cantankerous_curmudgeon

Previous poll review
In the Muppets poll, 40.7% of respondents chose Kermit, followed by 37.0% for Animal, and 29.6% for Gonzo. Hugs won the ticky-boxes, followed by paper tigers. Thank you for your votes!

Reading
I'm loving Black Water Sister -- the interactions between adherents of different religions are especially delightful. I'm making my way through it pretty slowly because I haven't had much listening time, but it's great!

Slowed down even more on Inventing the Renaissance. And the entirety of my non-audio reading has been the Guardian subs in Korean (skipping over some bits I don't know, but still looking up way too many words).

Kdramas (so many Kdramas)
( Cut for length. )

Other TV
We've started The Newsreader (Australian, stars Anna Torv) set in a TV newsroom in 1986. It's great so far -- Torv's character has a lot of emotional range, and the other lead is also interestingly complex. (TW: depression, anxiety.)

Also, one episode of Skeleton Crew, which is just as The Goonies-ish as I've heard. We'll give it another episode and see. Prehistoric Planet, which is really good. Just lovely animation and creature work. Bluey -- how is this so consistently excellent?? We're ploughing through season 3, and then there'll be none left. Oh no!

Guardian/Fandom
I am behind on EVERYTHING! Including this post. /o\ Also, I've been going through my browser windows and randomly closing tabs, now and then, so apologies if I left you hanging in a comment exchange. Firefox was just getting too hard to navigate.

Writing/making things
The Wishlist clock is ticking. I keep bumbling around like a bee doing things that are not writing fic, and then after a while saying to myself out loud, "This is not Writing Fic!" My brain gears don't seem to be working properly, and there's this one treat I'm stuck on... gah! Trying to remind myself that deadlines are just games we play with ourselves.

Life/health/mental state things
I have new glasses! They're really great. Except for biking home after picking them up, I've been wearing them non-stop with very few issues. Good for driving, okay for biking, great for TV. The fact that I have a world map and an artwork at the top and bottom of my stairs, respectively, turns out to be very helpful for distracting me from the out-of-focus stairs themselves. My keyboard is wobbly when I look at it, and sometimes the kitchen bench ("counter" for Americans) swims when I turn my head, but that's fine. I have yet to a) get the knack of gracefully attaching my clip-on sunglasses, and b) break my habit of looking under my glasses or taking them off for close work. But I'll get there. Generally I'm super happy, no notes! (My optician was right.)

Next test: we're seeing Avatar: The Way of Water in HFR 3D next week. I'll take my old glasses as backup, just in case.

Korean
Zoom call yesterday, and omg, I fumbled so much. I seriously need to practice speaking before next time. I yearn to rattle things off without having to think about it.

Link dump
Darebee home workouts (via Tumblr) | NHS's Couch to 5k page | AO3 has added Collection Tags | this shot-for-shot remake from Phineas and Ferb of "Genghis Khan" by Miike Snow (via

petra, I know exactly nothing about the canon, I've watched it twice, can't get over how good it is, I think I have... a platypus ship??) | Timothy Olyphant on Conan, taking it all very seriously (TW: toe bruises).

Good things
Jaffa Cakes, tv-watching friend dates, new glasses, writing, betas (♥!), Dreamwidth, a glorious wealth of Kdramas, wikipedia, fandom, Guardian, Guardian, Guardian.

Poll #33664 Fire burn and caldron bubble

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 28

View Respondents

Choose a potion

View Answers

sleep
10 (35.7%)

love
1 (3.6%)

immortality
6 (21.4%)

transformation
11 (39.3%)

grow-a-tail
4 (14.3%)

other
6 (21.4%)

ticky-box full of acoustic toothbrushes
6 (21.4%)

ticky-box of but now I can see all the dust and cobwebs
9 (32.1%)

ticky-box full of moose having a picnic buffet and running out of salad
11 (39.3%)

ticky-box full of a top-up prescription for writing mojo
15 (53.6%)

ticky-box full of hugs
21 (75.0%)

celli

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

musesfool

Slow Horses: Bad Dates: We are so back, baby! ( spoilers ) Very interested in seeing where this is going.

I am less on the bandwagon and more cautious and disbelieving about the Mets' playoff chances. They control their own destiny for now, but having to play the Marlins to cement their wild card spot is giving me very unhappy flashbacks to past collapses. Also, if Tyrone Taylor is not in CF the rest of the way now that he's back from the IL, then I don't even know what we're doing here.

