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This and that (but mostly drama watching)

We have a heatwave here, but a short one thankfully. It should be back to normal 23°C tomorrow. I spent the whole day today eating ice cream, drinking water and watching cute things to distract myself from that exhausting heat.

Seeing new pics from Q3 of Only Friends Dream On shooting helped, too. But wow, Aou, have mercy on me. There is hot enough here as it is, even without you being all bad boy DJ in a see-through shirt. 😊

The Ex-Morning

7th episode aired today, and surprisingly for me I’m enjoying this drama more and more with each new episode.

More with spoilers here.

Mix’s cameo as a vet! And he looked gorgeous, I can’t wait for Only Friends Dream On.

Also, wow, they made me sympathize with Phi. Yeah, what Tam did was shitty. I knew he had to have a reason for breaking up with Phi by sms, and then blocking him everywhere and not talking to him for years. But his reason absolutely doesn’t justify his behavior IMO. Couldn’t he just talk with Phi honestly? I fricking hate ‘I’m breaking up with you for your own good’ trope.

Speaking of cameos – I really, really hope we’ll get Boom’s cameo in the last episodes as a current or future boyfriend of Aou’s character. GMMTV lately loves to do that with their fixed ships, if only one half of a ship is in a drama. Till now we had Force’s cameo in Only Boo, Sea’s cameo in Sweet Tooth Good Dentist, and New’s in Break Up Service.

The Next Prince

I’m getting bored. I thought I would love this drama, but something is not working for me. Prince/his loyal bodyguard is my kind of ship, I feel like I should love Khanin/Charan, and yet I basically lost all interest in them. I blame the script, it’s just not good. Pacing is bad, too. For a long time I felt like almost nothing really was happening story wise. Also where is Ava? She disappeared completely lately.

I still am very much invested in Ramil/Paytai, their relationship is my kind of complicated and angsty and hot, and for them I will watch it to the end. But yeah, for me this drama definitely didn’t live up to my expectations.

I also started MilkLove’s new GL drama Whale Store xoxo. Two episodes aired for now and I liked them. Milk looks so beautiful that I spent the first half of the 1st episode just staring and sighing ‘she’s soooo gorgeous’ in an awed voice. Heh... The drama itself is cute and enjoyable, and perfect for relaxing on Wednesday evenings.

And yay, I did manage to finish something, too, finally. Two dramas, actually. One was the 2nd season of Tengu no Daidokoro. I loved it. It was as good and beautiful, and touching as the 1st season. And all the food porn made me so hungry at the most inopportune times, like for instance after 9 p.m. 😊

I also watched a short kdrama on Netflix called Mercy For None. I did enjoy it, but it was very brutal, dark and bloody, so it took me a while to watch all of it, even though it has only 7 episodes. It got a bit repetitive in the second half, but it satisfied my love for complicated and obsessive sibling relationships. And the fights were excellent.

It’s about an ex-gangster Nam Gi Jun who left the underworld in dramatic circumstances 11 years ago. And now he returns to uncover the truth about the mysterious death of his beloved younger brother (who in present time was the second in command in Gi Jun’s former gang). And to ruthlessly take revenge on people responsible.

I haven’t seen So Ji Sub, who plays Gi Jun, in anything before. And he is very good here. Very charismatic in that tortured, brooding and silent type of way. And it was great to see Lee Jun Hyuk playing someone so different from his green flag character in Love Scout. Here he guest stars in a few episodes as Gi Jun’s younger brother Gi Seok.

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dreamwidth: community thursdays

Community Thursday

Community Thursday challenge: every Thursday, try to make an effort to engage with a community on Dreamwidth, whether that's posting, commenting, promoting, etc.

Over the last week...

Final (;v;) vigilantes chit-chat on bnha_fans, for this season at least!

Commented on common_nature.

Book chit-chat on booknook.

