[personal profile] piyavking
- Вы по какому вопросу?
- Я к вам как к главному хуесосу.
[personal profile] silverflight8
In a series where I love almost every book, it’s usually hard to pick a favourite, but Memory is unquestionably my favourite. It’s just emotionally so satisfying, the culmination the emotional investment as well as character development in the past 10 books. It’s so, so good!

Memory )
[personal profile] tyger

Yeah, today was also. Not great. Didn't get out of bed until almost dark again, etc. etc. etc. I did at least go and get food, though, so that's something. I think I'll put soup on tomorrow morning, have that for dinner. Yes. I probably should've bought some more veggies to hide in it, but I forgot until now, whoops!

Sibling will be back over tomorrow, which is at least an external motivation to get the fuck out of bed and do stuff!

all of these can be solved with leeches

Jul. 13th, 2025 09:05 am
runpunkrun: illustration of numbered sheep jumping over a sleeping figure, text: runpunkrun (and then she woke up)
[personal profile] runpunkrun

Fam, I have been so wiped out lately that I feel like I have a Victorian wasting disease. All I can really do is just sit on the couch and read or work on my virtual farm. On the other hand this has given me plenty of time to make up Fake Victorian Wasting Diseases:

  • nervous frippery
  • whispering spleen
  • hysterical ennui
  • chimney wheeze
  • evening vapors
  • wastrel's scrod

Dear [community profile] raremaleslashex creator,

Jul. 12th, 2025 10:32 pm
anaraine: A crop of the Stardew Valley title screen; a pixellated green valley under an ombré blue sky dotted with stars. ([sdv] stardew valley)
[personal profile] anaraine
I love "rare" exchanges, so I'm really happy that the timing of this exchange finally lined up for me. As always, this letter is meant for inspiration purposes only - if you already have something in mind for one of this ships, please go for it! I'm sure I'll love whatever you create. ♥

I do have gifts enabled, and treats are always welcome.

In general... )

Crossover: Matthew Cuthbert/Willy )

Naruto: Tobirama/Kagami )

NU:carnival: Eiden/Yakumo )


Dear [personal profile] gattodoro

Jul. 12th, 2025 03:24 pm
kittyrefuge: (Default)
[personal profile] kittyrefuge
Cheers in the bath.png

Hopefully, your special day is going well like that cat in the bath.

*hugs*
Tags:

Welp x2

Jul. 13th, 2025 04:15 am
tyger: Gwendal, facepalming. (Gwendal - facepalm)
[personal profile] tyger

It was in fact NOT better today. It was actually worse. /o\

But! I did FINALLY take a fucking shower! It was at like 10:30pm, but I did finally take one!

Not sure exactly WHY my brain is bouncing off basic fucking hygiene so hard at the moment - probably something to do with it being cold, but it's not just that - but it really, really is. :/

But at least I've taken it now, so I can go food shopping tomorrow!!! >: The most important thing! (Here is a thing I have learned today: green beans don't really go in instant noodles. Texture is not quite right. Still, a vegetable is a vegetable...)

Reading adventures

Jul. 12th, 2025 05:16 pm
cimorene: Pixel art of a bright apple green art deco tablet radio with elaborate ivory fretwork (is this thing on?)
[personal profile] cimorene
I haven't been able to get invested in reading a specific fandom in several years. Every now and then I look at fandoms I have read in the past and manage to spend a few weeks rereading some of them before I run out of patience to keep looking, but that's not very long.