Lastly, I will be pet-sitting overnight at my brother's tomorrow, so hopefully the new-ish dogs are okay with that. We'll see how it goes!

*

Current Mood: okay
Current Music: Maria Maria - Santana

cimorene

Sipuli has had three days of short sessions, 5-10 minutes, of clicker training, and it's adorable. She's possibly the cleverest cat we've ever met, and she's very food-motivated.

Our rewards are the little cubes of freeze dried chicken, which are much more expensive than most cat treats but also healthier because, unlike most cat treats, they don't contain anything but meat; and they were the only kind Snookums could have because he was diabetic, and as a result Tristana is used to getting them at bedtime and after Procedures like claw trimming and ear cleaning.

Sipuli has not fully mastered "touch the target", but she's so engaged, and you can see her thinking.

The idea behind this suggestion from the cat behaviorist was, I think, being able to ultimately train them simultaneously in parallel, and maybe get them to act differently at the gate. This seems possible, but we haven't started training Tristana or introduced Wax making the requests yet, so it's early.

On the minus side, yesterday Sipuli got out and chased Tristana across the room for about thirty seconds. You'd have thought they were both dying, but actually it seems like they did not in fact touch each other at all - Tristana was screaming under the chair while Sipuli was yelling back. That's good, that nobody was hurt and they didn't physically fight. But obviously still a setback. Tristana had to go hide in the turtle bed on the heated upstairs bathroom floor for a few hours.

scaramouche

Buzz Aldrin's No Dream is Too High: Life Lessons from a Man Who Walked on the Moon (co-written with Ken Abraham) was a spontaneous get from a clearance section, and when I picked it up I assumed that this was his memoir? It does have elements of a memoir, in that Aldrin tells little stories of his life experiences, but his actual memoir is titled Magnificent Desolation, which I will have to get another time. This book is more a presentation of neat little soundbites for the purpose of inspiring people, and especially younger people, who look up to him and want to pursue their dreams.

Aldrin clearly has a lot of feelings about doing as much as possible while he's still alive and able, and this book is part of the activism of trying to keep interest in science, space and space-faring activities alive. He wants to inspire excellence! Unfortunately that's not really what I'm interested in, speaking as someone whose dreams are much smaller, so reading this book was a case of "that's nice, but not really relatable" which is frustrating because not everything has to be relatable, but the book's prose is trying so hard to make ALL of it relatable, and urging the reader to Innovate! And Think Out of the Box! And Not Be Afraid of Rejection! Aldrin is so upbeat and positive, there's outright whiplash when he drops tidbits out of the blue, eg. how his mother died, before right on back to going, Surround Yourself With People Who Will Bring Out the Best in You! Don't Be Afraid To Think Out of the Box! Be Open-minded! Stand Up For Yourself!

I don't mean this to denigrate, and I totally get Aldrin's frustration that NASA stopped going to the moon, and efforts to get to Mars are taking so long, that he needs to pour that frustration into this book (along with other projects) to remind people of the best of humankind's accomplishments and capabilities and to be unafraid to pursue excellence even when times are hard... and have unfortunately become harder since the time this book was published almost ten years ago. For example, this book gets dated for his namechecking Musk and Bezos as innovators who make the world a better place.

For Aldrin's purpose, the book is what it is, a collection of anecdotes to inspire and encourage optimism, so there's a sense of flattening and simplification for that. There's only allusions to Aldrin's difficulties in and after NASA, his depression and alcoholism, or even his time in the Korean War -- which, as he writes it, he remembers that war fondly, and not much more than that.

Current Mood: restless

siria

As may have been obvious from some of my recent posts, thanks to a chain of events involving Noah Wyle's winsome brown eyes, I ended up watching a lot of ER this summer and writing fic for it. However, I've also spent a lot of time grappling with the fact that a lot of plot happens to my favourite problematic dink, John Carter, in the course of 15 seasons. Some of it is contradictory, some of it is unclear, and the existing ER wiki resources just aren't done with my needs in mind, i.e. "I want to write fic about Carter and his feeeeeelings."

So below the cut are the notes I took when I rewatched the show. I'm posting them here so that I don't lose them and also who knows, maybe someone else will find this useful?

( The Carter File )

cimorene

I failed the driving test in apparently one of the most common ways to do it: no major errors except that the engine died at an intersection and I got flustered and failed to restart it so many times that the test administrator had to gently coach me through even though we both knew I knew what to do. I was fully aware that I was releasing the clutch too fast, but I just could not slow down no matter how I tried. Until she gently and calmly told me when in her coaching voice, of course, and that worked right away.

We sat there three light cycles. It was like something out of a sitcom. The test administrator was very nice about it; and apart from the embarrassment, I don't feel that bad about it, and I think I'll be okay when I retake it in three weeks.

§§§

However.

It's very frustrating to be told that you just need to calm down or relax, as a person with anxiety disorders. I don't mean it's insensitive or anything, just that it's frustrating because I already knew that and have been trying very hard to, but it's not working very well, because there's nothing that does work very reliably that I can do.

I can't take a tranquilizer. I can't magically make myself extremely familiar with the entire context/place/situation/people. I can't exercise vigorously right before because it takes longer to travel to Turku than it does for endorphins to fade (and I'd have to have time to go home and shower and dress even before the hour commute). I can tell myself everything's going well and it's not an emergency and I should chill; I can tense up all my muscles and then release and do those breath patterns that help lower your heartbeat; and I can listen to music that I find comforting. That's really it. It's got limited effectiveness.

But importantly, the bus ride is already stressful enough for me to need to do those things much of the time because I have a severe perfume allergy and am hypersensitive to perfumes, and typically there is at least one (physically) irritating perfume experience in over 90% of bus rides that I take. It's not often possible to come out of one centered and relaxed and refreshed, even if I logically know that the risk of anaphylaxis was low!

Probably it would still be hard to relax without the bus trip, though.

celli

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

musesfool

Baby Miss L is super into Halloween and has two Hello Kitty dolls dressed like skeletons that dance! She might be a skeleton herself this year! Her costume has not been finalized, but there is time.

As I've mentioned, I was never big into Halloween - it was my mom's birthday, so a lot of the time I was home celebrating with her - but it's fun to see the baby into it.

Today is the 12th anniversary of my mother's death. That is a whole seventh grader! It makes me sad that my parents will never know Baby Miss L.

*

Current Mood: sad
Current Music: Bad (live) -u2

china_shop

keep up fan_flashworks streak
finish current wishlist gift (quickly!) and write 3 or 4 more (so many tempting prompts!!)
finish two WIPs that are more than 4 months old, especially the Zhu Hong one)
Yuletide & treats?

Speaking of Yuletide, I think it's okay to post what you've nominated? I've nommed a handful of Kdramas: The Time of Fever, Unintentional Love Story[*], Good Manager, While You Were Sleeping, and Family by Choice (the dads).

[*] I'm never sure if it's okay to nom The Time of Fever and Unintentional Love Story? The pairing is the same for both. Ot1h, the shows have very different vibes, and ULS has different other characters as well. Otoh, you could reasonably write "ToF" fic set during ULS, or "ULS" fic informed by ToF... Mostly I nommed them both because I didn't know what other people in the (tiny, tiny) fandom might offer/request if they signed up, and I didn't want to mismatch if they only offered/requested one show or the other.
tl;dr: Umbrella fandoms solve a lot of problems! ;-p

scaramouche

I was going to start watching Bloody Game season 3, but while browsing Netflix on my phone, I got a promo for Crime Scene Zero.

HUH, said I. Does this have anything to do with Crime Scene, the murder mystery variety show that I love? A quick click on the show's info (the show itself hasn't dropped yet) seemed to imply that it's a continuation of the same show????

I went to the show's wiki page to double-check, and sure enough Crime Scene Zero is mentioned there as a fifth season of the show.... but just before that, the article says that there was a fourth season LAST year, called Crime Scene Returns.

WHAT! Despite my acceptance that the show is labour intensive and difficult to set up and run, they've made another two seasons? I checked the usual places on reddit, and have now watched episode 1 and 2 of Crime Scene Returns, as it seems that this season has changed the format some by splitting each case into two episodes each.

Sure, the comments on reddit are more levelheaded, with criticism of the new episodes' pacing and the roleplaying skills of the cast, but meanwhile I'm over here watching episodes 1 and 2 while being gleeful, joyous, excited, grateful, delighted, ecstatic, and laughing until my asthma kicks in. (When ep 1 first started I went aww Park Ji-yoon didn't come back? But then she came walking in as the detective and I went YAY!!!!) I am so happy, I have to stop myself from bingeing the whole season, though I probably will.

