sid_guardian | Member Posts

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Title: Spring Rain
Author:

kat_lair
Fandom: Primeval
Pairing: Nick/Stephen
Tags: Drabble, Kissing in the Rain
Rating: G
Word count: 100

Summary: It catches them by surprise.

Author notes: Spring defiance from under the crushing forces of capitalism = a drabble a day in April. This one for

kitarella_imagines who wanted some Primeval characters.

Spring Rain on AO3

( Spring Rain )

***

tinny

Another Nothing But You set for round 6 at

ships20in20! Enjoy!

Teasers:

( 20+3 icons )

I'm happy to receive all kind of comments, including concrit! All icons shareable. Credit for brushes and textures I use can be found here in my resource post.

Previous icon posts:

maggie33

Life in Smokey Blue

It’s a new Japanese BL drama, and one of the leads is played by Takeda Kouhei (Nozue from Old Fashioned Cupcake). It started airing on Gaga, the 1st episode is free and I watched it yesterday. And I loved it.

Takeda Kouhei plays Azuma Sakutaro, who’s 38 years old. He was an ace pharmaceutical sales representative, but now he’s unemployed and living at his sister’s house. One night when he’s drinking at the bar he chances upon Kuji Shizuka, his former coworker and rival from his pharmaceutical company days. Eight years earlier on the day Kuji left the company, they spend one memorable night together, but in the morning Azuma found out that Kuji disappeared without a word. And they haven’t seen each other since.

Two lead actors are 37 and 40 years old, and it feels so nice to watch BL with mature leads. And they look good together (see below) and have great chemistry.

life in smokey blue takeda kouhei and shibuya kento

Gohan

This is a Thai movie about a life of a white stray dog and his three different owners, and I really want to watch it. Even though I know it will make me cry buckets, because just this short trailer already made me teary-eyed.

Watch on YouTube

kaffy_r

... But Not Precisely Lively, Either

It's been too long since I last posted, or checked in with other folks' journals. My energy levels have been up and down like a yoyo, and even the ups aren't where I'd like them to be. It means that there are some days when I'm happy at having completed one or two things, and there are other days when I can't even get those one or two things done.

I've been active on Discord, but I don't want to hang there all the time, or certainly not hang there to the detriment of some of my other spaces. I'm trying to find and keep friends and friendly acquaintances in different places. You'd think that that kind of adulting wouldn't be difficult. You would be wrong.

I've managed to push through a bit on my writing. I've managed (ihopeihopeihope) to have prevented more mouse incursions. I'm thinking of putting some more of my old poetry up on

originalkaffy_r , but who knows if I'll actually do it. I've gotten some reading done away from the laptop as well.

I bought the new BTS album and, once again, can't say why I did that. I'd been listening to the album even before buying it (the first actual music purchase I've made in a long time) thanks to all the songs being on YouTube, and I really like it. But I don't understand ... well, much of what's going on in my head these days.

I imagine I'll figure it out.

Current Mood: blank
Current Location: the home office
Current Music: BTS "Body to Body"

china_shop

Previous poll review
In The whooshing sound as they go past poll, 25.6% of respondents said they generally find deadlines motivating, 28.2% want to hide from them, and 64.1% find them manageable in moderation or under specific circumstances. In ticky-boxes, sunbeams dancing brightly on leaves in the breeze came second to hugs, 66.7% to 87.2%. Thank you for your votes! ♥

Reading
Still listening to The Hymn to Dionysus by Natasha Pulley, read by Sid Sagar. There's an interesting tension between my being 90% sure the POV character is unreliable, and 10% aware that he is familiar with the ancient world and its mores, while I am not, so what if all his wrong interpretations are right?

I'm up to the second-draft section of Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts by Matt Bell, and I am somewhat despairing. In brief, he recommends: discovery write your first draft for raw material, reverse engineer an outline from it, fix the outline, then write the second draft from the revised outline from scratch. Which makes sense if a) you need to discover your characters and worldbuilding along with your story, and b) you can write from an outline. But when I've tried this in the past, I kept editing the outline until it was a completely different story from my first draft. Also, I don't want to rewrite my fics from scratch, and even if I managed to, I'd end up with a differently not-working draft and have to do it all over again. Tl;dr, there is a lot of good stuff in Refuse to Be Done, but it's not the magic bullet for my writing woes that I'd hoped. Oh well.

Maybe I should give the method a try for something shorter.

Kdramas
I'm currently watching four Kdramas, woohoo!

Andrew and I are watching Phantom Lawyer, which is goofy and kind. I would probably enjoy it even more if I hadn't recently listened to a bunch of episodes of Movie Briefs podcast; now I'm very conscious of the rampant unethical lawyering (your client being guilty does not mean you get to turn evidence over to the police, omg; you can't lie to a client about their case to spare their feelings; etc). Anyway, I'm kind of hoping it doesn't develop a romance; I like the leads as a platonic odd couple.

Pru and I are still watching Love Scout. More this evening. (And I showed my brother episode 1 on Friday, though he chatted through it; is that how normal people watch TV?)

I slipped and fell into a rewatch of You're Beautiful, the 2009 "nun undercover as her twin brother in a boyband" drama that was my gateway drug. It is still ridiculous and adorable. Neither of the leads has two braincells to rub together, and I love them. The second lead is still annoying.

spoilers

The lead is arrogant, impatient, and rude, but when he accidentally overhears his new bandmate talking about keeping the fact she's a woman a secret, he immediately confronts her, demands that she go to the manager and confess, and generally engages with her as an (annoying, accident-prone) person. Eventually he ends up helping her and conspiring to keep her secret. Meanwhile, the second lead guesses from Mi-nam's physical attributes that she's female (which reads very differently to me in 2026 than it did to my clueless younger self!). He doesn't tell her he's guessed, just goes out of his way to befriend her and invite her confidence, and he gradually gets jealous of the first lead. He's "nice", but I do not like him.

Hwang Tae-kyeong's reluctant self-embroilment in the deception makes me laugh a lot,and I'm permanently earwormed with the theme song. I feel like in a modern remake, a) the other boyband members would be more androgynous looking too, and b) the management would be all over everything. A.N. Entertainment is one ramshackle operation.

I also started Lovely Runner, starring Kim Hye-yoon (Extraordinary You) as a Kpop megafan whose idol dies by suicide. She time-travels back 15 years to when they were both in school and proceeds to be extremely in-his-face, leveraging her encyclopaedic fan knowledge of him to try and change the course of history. Kim Hye-yoon is always delightful, so I'm enjoying it so far, but it's early days.

Other TV
The Pitt. Ahhhh!!

Rooster (why do writers on TV never actually sit down and write? or read, for that matter?), Scrubs, Cheers, and about ten minutes of DTF [location] which was enough to know it's not for me.

Fringe and Bluey with my sister.

spoilers for Fringe

We've reached the terrible part of Fringe. Wow, I'd forgotten how bad it gets. I mean, why wouldn't you have one of your lead characters choose to give up her entire personality, life history, and all of her friendships and social and family connections for romantic love? I mean, none of that meant anything much, right? Wow. /o\)

Paper Girls and Connections with Andrew and Ed.

Audio entertainment
Bill and Frank's Guilt-Free Pleasures' episode "Crowded House: 'Don't Dream It's Over'". A bunch of relistening to RNZ podcast Conversations with my Immigrant Parents as research for a fic I'm not writing.

Online life
520 Day assignments are out, woohoo! The Slo-Mo Guardian rewatch is kicking back into gear this weekend. I've started a new browser window (window #4) where I'm camping out; it currently only has thirteen tabs. I'm failing at keeping up with Dreamwidth, but hopeful that will change now Writers' Hour is at 8am instead of 10am.

Writing/making things
The last week has mostly been modding, squaring away my Yuletide fic for when I get back to it, making notes for a thing that I'm not going to write after all, and alibi sentences. But sometime in the next couple of days, I'm going to start my 520 Day assignment. This is my resolve face.

Life/health/mental state things
( Cut for length. )

House
I am optimistic that my kitchen windows will be re-puttied next week sometime, weather permitting.

Link dump
Why Greenland is an Island and Australia is a Continent (via

starandrea) | Losing Self-Control (5-minute short film about gay love in a Big Brother-like dystopia (with happy ending), which is actually an official music video for Minute Taker; via

mific) | Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names (via

tinny) | London Writers' Salon are having a free 24-Hour Sprint 7pm 24th to 7pm 25th April UK time (you just go to whichever hours you want) | Migaku language-learning app (via

tinny) (note to self: come back to this next time I'm in a language-learning phase).

Good things
Hair! My 520 Day assignment! Kdramas! Social occasions (I guess). My sister mended my favourite slouching-around-at-home trousers and made me Brazilian cheese bread. Halle and Andrew and the fact it's not raining or cold.

Poll #34458 Stoic hurt/comfort

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 37

View Respondents

When dealing with stoic characters, how do you prefer your hurt/comfort?

View Answers

stoic character stoically/reluctantly/awkwardly receiving comfort
16 (43.2%)

stoic character stoically/reluctantly/awkwardly providing comfort
16 (43.2%)

anyone and everyone hurt!
14 (37.8%)

anyone and everyone comforting!
13 (35.1%)

it depends
12 (32.4%)

none of my characters are stoic/reserved/clams
0 (0.0%)

all of my characters are stoic/reserved/clams
1 (2.7%)

I'm not into hurt/comfort
3 (8.1%)

other / it's more complicated than that
5 (13.5%)

ticky-box of having multiple browser windows open right now
19 (51.4%)

ticky-box full of story structure is my nemesis
11 (29.7%)

ticky-box full of a red panda circus troupe performing for grapes
13 (35.1%)

ticky-box of appreciating being able to breathe through your nose
24 (64.9%)

ticky-box full of hugs
29 (78.4%)

isis

What I've recently finished reading:

In eyeball, The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow. Time-loop novel about a medieval historian and the lady knight he's obsessed with, in an alternate world that is not quite our England; one of you called it "sort of Arthuriana" and I guess it is, though that sort of is important. In a way it reminded me of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August as much of the novel is the characters gradually figuring out that these same things are happening again, and then trying to take advantage of this knowledge to make the next loop better. Unfortunately, in this case the source of the time loop has very clear, firm aims, and does not want to be thwarted by the mere pawns acting out the story that is destined to be enshrined in the country's lore. I liked it a lot, especially as the layers unfolded, though actually I was most interested in the villain of the piece and would like to have had more of that story!

In audio, All These Worlds by Dennis E. Taylor, the third Bobiverse book. I'm really liking these, although they could use some closer editing to avoid repetition of things we already know. It's an interesting inversion of Adrian Tchaikovsky's "How can we see the other as a person?" in that the viewpoint characters, the Bobs, are cloned brain patterns from a now-dead engineer which run on computers installed in spaceships; though within the narrative they are unquestionably people, other humans don't necessarily see them that way. And yet as they are enabling and directing the expansion of humanity into space, they're the segment of humanity making first contact with the other sentient species of the galaxy, and they're the ones who have to handle the related decisions. The structure of these books, with the multiplicity of Bobs and their storylines, means that all the different cases can be handled: the Stone Age civilization, the early-industrial civilization, the possibly advanced civilization that no longer exists, the advanced civilization that presents a terrifying threat. And as some humans fight against the idea that the Bobs are human, some Bobs work to reclaim as much of their humanity as possible. There are some deep philosophical questions one can tease out of these books - but I don't think that's the author's intent, and they are enjoyable reads just as fun science fiction.

What I've recently finished watching:

We enjoyed the Netflix "nature documentary" miniseries The Dinosaurs; quotes are because I think it's basically all CGI. Narrated by Morgan Freeman, it's a dramatic tour of prehistory, from the first proto-dinos to the asteroid that ended it all. It does a good job of telling individual "stories" of the various dinosaurs looking for mates, protecting their young, and doing their best to eat and not be eaten.

$radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)$

radiantfracture

What is the name of the hockey team from ancient Uruk?

heron61

I realized that I hadn't worried about nuclear war since the 1980s, and I'm deeply unhappy about having to do so again. Also, here's my favorite song about nuclear apocalypse (Goodnight London, by Seeming):

Watch on YouTube

kat_lair

***

Title: Thaw
Author:

kat_lair
Fandom: The Professionals
Pairing: Bodie/Doyle
Tags: Drabble, Spring
Rating: G
Word count: 100

Summary: Everything is dripping

Author notes: Spring defiance from under the crushing forces of capitalism = a drabble a day in April. This one for

kitarella_imagines who wanted some Bodie/Doyle.

Thaw on AO3

( Thaw )

***

mekare

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

sabotabby

Well looks like this sorry, battered world is still there, at least this part of the world, so here's what I'm reading I guess.

Just finished: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones. This whipped. Blood-soaked historical fiction set in the early 1900s as a Pikuni vampire tangles with a Lutheran minister in the wake of a horrific massacre. All of the trigger warnings, obviously as it's quite literally visceral, which is not the most upsetting thing about it. Jones is really quite a brilliant writer.

Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz. This is not the kind of thing that I normally like but works well as a chaser to the previous book, in that it's low-stakes, cozy, and fun. It's about a group of emancipated sentient robots, a car (also sentient), and a human who take over a ghost kitchen in the aftermath of a war between California and the rest of the US. If they don't pay off their debts, they'll be re-sold into slavery, but this is not the kind of book where that happens. It works for me largely because of the descriptions of the biang biang noodles, but it's also about the big theme of the year, which is who counts as a person.

Currently reading: About to start The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar.

alisx

A brief history of domains.

Man. Remember back when domain names where like a buck or two a year? Back before the deregulation and the monopolization and the rentier ratchet? Good times, good times.