Previous poll reviewIn
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!
ReadingAudio:
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
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
obsessive24 and her amazing fanvids? Looks like
she has a queer fantasy trilogy coming out soon.
KdramasI 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 TVFinished
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/FandomGuardian!!! <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3
Also,
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 entertainmentWriting 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?)
FilmsJurassic 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 thingsThe glittering ice sculpture of my oomph has become a puddle. Anyway, this was my entry for the Science round of
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 thingsThe 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.
CatsCure 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.
KoreanI 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)
FoodMy 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
autodach) and to make no-recipe risotto this week. It's hard to fathom that a few years ago I rarely cooked.
Good thingsSunshine! Audiobooks with great narrators. Kids' cartoons. Ginger in everything. Fandom and Guardian. Writing (*presses face against the shop window*). Washing on the line. Dreamwidth.
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 16
The best revenge
View Answersis living well
11 (68.8%)
is sweet
1 (6.2%)
is served cold
3 (18.8%)
requires two graves
3 (18.8%)
leaves everybody blind
1 (6.2%)
other
0 (0.0%)
ticky-box full of writing theory
5 (31.2%)
ticky-box full of brain being empty, but not in a meditation way
4 (25.0%)
ticky-box full of dabbling your toes in a tray of soft, cool, shimmery sand
7 (43.8%)
ticky-box full of the ancient language of shadows and flight
10 (62.5%)
ticky-box full of hugs
10 (62.5%)