Current Mood: ecstatic
Current Music: Franz Ferdinand - What You Waiting for?

cimorene

I have been thinking about the ADHD struggle, and I decided I should buy the Barkley book on adult ADHD and also a copy of How To Keep House While Drowning; I added them to my cart at the online bookstore, then didn't order them because I didn't have the executive function to do that yet. I found some potential replacements for the charger of my laptop that just broke as well, but didn't manage to finish comparing them and decide.

Other stuff I need to do and have been unable to start includes:( Read more... )

I think a lot of what's blocking me from several of these things in the last month, anyway, is that they feel like projects that require planning and stamina, but so much of my bandwidth has been going to anxiety about the driving test (two days from now) that there wasn't space. This is extremely normal for me and obviously a fallacy, but I guess I've been feeling like the time until the test was mostly short enough that I should just try to minimize anxiety and worry about all the other stuff after. And I didn't want to take my adhd meds in between.

scaramouche

I got Karen Armstrong's memoir The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness from a book fair ages ago, but kind of avoided reading it because although I knew that Armstrong used to be a nun and that informs her perspective of religion, I was nervous that knowing Armstrong better might make me enjoy her other books less. As it turns out, knowing a bit more about life experience has indeed changed the way I view her books that I've already read, but in ways I wasn't expecting, and most of the guesses I'd made from her style of writing turned out to be pretty close.

( Cut for length. )

Anyway, great read, enjoyed myself even through the difficult parts, I have a better understanding (I think) of the ways that Armstrong thinks that differ from my own, but still illuminate routes that are useful to think about.

Current Mood: mellow
Current Music: Earth, Wind & Fire - September

musesfool

Yesterday evening, I made a lovely pan-seared steak for dinner, and today I roasted a chicken. It was more expensive, but I bought one that came already spatchcocked, which meant it cooked in about 40 minutes. I used this recipe and the white meat was quite juicy and good. It's annoying to have to flip the whole chicken in the frying pan though, so I don't know if I will do it this way again, especially since I don't really care about crispy skin since I don't eat the skin. [obligatory quote: "any demons with high cholesterol?... You're gonna think about that later, mister, and you're gonna laugh."]

I also did the first part of this chocolate chip cookie recipe and now they're in the fridge chilling. Tomorrow I will bake 2 off and then do the same thing for the next 3 days too, since it only makes 8 extremely large cookies and they are supposedly best when freshly baked. I will report back on how they taste!

Tomorrow, I plan to make a nice herb and cheese frittata for dinner and lunch for a couple of days too, and of course, there will be leftover roast chicken to eat too.

*

Current Mood: satisfied
Current Music: Cowboys vs Bears on tv

garryowen

Fic: Nemo Resideo
Rating: G
Pairing: Josh/Oliver
Summary: Elevator 301 at Bronx Gen has carried thousands of people, but it cares about two of them in particular.
Notes: The Dr. Porter mentioned in this story is not the one in Season 2, it's the one whom Oliver replaced, the one who went to work for big pharma.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/71172146

( Nemo Resideo )

scaramouche

It took me so long to finish Bloody Game season 2! (Looks like I started somewhere in July.) There was a stretch of a few weeks where I was three episodes from the finale and just couldn't get through, the pace and editing was SO BAD in the second half of the season. Made worse because at the same time I was watching Taran's The Genius season 1 commentary, which further made me appreciate how crisp the editing is in that show, even during its slower first season.

(Tangent: Taran paused his The Genius commentary to commentate over Survivor: Australia - Australia vs. the World, which I ended up watching because I figured that his commentary would be interesting enough to cancel out my general disinterest in Survivor -- speaking as someone who followed season 2 and 3 really closely back in the day. Taran had way less to say because he doesn't have as much game strategy to analyse, but it was fun to get a glimpse of Survivor fandom lingo and meta discussion about "player edits" and "social currency".)

I finally forced myself to finish Bloody Game's season 2, in the hopes of getting to the reportedly better season 3. It's been literal months since I first started season 2, and at one point I accidentally deleted my post on the earlier episodes when it was in a dreamwidth draft, so I'll try to recall what my thoughts were.

Why couldn't I have fastforwarded through season 2 the way I did season 1? Because Hong Jin-ho was a player. Dammit, Jin-ho! Though a lot of the time I let the show play in the background while I did other things. It is fun seeing Jin-ho, who "rescued" The Genius's debut season, appear almost ten years later in Bloody Game as a veteran (and thus letting go, fashion effort wise) in a mostly younger-than-him cast.

