayed -- ahh, this is so good! It's about a young death-obsessed recovering-alcoholic gay Iranian American who's writing a book about martyrs. It reminds me a bit of Love in the Big City, but it's more experimental and lyrical. I'm halfway through nearly done. Surprising, funny, sad, beautifully written. Warnings for drug use, alcohol addiction, suicidal ideation, and politics.

Also Guardian by priest, and I currently have on loan from the library: No Rules Tonight by Hyun Sook Kim and Freya Marske's Swordcrossed in audio.

Kdramas
My Dearest Nemesis -- I am enjoying this so much. The leading man, as well as being a closet fanboy, is adorably ridiculous and so love-starved. I want to give him a puppy. (In fact, I think he should just have a dog for a couple of years, and one or two more friends, and then he can get a girlfriend.)

Other TV
Ghosted on Apple TV+, a spy/romcom with Chris Evans and Ana de Armas. The reviews are terrible, and it was indeed very very silly, but we watched it on its own terms and enjoyed it tremendously. Some laugh-out-loud moments. A+ popcorn movie! (The trailer is VERY spoilery, ftr.)

Murderbot, Poker Face, Fringe, Étoile (omg, someone please give these people media training!! Also, I'm sad I looked at that one gifset, because I'm very spoiled for the plot thread I'm most invested in, which is undercutting the tension), and Turning Point: The Vietnam War (so disturbing and thoughtful and informative).

Guardian/Fandom
Partying on. <3 <3 <3

Audio entertainment
Not much; my listening time is being eaten by Martyr!

Writing/making things
I'm currently working on a handful of different shortish things in a desultory "what shall I pick up today?" fashion. This is not how I finish things or even get a satisfying sense of progress! (Yesterday's was another CSZ/SW/ZYL fic -- many deliciously difficult feelings; today's was a gen drabble sequence for FFW.) Just pick a WIP and finish it, china!

I now have 238 Guardian fanworks on AO3. Ten more will make it my most-created-for fandom. # writing goals

Online life
I keep getting as far as checkout on shop websites and then drifting off. The fear of buyer's remorse is very real. Yet another reason I have so many tabs open.

Link dump
Screenwriter's Secret to Mindblowing Plot Twists by [youtube.com profile] heyjameshurst | [personal profile] mergatrude's e/R playlist (Youtube) | Music: Mon Rovîa - Rust. (Live) (Youtube, via [personal profile] teaotter) | US politics: 5 calls | Newsblur RSS reader | ‘I wanted to be a teacher not a cop’: the reality of teaching in the world of AI (The Spinoff, local indie newsite) | Hieronymus Bosch butt music (tumblr link, via [personal profile] mific) | Underrated Apple TV+ show recs? ([community profile] tv_talk post) | Thai Coconut Chicken Soup recipe (via [personal profile] autodach) | Poetic fic meme (via [personal profile] extrapenguin). There, I've closed a dozen or so tabs. # progress

Good things
New shampoo making my hair soft. Guardian. Warm buttery toast. My sister coming over this evening. Kdramas and books. Yesterday's sunshine, and walking through the trees along a shared mountain-bike trail. Sushi on the waterfront. Writing. Clean sheets.

Poll #33341 Companions
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 58


What talking animal would you take on an adventure?

View Answers

emotionally unavailable alley cat
25 (43.1%)

naive gecko
9 (15.5%)

sad wolf
13 (22.4%)

stoic capybara
20 (34.5%)

trivia-obsessed fennec fox
24 (41.4%)

upbeat skunk
10 (17.2%)

coffee-addicted giant panda
12 (20.7%)

other
7 (12.1%)

ticky-box of frittered-away time
23 (39.7%)

ticky-box full of infinite monkeys and... wait, who's providing all the typewriters?
21 (36.2%)

ticky-box full of liquid birdsong that tastes like vengeance
21 (36.2%)

ticky-box full of dancing, light as thistledown, to an orchestra of metronomes
22 (37.9%)

ticky-box full of hugs
39 (67.2%)

Page generated Jul. 20th, 2025 11:04 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios