For 520 Day, I received the most wonderful romp from ehyde. Srsly, it made me shout with laughter every second paragraph. :D :D :D
Secret's Safe With Me (1820 words) by EHyde Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Guo Changcheng & Shen Wei, Shen Wei & Shen Wei's Students (Guardian) Characters: Guo Changcheng, Shen Wei (Guardian), Original Characters Additional Tags: Bodyswap, Hand-Wavy Dixing Powers (Guardian) Summary:
Guo Changcheng gets (very literally) mixed up in one DCU student's misguided attempt to protect her favorite professor from the SID.
I wrote outsider POV for echo_ph0enix -- Zheng Yi's take on the first part of episode 14, including some missing scenes with Shen Wei.
Senza Sordino (没有弱音器) (6858 words) by china_shop Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Shen Wei & Zheng Yi, Zheng Yi & Tan Xiao, Background Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan Characters: Zhèng Yì, Shěn Wēi, Tán Xiào, Special Investigation Division | SID Ensemble (Guardian), Zhao Yunlan Additional Tags: Episode Related, episode 14, Missing Scene, Canon Compliant, POV Outsider, Fatalism, Trauma, Mentions of deportation, No One Is Actually Deported, Happy Ending, rated for themes Summary:
Zheng Yi quavered. On her left were the conscious and unconscious casualties of her desperate search; on her right stood the object of it, Tan Xiao. She’d been too desperate to consider anything or anyone else while she’d been parted from him, but that was no excuse. Something inside her cracked, and guilt poured out.
In this private space shared with only the Envoy, it felt safe to speak. She gulped back tears and opened her mouth. Whatever kind of person the Envoy was, she had to say it. “I’m sorry.”
Today's plant sale was delightful, impressive, and funny; got three things I've been looking for for years and three neat new finds. Also there were lots of humorous signs about plants and gardening.
Planted nothing, did not finish brick maple tree. Took dog to park, discovered new secret trail to the top of the hill, recorded a whole hour of speaking for the output challenge. Amazing how doing things makes them easier. Definitely another vote for "anything worth doing is worth doing badly."
• I gave Snowball Earth an episode, because people have talked it up, but it's just not for me. I didn't vibe with the tone, I think? I thought I would like it, given how much I like both Kaiju no 8 and various Gundam series, but it was just a mismatch.
• This week I watched the entirety of Zenshu, a 12 episode series from last year about an animator falling into the world of her favourite depressing children's film after she eats seafood that's gone off. I can see why this is so well regarded. It's so pretty and a lot of thought has been put into the story. I love the magical girl transformation sequence for when she sits down at her desk to draw! The kids fantasy movie she falls into visually feels very influenced by 80s animation (some parts are a clear shout out to He Man, for example), but also given it's a rocks fall, everyone dies scenario you can see why in universe it was not successful, LOL. This is such a love letter to fix-it-fic and self insert romance, LOL. There are parts that didn't work for me quite as well, but it was overall delightful. I think my favourite was Destiny deciding she was going to get super buff.
• 7th Time Loop: The Villainess Enjoys a Carefree Life Married to Her Worst Enemy is fun, though a bit too neat for my tastes. Rishe's life is not actually carefree, and by the ending they are not actually married yet, but I did enjoy the tension created from her getting engaged to the guy who killed her in a previous life and started the war that got her killed in all the previous lives. The re-living the five years from being dumped by a previous fiance to her death repeatedly mostly means she's levelled up in skills and stats; I did kind of want more from her previous lives woven into the story. But it's a fun bit of fluff. Her outfits are mostly hideous, in an amazing way. There's various handsome men who come into her life to be interesting and handsome, and that's enjoyable.
• I'm finding the pattern with episodes of Go For It, Nakamura-kun!! is that the episodes that people tell me draw more heavily on the manga are a lot funnier. In terms of laughs it's sort of uneven for me, but always cute. The episode that made me laugh the hardest is two weeks ago with the closer friendship battle and the creepy clothes sniffing. It's so cringe in the most delightfully awkward teenage way, and the art is so lovely. Though my actual favourite bit from any episode is Nakamura and Hirose becoming officially friends in Yokohama Chinatown, which is just so sweet.
• I'm also keeping up with Marriagetoxin, though I don't know that I have a lot to say about it. Lovingly animated. I'm looking forward to continuing to ignore all the discourse.
• Witch Hat Atelier is pretty and enjoyable, but I'm also finding the increasing hype and the fandom around it super annoying. I would like manga fans to be less aggressively trying to spoil anime watchers, I would like the people obsessed with the discourse around it to stop telling me about it, I would like the people who think it should be gatekept for political reasons to STFU about that...
I can feel my interests shifting again, which is not really surprising - usually, I can only focus on one thing for approximately three years, which is about right - but it always makes me feel a little sad, and it's also just tedious to have to join a new community and try to figure stuff out.
It doesn't help that my current interest also evokes a lot of feelings about the person I was when I was last into it, and there's not much I can do except just feel them and try to be kind to myself about it. I guess this is probably healing in the long run, but it sucks in the moment - I feel like my whole life is dealing with one kind of mental/emotional bullshit or another. Even if I could, I would not go back to the past, but that doesn't mean I don't miss it sometimes. I remember so much, good and bad, and sometimes I wish I didn't - my life would be so much easier if I could forget.
All of which is to say, I am lonely and sad and generally of a melancholy temperament at the moment, and I hope that will shift at some point, and things will get better. Unfortunately, I suspect this will require me to actually do things, which I am bad about, but still. One can hope. I will try to be happy in spite of everything. I wish I could write, but I just feel stuck and tired.
The Madoka Magica official Twitter started posting a 100-day countdown to the new movie, so I guess they're serious this time. Now that I have a working theory for what the movie is about, and how and why it happens, it's amazing how much my brain has quieted down. I have no idea if my answer is the same as canon, but it is satisfying to have an answer nonetheless, and I'm looking forward to seeing how much they overlap. This has been such an intellectual puzzle for me for the last few years, and while I'm sure there will be no shortage of things to analyze in the finished film, it will be the end of an era no matter how it turns out. But I think it will be easier to understand this movie after having studied Rebellion, Urobuchi's works, and the Shaft style so deeply; no knowledge is wasted, but this is the logical continuation of all those particular threads.
The next Alchemical Journeys book, Inkpot Gods is coming out next month, and it looks like we are finally get the Asphodel story I've wanted ever since she was introduced in Middlegame. I'm looking forward to it.
Fandoms: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Relationship: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Hermione Granger
Characters: Hermione Granger, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Original Characters
Additional Tags: meet cute?, Lost Child, Monster Hunters, Kikimore, Isekai'd Hermione, Hermione in the Witcher, Wandless Magic, injuries, injured child
Language: English
Words: 1,706
Summary:
The Scamander Fantastical Beasts only has beasts on Earth, and it isn't particularly useful here on the Continent. But Hermione finds herself a monster hunter while looking for a lost child.
If Geralt thought Jaskier was bad, he hasn't met the most inquisitive witch in the world.
Previous poll review In the Circus poll, 25% of respondents would like to be the knife-thrower, while 18.2% would prefer to be the acrobat. In ticky-boxes, eight hours' sleep beat hugs, 79.5% to 77.3%! Artistic poetry-reciting tigers came third with 54.5%. Thank you for your votes! ♥
Reading Cetaganda by Bujold (read by Grover Gardner) is fun, but we're not getting through it very quickly for logistical reasons.
I started Ann Leckie's latest Radch book, Radiant Star, read by Adjoa Andoh my beloved, but I'm having trouble focusing. My usual method of audiobook listening is to surf the emotional wave, so to speak, and this is political, worldbuildy omniscient POV. Maybe I should try it in text instead.
I also have some Nghi Vo and the latest Amina al-Sirafi (Shannon Chakraborty) to catch up on, along with the entirety of the 520 Day Guardian Reverse Exchange collection, which went live this week, yay!
Kdramas I'm super enjoying To My Beloved Thief, a historical that bears similarities to Knight Flower but manages to be crackier. The prince plays against type, which is great, and I'm hanging out for an enemies-to-lovers OT3 (not my usual flavour of OT3, but they're all so entangled). We shall see. No spoilers, please!
Also still into Absolute Value of Romance, though last week's episodes were a bit weird. I'm increasingly conspiracy-theorising that it's a stealth m/m show. Could it be? Surely they realise who their audience is, given the starting premise?! (I haven't been able to watch this week's eps yet. Please don't tell me anything, not even a hint.)
And last weekend, Andrew and our friend Ed and I semi-randomly started a supernatural mystery/thriller called Miraculous Brothers, which I was mostly interested in for Bae Hyun Sung (Hae Joon from Family by Choice). I have no idea where it's going, which is always fun.
Other TV Pardon My Icelandic - Ari Eldjárn standup special on Netflix. Great linguistic humour, fun with accents. (Hilariously, it came up when I searched for British stand-up.)
Cunk on Earth - one episode. Did not click.
Scrubs (original flavour) has outstayed its welcome. I'm starting to actively dislike JD, and the male-gaziness is off the charts. (Sorry to people who like it!)
The Burroughs - three episodes of the Duffers' new show. It's a bit slow, mostly an exercise in "who's that actor?" but it's only 8 episodes, so we'll probably finish it. (Honestly, I don't think it needs the monsters.) My favourite part is Geena Davis and her younger love interest.
Audio entertainment Writing Excuses, Better Offline, Tech Won't Save Us (episode: "The UK Government's AI Obsession is a Big Risk w/ Will Dunn" /o\), Cross Party Lines, Guilt-Free Pleasures ("Whitesnake's Here I Go Again"), Dreaming Against the Machine, about 20 minutes of Pod Save America, Keep It Steady episode 7 (timeline cleanse), a bunch of ChinesePod beginner lessons ("不好意思, 我先走了"), and half an episode of You Can Learn Chinese.
Online life The 520 Day Reverse Exchange is live, yay!!! I'll post separately about my Utterly Delightful Gift and the thing I wrote. I haven't been very present on Dreamwidth, but I've been around a lot, modding and writing, which feels Dreamwidth-adjacent (at least to me).
Writing/making things I spent an hour on Wednesday rewriting a single sentence in my 520 Day fic. That's sort of how it's going. I have 687 words of a flashfic that I started for the last fan_flashworks round (Avalanche), which I'm now planning to squeeze into this round (Late). Hopefully I'll finish it soon, so I can keep my "one fic a month" average steady. And then I'll get back to my Yuletide fic.
Life/health/mental state things At some point pre-Covid, I had standing lunch dates every weekday, plus (at one point) multiple weekly language exchange meet-ups and TV-watching dates. These days, almost all of my socialising involves friends coming over here for lunch or dinner/TV. My sole remaining regular lunch-date-in-town friend moved away last year but has been commuting, so we've met up roughly every second week. But she's just taken a job nearer her new place. I still see people a reasonable amount, but soon I won't have regular reasons to leave the house anymore. I may need to do something about that...
Some bad attacks by middle-of-the-night brain weasels lately. Bah!
House My IKEA shelves arrive next week. I'm trying to plan how to organise things so I don't just stuff them full and close the door. Maybe I should watch some home organisation youtube videos? *loses half an hour* Oops!
Language Learning I'm still going on Duolingo and Hello Chinese. The former has given me 30 days of free Premium (I can say, 我的爸爸不去中文书店和韩国饭店，你的爸爸呢？-- though, ha, when I came back to it, I didn't recognise the characters for bookstore or restaurant, despite knowing the pinyin.) With Hello Chinese, I'm still on the free option, so I mostly practice the 10 most commonly used characters (这是和不在有一的了人) and 一 to 十) and take the pronunciation quiz. (Typing is still a work in progress, but I'm getting there.) Question: is vocal fry part of 3rd tone? It seems really common, especially when people are enunciating clearly.
Good things 520 Day, woohoo! The weather has been conveniently mild. I made lemony fish pie on Friday; it was yum. Imminent new pillow and shelves (both in transit). My car actually started on Friday. A friend is lending us an EV to go up the coast and have lunch with my parents.
Manacles Press, publisher of various fanzines including Nudge Nudge Wink Wink (Professionals), McPikus Interruptus (Wiseguy), and Consupiscence (multifandom), is importing the zines’ fanworks to the AO3! Read all about it at: https://otw-news.org/bdfvy74u
We're playing our 17th annual Forever Knight (1992-1996) ficathon game!
Due on the AO3 on July 18, for release starting July 20
Minimum length: 500 words
We've identified 13 prompts as a shared challenge pool. Each story must use at least one official prompt. Check them out!
Remember FK? Just discovered FK? Curious about the original and still greatest vampire homicide cop TV show? :-D We've got police procedurals, historical fiction, vampire horror, urban fantasy, psychological drama, and so much more. Come play!
♥ Okay I got two more alt brick trees, a maple and a pine, with a cherry tree on the way. Every scene needs more trees. And birds. (At least Lumibricks agrees with me about water; I appreciate that so much of their stuff includes a water feature.) I will have more nature in my plastic toy bricks.
♥ It seems I have an Easter cactus. One of my neighbors was getting rid of an unidentified succulent last year and offered it to me (somewhat apologetically, she thought it looked terrible) so I poured a bunch of water over it and left it on the back porch for a few months until winter came, then I brought it in and put it under a light. This week it started to bloom.
♥ The gardens are starting to look like something and I spent almost two hours watering today, so I definitely do not need any more plants, which is why we're only going to one plant sale this weekend. I think last year's intensive watering effort is paying off: some of the things that hadn't grown in years are bigger, and some of the things I thought were goners are cheerfully waving their hopeful little leaves in the air.
♥ Since January, I've been taking some herbal stuff for focus and cognitive function, and I feel like it's significantly improved my ability to remember, focus on, and complete tasks. A few days ago I found some detailed to-do lists from last summer that made me realize my executive function has improved much more than I realized. It was surprising to find such solid evidence of change.
♥ evildea has shared his first 50-hour update from the lingopie challenge. He started about two weeks ahead of me and he remains about two weeks ahead of me. This is very motivating to me, since I feel like we're starting with similar Chinese levels. So it's like that t-shirt one of my basketball-loving classmates used to wear in middle school:
"Somewhere someone is practicing while I'm stuck in school. One day I will meet him in head to head competition, and he will beat me."
Our annual Guardian Reverse Exchange revealed two days ago, and our collection is full of gorgeous works! We have a whole bounty of drama and novel works, fanfic, fanart, podfic and vids this year. So happy-making! :D
My own exchange experience this year is all Ya Qing-centric, yay! I received a delightful Ya Qing vid from amedia:
These Boots [General] Characters/Relationships: Ya Qing & Zhu Jiu, Ya Qing & Wang Xiangyang, Ya Qing & Ye Zun, Ya Qing & Ying Chun Content Tags: Celebrating BAMF!Ya Qing, 520 Day Guardian Reverse Exchange 2026, Prompt Fill, Gift vid, Fanvids, Short vid (just over a minute)
Summary: Ya Qing is SO DONE with all her co-conspirators.
And I wrote a Ya Qing/Zhu Hong fic myself, for plingo_kat:
Unwritten (3,017 words) [Teen] Relationship: Ya Qing/Zhu Hong Characters: Ya Qing, Zhu Hong, Ying Chun, Snake Tribe's Fourth Uncle Content Tags: Post-Canon, Post-Fix-It, Guardian Treaty, Yashou Worldbuilding, Yashou History, Fu You's Legacy, High Chief Zhu Hong, Pre-ship, First Kiss
Summary: It's foolish to have a quarrel with a dead woman, but Ya Qing does. She's had it for years, ever since she began to realise how much the Guardian Treaty and Yashou neutrality were holding her people back. Fu You's legacy looms large among all the Yashou tribes, and everything Ya Qing did was to try and escape it.
So the Boston Immigrant Justice Accompaniment Network, where I volunteer, is scraping the bottom of their bond fund. If you have a few pennies to toss, now would be a really exceptional time.
(I personally have been scratching my head trying to figure out what kind of best talent show this town has ever seen might be helpful to the overall cause, so I guess if there's anything you've ever wanted to see me do or post about particularly that might work as a fundraising incentive, let me know???)
It's nearly my five-year Bigglesversary! And that means there has to be fic. My plans for actually finishing one of the fics I started practically five years ago to the day have not quite come off yet, so instead have this bit of ridiculousness that wandered into my head yesterday and wouldn't go away.
Title: Touch Content: Biggles/EvS, a bit of EvS/Zorotov and Biggles/Marie, UST, resolved UST, 1000 words Summary: months later, Erich could still feel each separate touch
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