About a month ago, I tried to read some 911 fic from [personal profile] waxjism's spreadsheet. She is keeping a spreadsheet of every fic in this fandom she has read. She records the title and author; pairing (even though they're all the same pairing); summary - which is sometimes the author summary and sometimes she writes something in this field like a comment, or a whole rant, that doesn't actually include a summary; a column called "good/no" where she categorizes them as very good, good, above mid, mid, "sub mid", or bad; and a column called "comments" where she sometimes rants, or continues the rant from the summary columnn, and sometimes just says things like "fun-ish" or "not flawless" or "pretty hot" or "unbearably written by a child or a super-offline person". This is different from how I, at least, used to keep track of a recs list when I had to do it manually, because she puts in everything she starts even if she DNF immediately, and also it's for private use. I tried to use it to find things to read, and it's not like I'm unfamiliar with reading fanfiction without canon but also I had seen some of this show accidentally while she was watching it. I did keep trying for a while and I read... some... number of the ones she marked very good or good, based on the comments and summaries, but I kept getting bored and annoyed at the characters. It just wasn't grabbing me. Very disappointing because there would've been a lot to read. (A huge amount of the things on this spreadsheet are marked bad or sub-mid even by her, and I think she is in general more forgiving in judging quality than I am even though unlike me she never reads things that seem kinda bad or mediocre to her for fun. And she has never gone archive-spelunking or read directly from the tag: she ONLY reads from recs and bookmarks. There's no control to test it here, but I think this bears out my personal conviction that there is a 0% increase in quality from recs and bookmarks (of random people that you don't know as opposed to someone vetted and trusted) vs. the slushpile (the entire content of the archive at random)).

A couple of weeks ago I saw a post on Tumblr that said something like, paraphrased, "There's a very popular notion that in the past all literature was good quality compared to now, but that's not true. This is survivorship bias. The stuff we still know and read in the present day is the good stuff, but a vast quantity of bad and mediocre stuff is lost to time." Someone responded by linking to The Westminster Detective Library, a project investigating the earliest history of the detective fiction genre. Apparently the professor who began it was initially inspired by a conviction that Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue was not actually the first detective short story based on features of its writing which in his opinion betrayed the signs of a genre history. The website contains transcribed public-domain detective fiction that was published in American magazines before the first Sherlock Holmes story's publication. I have been enjoying reading through it chronologically since I read the post. Reading in one genre is a bit like reading in one fandom, and reading very old fiction has several special points of interest to me because I love learning about history and culture in that way. Of course on the minus side, it isn't gay. But I'm getting fascinating glimpses of the history of the genre and the history of jurisprudence in both America and Britain. And although there is definitely mediocre and "sub-mid" writing published in the periodicals of the 18th-19th centuries, awash in silly cliches and carelessly proofread if at all, they are still slightly more filtered for legibility and literacy than the experience of reading modern fanfiction (even, as mentioned in the last paragraph, from recs lists and bookmarks, unless you have a supply of trusted and well-known reccers to follow. I sometimes come near tears remembering the days when I could always check what [personal profile] thefourthvine and [personal profile] norah were recommending, but I can't blame them for the decline, either, because I was generally reading and at least bookmarking if not reccing just as productively at the time).

The other thing that has happened to affect my reading is that my little sister's high school best friend got engaged and invited my sister to her engagement party in Florida, which is going to be "Gatsby-themed". The 1920s is possibly my single oldest hyperfixation, dating from before the age of 10, and it's the historical period that I know and care the most about. For the past ten years or so the term "Gatsby" has, consequently, inspired me with the most intense rage and irritation, because its popularity after the movie version of The Great Gatsby flooded the internet with so much loathesomely inaccurate "information" about and imagery of the 1920s as to actually make it harder to find real information, and nearly impossible to filter out this dreck. So my sister began shopping for her Engagement Party Outfit, which is supposed to be "Gatsby"-themed, and I am the permanent primary audience for this (just as she is the permanent primary audience any time I am planning outfits or considering my wardrobe). This has led me to reading 1920s magazines online from the Internet Archive and HathiTrust - initially the middle-class fashion magazine McCall's; then also Vogue and Harper's Bazar (much more pretentious and bourgeois). I tried to branch out into interior design magazines of the same period (House & Garden and Better Homes & Gardens), but it has been harder to find scans of them. I find 1920s romantic fiction (serialized copiously in all these magazines) much less readable and enjoyable than the 1920s detective fiction which I am more familiar with (I've read plenty of it thanks to my interest in Golden Age detective stories)... but I've also learned a lot more physical and aesthetic details about women's fashion and interiors from the romantic fiction, which makes me think I perhaps need to seek out more of it.
Tags:

Murderbot News!

Jul. 11th, 2025 10:53 pm
chomiji: An image of a classic spiral galaxy (galaxy)
[personal profile] chomiji

‘Murderbot’ Renewed for Season 2 at Apple TV+

The news comes ahead of the Season 1 finale on July 11. Based on “All Systems Red,” the first novella in Martha Wells’ series “The Murderbot Diaries,” the season stars Alexander Skarsgård as “a self-hacking security construct who is horrified by human emotion yet drawn to its vulnerable clients” that “must hide its free will and complete a dangerous assignment when all it really wants is to be left alone to watch futuristic soap operas and figure out its place in the universe,” per the official logline ... .

Welp

Jul. 12th, 2025 02:46 am
tyger: Axel looking off over the sunset (Axel - into the distance)
[personal profile] tyger

I did... absolutely nothing on my to-do list today. I didn't even get out of bed until like. 5? It was almost dark, I know that much. SIGH.

I did at least apply for some jobs, which I've gotten into the habit of and so didn't put on my to-do list, but still. Fuck executive dysfunction, what a pain. Not surprised though, this is generally how it goes. :/

I HAVE to go shopping tomorrow though, I'm out of uh. Most foods. So hopefully that'll give me a kick in the ass to do other things, too. Hopefully!!!

I did do some knitting though, almost done with the switch cover! Just gotta bind off and then probably block it. Never had to block anything before, so that'll be an adventure! (Mama blocked the shawl I gave her. I was gonna do it, but she had it washed and blocked out before I could even say I was gonna! XD;;;) First thing will, of course, be finding the mats! But I do know where pins are, so that's something...

[personal profile] piyavking
отягощаемый природным и цифровым аутизьмом твитор всё более уёбищен, дамы и господа...
[personal profile] tropicsbear

Vigilantes: Boku no Hero Academia Illegals (8/10)

Vigilantes is a spin-off story set before the events of Boku no Hero Academia which focuses on vigilantes in a world where being a pro hero is a viable career path. It expands the worldbuilding of BnHA beyond pro heroes and gives more historical information about how society developed after the appearance of Quirks. (Someone in YouTube comments said that Vigilantes is actually more academic about hero society history than BnHA which is more "My Hero Military Camp" sometimes. Absolutely wild and yet weirdly accurate.)

We're introduced to a new set of characters—college student Haimawari Kouichi, "freelance idol" Pop☆Step, and eccentric bruiser Knuckleduster—but lots of pro heroes from the main series appear in supporting roles as well.

Cut for length and spoilers (for the anime and some of the manga). )

Random stuff:

  • There's a distinct lack of protecting secret identities in this show. Kouichi spends more than half the time with his face out in the open even if they explicitly say that vigilantes are technically on the wrong side of the law. (Because even if they're doing good, they're not licensed.)
  • There's a trio of characters who are assholes to Kouichi and Kazuho in E01. Like, assault and beat up levels of being assholes. And yet there's some weird redemption thing going for them by the end of the season? We don't need this.
  • We get a fair share of Tensei AKA Big Iida in this show and I'm eternally grateful for it. We even get a minute of kid!Tenya struggling with his Quirk!! Cutie!!!
  • The animation quality's much more consistent compared to the recent seasons of the main show, and also just higher quality in general. Which is interesting because you'd think that the main series would get more love since it's the central canon. Checking on MyAnimeList, studio Bones produces the main series and Bones Film produces Vigilantes. Poking around the Wikipedia page, it looks like Bones Film is a subsidiary of Bones and different studios in Bones Film work on each series (Studio B for Vigilantes and Studio C for the main BnHA).
  • My per-episode reactions are in the comments of the corresponding posts over at [community profile] bnha_fans. Spoilers abound in the comment discussions, so beware if you check them out.
  • S02 is targeted for release in 2026!
[personal profile] blueshiftofdeath

Top Secret!, by the creators of Airplane!, is a parody of WWII movies and "Elvis" movies, in which the Elvis-like American protagonist, Nick Rivers, stumbles into being a hero that helps the resistance against East German fascist regime.