( More thoughts about Bloody Game's season 2. )

Current Mood: bored

china_shop

I posted my unexpected-kink fic for the Riddle round of

fan_flashworks, and today I archived it to AO3. It's part of my Breakage and Repair 'verse which is Post-Canon, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives (mostly), Canon Divergence, but all you really need to know is that it's early-relationship Chu Shuzhi/Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan.

Title: Experiments in Dynamic Translation (9003 words) [Explicit]
Relationships: Chu Shuzhi/Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan, Chu Shuzhi/Hei Pao Shi
Additional Tags: Established Relationship, Relationships with complicated history, Being closeted in some spheres, Domestic, Unplanned/Impromptu Kink, Identity Porn (literal), Dom/sub, soft D/s, Dom!Shen Wei, Envoy!Shen Wei, Sub!Chu Shuzhi, (Zhao Yunlan enjoys the show), Fealty, Orgasm denial/delay, Dark-Energy Sex Toys, Low-key impromptu bondage, Dixing-Powers Powered Sex, Anal Sex, Voyeurism, Frottage, Long Hair
Summary:

It’s been just over ten weeks since his and Da Qing’s return to the land of the living, and in that time, Shen Wei has not yet had occasion to don his robes of office in front of Shuzhi—or indeed, to conduct any Envoy business at all in his presence. He’s visited the SID once or twice on official matters, but only in Haixing clothes, and he’s been sure to keep his manner light and casual in the public areas. Formal liaising is for the privacy of Zhao Yunlan’s office.

Now, faced with the prospect of a Dixing state dinner, Shen Wei discovers he’s slipped into—not so much keeping secrets, as compartmentalising. Again.

As I said in my end notes, it’s hilarious to me that my first E-rated fic in this ‘verse is something I usually DNW (D/s, especially when it leans into existing power dynamics). For some reason, it worked for me in this specific scenario.

musesfool

If you are interested in checking out Dungeon Crawler Carl but don't want to buy the first book (or the wait list at your library is very long), there's a webtoon version you can check out for free to see if it's up your alley. It's making me want to start a reread of the series even though I just read it last month. *hands*

*

Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: Mets losing to the Nats

siria

( Joan of Arc (1900) )

( The Ninth Guest )

( Thunderbolts )

cimorene

The plumber and the digger have left after tamping the dirt back down and pouring some new gravel where the car parks! The septic tanks have been removed and the separate rainwater drainage is in place!

The sewers from the tenant side do not empty into the tank under the garage anymore (that's still there though, but it shouldn't be able to give us any trouble unless we get like a month of flooding rains and a leak)!

It's all brown dirt and gray gravel again now, but here's a few pictures Wax took of the excavation earlier.

We have lost a few bushes and possibly some hostas, as well as a little flat cement pad that we didn't want, to the piles of dirt and digging. We will need to buy a few baby bushes (rhododendron maybe?) and a bunch of clover seed which hopefully might manage to outcompete the grass. And set the cement paver path back in place. All that has to be done during the autumn, before the frost, so... here's hoping. Also a city tree on the corner of the lot had a lot of its roots cut off and unfortunately a lot more on the other side last winter when the city dug up the street to fix the pipes. It's probably not gonna survive that, I guess.

I have been feeling full of anxiety and suspense when actually a lot of things are going well. This stupid open septic tank issue has been oppressing and terrifying us for a year. Monday and Tuesday are my last driving lessons and then I take the test (tons of anxiety) but my teacher and I agreed I've been doing pretty well. Wax and I have managed to cook together a bit more often, even.

Profile

cantankerous_curmudgeon

December 2010

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Page Summary

china_shop - Me-and-media update
celli - My promos for Yuletide
musesfool - thinking of ways to make it better
cimorene - I've started clicker training Sipuli
scaramouche - Book Log: No Dream is Too High
siria - 2541 / The Carter File
cimorene - The good news is all I have to do is calm down
celli - the more anxious I become, the more organized I get
musesfool - if i could, i would let it go
china_shop - Writing/making Goals for the rest of the year
scaramouche - Crime Scene Returns
cimorene - ADHD roadblocks
scaramouche - Book Log: The Spiral Staircase
musesfool - tips and overthrows - gotta have it
garryowen - Fic: Nemo Resideo
scaramouche - Bloody Game
china_shop - Guardian fic: Experiments in Dynamic Translation (CSZ/SW, CSZ/SW/ZYL)
musesfool - and that might have impact in the ninth
siria - 2540 / Joan of Arc; Thunderbolts
cimorene - The long sewage nightmare is over

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