Commented on littleblackdressex about a duplicate nom..... My first exchange sign-up this year! Excited :D :D

Signal boost:

sunshine_revival started! Each (chill) challenge will have journalling prompts, and so on. A good way to be active and meet other active people around Dreamwidth! There's a friending meme, too! As happens way too often (and I'm going to need to address that at some point...), I'm too overwhelmed with other things to take part in social challenges at the moment, but wishing everyone a super fun time with it! And who knows, maybe I will manage to squeeze in one or two challenges, too... It could happen!!

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ZhuBai picspam (sort of)

I'd mentioned to

mumblemumble making desktop wallpaper calendars from Zhu Yilong & Bai Yu photos, and to commemorate my 6th Guardianniversary here's a little picspam of what they have looked like.

( Years 2020-2025 )

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rl-thingslearned

Things learned in June

June was a slow month, but better than nothing. :)

( 14 things, some animal trivia and other random stuff )

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fan meta

6 years

My 6th year Guardianniversary was a couple of days ago. ♥ I have a Guardian-adjacent post in mind but it requires some digging through folders and I haven't finished that yet.

Instead, today's post isn't about Guardian... ( but about a sus AO3 encounter )

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RL is meh, but at least I have a lot of entertaining things to watch

I’m a bit sick, ugh. Nothing serious, just a sore throat and a bit of a cold, probably because I’m sweating a lot (ahh, my lovely frenemy menopause 😒), and when I go out there is a strong chilly wind outside (and has been for the last two weeks or so), and of course air conditioning inside everywhere.

Also I have the attention span of a gnat lately and started watching so many new things, I don’t know when I’ll finish all of them. 😊

I mean, ok, I did finish a few things. Amongst them:

Kpop Demon Hunters

This is Netflix’s new animated movie everybody is talking about right now. It’s about three demon huntresses, who form a kpop girl group named Huntrix, and use their songs to build the protection spell around the world, to save all the humans from a big scary demon, who wants to eat their souls. So this demon sends five demon boys to form a kpop boy group to compete with Huntrix and steal their fans and their fans’ souls from them.

Yes, it’s as ridiculous as it sounds, and it’s also funny and entertaining, and touching and sweet. I enjoyed it a lot. And I didn’t expect much, just an hour and a half of fun and cuteness and a few catchy songs. And it was all that, but it also made me teary-eyed at the end.

Spoilers here.

And not because of Jinu’s sacrifice. But because I’m a sucker for ‘power of friendship saving the world’ stuff. And that movie delivered so well on that front. Rumi, Mira and Zoey’s friendship was my favorite part of the movie.

Also – this cover of Your Idol is very good.

Watch on YouTube

My Sweet Brother in Law

The last episode aired last week and it was bit of a letdown after decent and enjoyable four episodes.

Spoilers here, too

That went into a full OTT dramatic soap opera in the last episode: a cheating psycho wife, a homophobic dad throwing his gay son out of the house, a stabbing, Bao saving Khanh’s life and ending in a coma for six months, and then a cliffhanger with a sudden arrival of Bao’s handsome ex-boyfriend. I think they hope for the 2nd season. And you know what, I hope they will make it. In general I enjoyed this drama. For my first Vietnamese BL it was great.

Even though I do wish they didn’t make Khanh’s wife a gold digging cheating psycho, to make it okay that Khanh cheated on her with Bao. After watching the first three episodes I was so pleased that the women involved weren’t vilified in this drama, and unfortunately, that didn’t last.

I also watched two other BL dramas. And they both had a very similar plot. Chinese and Taiwanese BL dramas sure do love dramatic, full of longing and forbidden desire, step-brothers pairings, don’t they? 😊 And sometimes I get a craving for such pairings, too.

So first I watched Moon and Dust, a new short (6 episodes) Chinese BL. An older boy rescues a younger boy from homelessness and suffering, ends up raising him, and then of course a younger boy falls desperately in love with his Da Ge and tries to quash those feelings, but can’t help confessing in an emotional scene. And the older brother clearly feels something more than brotherly feelings, too, but can’t admit it, because he doesn’t want to recognize those feelings for what they are, and he feels that as an older brother he has to be the responsible one and refuse his brother’s love.

I liked this short drama a lot. It’s cheaply made, cheesy and OTT sometimes, but good actors with very nice chemistry made it work for me.

Spoilers for the ending here.

This is not a happy ending. I would say it is ambiguous. It’s clear they both have feelings for each other. But they don’t get together, and it ends with the older one rejecting the younger one’s feelings. But there is no tragedy or death or anything like that. So you can imagine very easily a post-canon fix-it with them getting together in a few months or a few years.

The 1st episode is available for free on Youtube here. When the drama was airing they did make each new episode available for free for the limited period of time, and now you can still watch the last 6th episode there, but episodes 2-5 are available for members only.

And since Moon and Dust was so short I decided to finally watch Unknown, Taiwanese BL from 2024 with the same trope. I did watch the first episode back then when it started airing, but it was rather dark and violent, and I wasn’t in the mood for something like that then, so I never watched more. But now I watched all of it.

My opinion – it’s very uneven. The first half is good, and then it starts falling apart. It took me a week to watch the last two episodes, because they were either super boring (episode 11) or made me cringe so hard (episode 12).

The weak script in the second half was the main problem for me. Exacerbated by me not really seeing much romantic and sexual chemistry between leads. As actors they are both good, but it was very hard for me to buy Qian reciprocating Yuan’s feelings.

More complaining with spoilers here.

And seriously, everybody around them is perfectly fine with Qian and Yuan’s relationship, and so accepting as soon as they hear about it? And people in Qian’s office instantly start gossiping about who’s the top and who’s the bottom. And then they openly ask Qian about it. I cringed from second hand embarrassment so hard and instantly pressed a fast-forward button. Why? Why do BL dramas still do that in 2024?

And this post got quite long already so I’ll write about all those other, started things the next time. And now I’m going to watch some of them, and maybe I’ll even mange to finish something else today. 😊

Current Mood: apathetic

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Extra-long-weekend mishmash post: office furniture, phone keyboards, family, hair, lilacs...

With Canada Day rudely falling on a Tuesday,

scruloose and I both booked today off. I haven't managed a whole lot of manga work yet, but hopefully between today (as soon as I finish this post) and tomorrow I'll get a reasonable amount done. While I'm doing at-my-desk things,

scruloose is working on the next step(s) in getting a dedicated hose set up for our individual townhouse.

Last night we finally got around to switching the desk chairs in our offices, ( cut for the uninterested )

It occurred to me very late in the game that I might do better at spending non-work time at my desk (where, y'know, most of my writing used to happen) if I didn't hate my chair; I've been attributing the fact that I spend 95% of my evenings down in the living room these days to the fact that Sinha's such a lapcat, and that's definitely a huge factor, but...being able to sit comfortably in here would sure help.

Another pleasing tech-related development has to do with my phone keyboard. ( again, cut for the uninterested )

Speaking of things that feel so much better now, Saturday also involved Ginny chopping my hair off for me. I've been leaving it alone (other than the undercut) since whenever the last time we buzz cut it was, and maybe a month ago I found that it was long enough to easily ponytail. That was pleasantly novel for about a week, even though the front bits weren't long enough to get into the ponytail and quickly started to need clips or something when it got hot. By last weekend, I was very, very done with the whole thing, and this weekend Ginny was able to deal with it. Such a relief.

My younger nibling and their spouse of eight months or so stopped by a few days ago to pick up a few years' worth of my spare comp copies from Seven Seas. Only one box, since I've technically scaled back my freelance workload (and I think there's also a backlog of comps that I should be getting sooner rather than later), but a hefty box that was bulging a bit at the seams, so it's nice to have that all sent off to a new home. It was lovely to see my nibling and meet their spouse, however briefly. (They politely rolled with the "we're going to stand in our driveway and chat while masked and overheat more than a little" element.)