(Feel free to go watch Top Secret! and then return to this post.)

One of my and [personal profile] ebaths's favorite scenes in Top Secret! is one in which Nick is captured and tortured by the regime. In the middle of his torture, Nick passes out and has a nightmare that he's "back in (high) school" and missed all of his finals. Then he wakes up to the real life torture, realizes it was a dream, and says, "Thank god!"

This great little sequence clocks in at under a minute in length!

It's funny because of the delivery (I love the out-of-it performance of the dream classmate), the familiarity of the dream (I couldn't find any statistics on how many people have this dream, but it's incredibly common even after graduation, and there are multiple articles on the subject; here's one I found just now), and the absurdity of Nick preferring getting beaten over the mundane and relatively harmless scenario in which he missed his exams.

I think part of the humor also comes from how true it rings. It's absurd that Nick would prefer getting beaten, but in some way also very real. To me the scene, though comedic, is a fantastic illustration of how human experiences are all determined by how we see them. This is often brought up in the context of how we can change our views, and I think less often in the context of how aging changes our world and therefore the way we perceive events-- the latter of which is particularly relevant to Nick Rivers's high school nightmare.

It's easy to forget how little you know as a child; for example, kids often need to have concepts like death explicitly laid out for them since it's not something they'd pick up on their own, whereas as an adult the existence of death (at least in its most abstract form) is second nature. With knowledge so limited, your world is easily defined by the adults around you. They might introduce you to religious concepts or the idea of something like Santa Claus, and though later you may reconsider your beliefs, as a kid typically these concepts are easily absorbed into your idea of reality.

Ideas around school fall into this category. If you're given the sense that you "must" get certain grades, or complete certain milestones (like taking final exams) or else your life is over, then that'll become your reality. Later on, after graduation, you'll likely realize that failing or missing exams don't end your life, even if they cause a lot of stress and extra headaches. In retrospect, the stress of needing to pass your chemistry final may seem almost trivial. Even if the event of "missing your chemistry final" doesn't change, your experience of the event (in terms of your emotions leading up to and following the event) can change if your perception of the world changes.

In the movie, Nick Rivers is a suave, unnaturally "chill" guy, ready to roll with it as he suddenly has to start risking his life. You can imagine that he's seen enough at this point to realize that whatever happens, he can probably make it work, and if not... he's enjoyed his life enough to not freak out too much over the end of it all. But as a teenager, he wouldn't have had acquired this life experience; it seems he was likely relatively sheltered (also funny) and like so many of us, had his brain trapped in the world (perhaps unintentionally) constructed by his parents and teachers-- a world where he had no way of seeing beyond the apparent horizon of doom that was missing his final exams.

So while being imprisoned and physically tortured is definitely worse than missing your final exams, it makes sense for Nick to find torture more tolerable than the dream-- because in the dream, he's not only living out the scenario of missing the exams, he's also re-living the mental state of being in high school. He's been reverted to the him that has no way of knowing that school isn't life or death, and has no sense of how much control he really has over his own life or how many opportunities still lay ahead.

Put another way, the high school nightmare represents not a single situation (such as being in school or missing exams) but a different world (mentally living in a reality in which you have no agency and you perceive that any misstep will be catastrophic). Though the "torture" situation of reality is less desirable than the "missed exam" situation of the nightmare, perception is what defines experience, and Nick naturally welcomes back the world of reality (in which he is an adult that sees near-infinite options for his future) compared to the world of the nightmare (previously described).

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