A final thing before calling this a post and getting to work: last weekend

scruloose and I gave the Sensation lilac a long-overdue aggressive pruning (and it should probably get the same amount cut out of it in a year). The poor thing was all spindly limbs and mostly-high-up blooms, so hopefully this will help it for next year.( But what to do with the mutant hybrid? )

Entry tags:

fic,
fic:bts

BTS double drabble: need you like oxygen

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Two weeks' worth of reading

A weekend post never happened last weekend, but here's what I'm been reading over the last couple of weeks. (Watching has been basically unchanged: we're up to date on Murderbot and continuing to slowly work through Leverage season 4.)

I finished reading Tchaikovsky's Service Model, which I thought was...fine? It was interesting enough, but if it had been my first exposure to his work it wouldn't have made me rush out and try more right away.

I read and liked Margaret Owen's Little Thieves in April, and Jenny Hamilton on Bluesky was recently talking about the trilogy as a whole (and this reminds me that now I can go read her "How to Break a Heart: Subverting the Hero’s Breakup Trope"), so when I decided a week or so ago to finally burn through all of my Kobo points and clear at least a bit of my wishlist, I included the second book, Painted Devils, which I enjoyed enough to want to read the third (Holy Terrors) right away. I try not to buy many ebooks at full price, though, given how many more I buy overall than I'm ever going to manage to read, and thankfully my library not only has it but had it available right away.

Consider that a recommendation, but beyond it I'm just going to quote the non-spoilery part of Jenny's essay that describes the series (and the essay then details how things stood at the end of book 2, so consider that the spoiler warning):

This year brought us Margaret Owen’s Holy Terrors. It’s the third in a trilogy about an angry, selfish girl named Vanja who made it through a lifetime of neglect and abuse with a crop of emotional and physical scars, a talent for picking pockets, the favor of the gods (sometimes), and a healthy hostility for rich people. Against both their better judgment, she falls in love with prefect Emeric Conrad, whom she variously describes as a “human civics primer,” an “accounting ledger made flesh,” and an “intolerable filing cabinet.”

(Here the author of this piece has been compelled to delete a ten thousand–word manifesto about the greatness of the Little Thieves series. If you like the TV show Leverage, or you enjoy digging your teeth into solid character development, or you just hate rich people, you should read it. The first book is Little Thieves. Thank me later.)

For a dramatic change of pace, I'm now reading Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 by M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi (also a with-points acquisition), which I keep wanting to file under non-fiction, although the title will clearly tell you that it's speculative fiction. (IIRC I learned about it from

skygiants' post.) Its fictional interviews build a distressingly plausible picture of global collapse through this decade and the couple to come, but also offer glimpses into how we could come out on the other side, if we're willing to largely raze and rebuild ~human society~ in a way that actually takes care of people. (The book came out in...2022?...so it in no way accounts for the most recent and current forms of the political hellscape.)

On the non-fiction side, I read Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen, a book of essays and corresponding recipes that I'd previously read maybe ten years ago. Colwin died in 1992 (I think I've got that right), and this book (and the follow-up, More Home Cooking) is a food-writing classic for good reason, although also very much of its place and time--very American, very '80s.

(The rest of my using-all-my-Kobo-points haul: The Hands of the Emperor, We Are All Completely Fine, Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower, All Under Heaven: Recipes from the 35 Cuisines of China, and Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World. Did this put a visible dent in my Kobo wishlist [which is a relatively curated list of books I keep an eye on for preorder purposes and sighting sales]? Yes. Has the dent since been filled in? Also yes.)

Entry tags:

personal: friends

(no subject)

There's a local queer contra that I have known about for a very long time (probably close to a decade tbh, which is wild) (mostly because I uh keep forgetting exactly how long I've been out here) but have never actually gone to because the friend who got me into contra during college wouldn't go (which, hah, idk if she'd call herself queer, so.) and I usually only went to the dances with friends, so. No reason to. I've never really cared about the Intrinsic Gendering Of Dance Terminology anyway (calling the moves for Ladies and Gents is exactly as irrelevant to me as calling it for Robins/Ravens and Larks) (I mean, I like that the non-gendered terms queers came up with are birds, but. I don't think it stops people from having gendered associations with the roles, it just removes the explicitly gendered terminology.), and tbh it's not actually hard to meet queers at events not aimed at queers when you're in such a queer-friendly area. Plus the general events are, y'know. Larger. And if I am there mostly because of music and dance, then... more people is nicer, makes the dances easier to have more people to keep the pattern flowing.

But the queer contra is also still a mask-required space, and it's one of the only dances in the area (like. two-hour radius, from what a friend said.) with that requirement, which is why said friend brought her friends out from Albany to try contra at this dance, and then messaged me like "hey are you around this weekend? I am going to be at this dance, could you be there too?", to which I was like "!!! YES <3".

( this is a lot of rambling )

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bl: thailand: only friends

Only Friends Dream On

Oh wow, look at that. 😍

These are AouBoom pics from the first day of shooting.

Two more pics (EarthMix and JossGawin) behind the cut.

People are speculating that Only Friends Dream On may even replace Memoir of Rati when it finishes airing in September. It would be great. And I already know I will be even more obsessed with this season than I was with the first one. 😊

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Good things

Good RL thing is that I had a colonoscopy today and everything is fine. Uff... I admit I was a bit anxious, especially since I was never sedated before. But everything went well.

And there are plenty of good fannish things.

At 25:00, in Akasaka will have the 2nd season. It was officially confirmed a few days ago. Yay!

Only Friends Dream On started shooting today. There is a chance it might start airing in November or December. Woohoo!

MosBank will have another drama soon. It’s called Be My [Soul]mate, and it’s another university BL with “and they were roommates” plot. Here is hoping it will be better than Sunset x Vibes. The official longer pilot will be released tomorrow, and for now here is a teaser pilot.

Watch on YouTube

Jeff Satur’s new song Tell Me The Name is fantastic. The official MV is here. And here is a stage version from the concert he had on 21st of June.

Watch on YouTube

Jeff looks so hot here in that sleeveless T-shirt. Come on, Jeff, hurry up and come to Europe when I still have the strength and energy to fly to another country to see you on stage. 😊

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Five more icons for my 100ships table

I have been ~~working on~~ sporadically remembering the

100ships table since 2022, and today I felt like making a few more shippy icons.

Here they are:

#14 – Navy	#16 – Neon	#52 – Salt	#72 – Desert	#75 – Buff

I realize that Ody3 aren't really in the navy, but I feel like cruise ship / navy, close enough. I really wanted to have an icon of them in their navy blue uniforms, but didn't have a good cap. :/ I made some Spock icons for

your_favourites today and while I was at it, made two more for the table. And the remaining two are Murderbot and the movie "Good Luck To You, Leo Grande".

The table is here, there are currently 40 icons in it: https://tinny.dreamwidth.org/704185.html

Previous icon posts:

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dreamwidth: community thursdays

Community Thursday

Community Thursday challenge: every Thursday, try to make an effort to engage with a community on Dreamwidth, whether that's posting, commenting, promoting, etc.

Over the last week...

Second-to-last vigilantes chit-chat on bnha_fans, as the current season approaches the end!

Commented on common_nature, booknook, anime_manga, ffxv.

Promoted finalfantasy in a comment.

Signal boosts:

everykindofcraft, a new comm for all kinds of craft and already decently active!
Continuing to enjoy the weekly stories on senzenwomen, "Histories of women in and around Japan, 1868-1945"
Bunch of fanweeks, zine and other events for Final Fantasy XV being promoted on ffxv :)
Via squidgestatus, SquidgeWorld is having their summer fundraiser!

Current Mood: pleased

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Initial Air3 usage report!

Over a month after the arrival of our (in my case, long-yearned-for) Microclimate Air3 powered respirators, I finally took mine out on its maiden voyage yesterday. (It may result in me going more places than I have been, but it may also mainly result in me feeling safer in the places I do go.)

Yesterday there was a casual in-person meeting at Dayjob where the team properly met the two people who our office's managing editor answers to. Donuts were promised (and turned out to be quality donuts, although I opted not to bring one home with me [since I sure wasn't about to unmask to eat anything there!]. Fun times in needing to be picky about what I spend my sugar intake on). We also had a heat warning, so I was all the more glad/relieved to have a drive to and from the meeting rather than taking transit for the first time in, oh, three years or so.

I'll put most of the rest under a cut, but I do want to note--especially since probably at least one or two of you clicked on the link for the Air3, and the price looks horrifying--that I'm incredibly glad we didn't order ours immediately when they first became available, because at that point the Air3 alone (as opposed to the kit) was more like $1000 USD. The original plan wasn't for

scruloose to get one at all, given that initial price and given that they have a respirator setup that works well for them. But then a few weeks later, the price dropped to $549(/$649 for the kit with extra stuff, which is what we opted for, as well as a few extra filters etc. in the name of minimizing future need to deal with shipping), so we got to say "Well, that's still really spendy, but it's also now not completely outrageous to get two." (And then we wound up having to contact the company because of shipping/import charge shenanigans, but those were on the courier's side, not Microclimate's, and the person

scruloose dealt with was great, so it's all good.)

I should also note that one of the review videos I watched about this made sure to point out clearly that its price (which initially was a MAJOR jump up from how much the Air2 cost when that was available) was in line with the cost of other NIOSH-certified powered respirators. It's far from cheap, but it's not the gouging attempt it might seem like. (I do wonder what the deal was with the massive price drop so soon after its release, though!)

( And now, the actual experience: )

reading!

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Entry tags:

art-icons,
tv-hpi

10 vibrant icons for fandom10in30

The current challenge at

fandom10in30 is Vibrant Colors. My fave thing, turning up the vibrance and saturation to the max! I made these in like two days, lol. :) I hope I won't hate them tomorrow, but for now I adore the colors. It was a real challenge to make Karadec vibrant. :D

Teasers:

( all hpi or hpi actors )

Every single comment is treasured. All icons shareable! Concrit welcome. Check out my resource post for makers of textures and brushes I use.

Previous icon posts:

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种地吧 become a farmer

Become a Farmer (a transcription practice)

( An early conversation with guests )

Entry tags:

(no subject)

My dojo had a seminar this past weekend, which was lovely. The mat was full but not crowded, the energy was fantastic, got to see a lot of excellent people, and we had more than enough food for everyone to eat after the seminar. (And none pizza, because we know better and are willing to put in a bit more effort to provide better sustenance.) Everyone had a good time! Great practice! Love to take ukemi for sensei's demonstrations, and to get the vibe that she selected me not just for being a yudansha from the host dojo but because she enjoyed throwing me around!

Now we can start looking ahead to next year's seminar, which will be the dojo's 50th anniversary seminar. I think that the goal is for me to take nidan at that seminar, but it's far enough out (May 30th) that there's no particular plans yet.

When I was talking to my mom about this (a sidebar in a conversation mostly about scheduling me flying out to visit my family), she told me that next year would also be the 50th year since women could attend the air force academy.

She was a member of that first class of women.

She is much more excited about my dojo's 50th anniversary.

anyway it is TOO HOT right now and I can't wait for the heat dome currently covering the east coast to break so that it stops being high 90s F/feels like over 100 F. At least the seminar only had normal summer heat! Not this nonsense!

(this nonsense, btw, is hot enough that the building fire alarms went off because of the heat! nothing was actually wrong! it's just Too Hot! isn't that fun!)

Entry tags:

promo

tvmovie20in20-textures round-promo!

This seemed interesting so I'm just promoting it here. The new round at

tvmovie20in20 is going to have 20 textures provided and we can claim any one show/movie. Sounds challenging and I'm soon going to have summer holidays, so I'm entering this one!

Voting is open at

celebrity20in20 &

tvmovie20in20

A new challenge is up at

ic_animated ,

perioddrama_ic &

screen_icons