Reading

Entry tags:

books,
tea

I crave tea.

I need to be forcibly separated from my bank account.

I already have a full shelf in my pantry devoted to tea, not to mention the giant drawer at work. Or the half-shelf in the work kitchenette. Or the bin in my closet at home.

Did I buy more tea? Yes. TBF, Labor Day is coming and all the fun iced teas Adagio offers will be sunsetted for the autumnal teas. Which \o/ Yes, I did get the rainbow iced teas sampler. I also have a book on the labor and justice movement on tea plantations in the Darjeeling region. Which, the evolution of the tea plant's growth in that region is fascinating. Darjeeling, like San Diego has an incredibly interesting climate.

Current Mood: hungry
Current Music: what went wrong - kill bill

Entry tags:

Por que no los dos?

Depression or illness? That is the question.

Anyway, Thurs/Fri are street cleaning near me. I mention this only as I had a fun interaction with the person writing parking tickets on my block. I went outside to head to work yesterday and found the guy putting a ticket on the car behind me. I opened the door to head out and he was all "You're fine!"

Me: Oh! I'm just heading to work!
Him: *laughs* Weird timing! But! Remember, it's street cleaning Thurs/Fri. *points at signs"
Me: Oh, I know. I've taken to looking up the schedule in April and putting the dates in my phone so I won't get surprised.
Him: Smart! I wish everyone did that.
Me: Yeah, but to be fair, looking up the dates is like trying to navigate the DaVinci Code or something.
Him: OMG, THE WARD MAPS, WHY.
Me: I KNOW, especially this one! We're like O'Hare pretending to be Chicago in this block section!

There was more, but I wanted to share this deeply specific Chicago conversation with the rest of you because sometimes it's just really nice to have a hyper-specific conversation with another person who gets it. And by 'it' I mean, living in your city's bureaucracy.

In other deeply place-specific whining, I remain annoyed that CVS closed its location in Oglvie. Partially as that was where one of the only accessible entrance points to the building was, so we're currently all hosed. Also because the grocery in the French Market charged me $7 for a pint of half and half and a soda. TBF, it is my own fault for not working harder to hit up the Aldi last night.

I am also grumpy because I've become someone who drinks coffee and will now sometimes buy a latte when I am out and about. But that is a personal grievance against myself. NGL, it started and remained as a maladaptive grief exercise and now that I'm Less That, it's remained and I am grumpy. One of the core tenants of me being able to live on my own is that I'm terrifyingly frugal, so having a vice - no matter how limited - that involves a $5+ pricetag is upsetting me. At least I started carrying sugar free syrup when I do plan to purchase one.

In other news, I decided to treat myself to a stack of new books. Do I need them? No. Do I already have a stack of ~60 books I could read instead? Yes. We won't talk about the stack of library books I'm currently working my way through either. Next year might be another "read what you own" reading challenge for myself. Or not. Who knows what headspace I'll be in next year. Anywho, three of the books I ordered I did so I could put them in a local little library. I'm all about forcing my reading tastes on people wanting to read free shit.

( Chat about the books I ordered here. )

IDK. I think I just wanted a nice little present for myself. I did buy cleaning supplies last night, but there's only so excited I can get about sanitizing wipes and laundry soap.

WIP Challenge Check-in, Day 11 -- Wednesday

Hello on Wednesday! How are things going in the world of fic?

Did you write?

- Yes!
- No!
- Not yet!

If yes, what kind of writerly activity did you engage in? How do you feel about it?
If no, what were the obstacles/situations that affected your writerly pursuits? What will you do differently tomorrow to get more writing done?
If not yet, because the day hasn't gotten going yet, what kind of writing activity are you planning (or hoping) to accomplish?

Entry tags:

what i'm reading wednesday 13/8/2025

A short post this week, since I was very, very busy this weekend.

What I finished:

+ Behind Frenemy Lines by Zen Cho, which I enjoyed despite the awful name. Whoever is naming the books in this series is doing them a disservice! I really like the cover art though, so kudos to the artist.

The books in this series (two so far, the other being The Friend Zone Experience) are ostensibly romances, but that's not really why I read them. The romances move too fast for my ace ass, just like 90% of romances, but this is a Me Problem. If you don't have the "you barely know each other!" or the "I haven't spent enough time with you to be fully invested in this relationship!" kinds of problems that I have with almost all romances, then I do not think the romance will seem rushed. It's a nice dynamic between two immigrant London lawyers (one from Malaysia, one from Hong Kong) who have a series of unfortunate encounters before ending up working together.

I really like both of the characters, but as I said, I'm not so much here for the romance as I am for the other stuff. In both of these books, the real appeal are a) the family backdrops and b) the moral quandaries. Zen Cho is fantastic at writing complicated family dynamics that feel so very real--suffocating in some cases, loving but fraught in others. Family, no matter how loving, is never easy in her books--it involves responsibilities, expectations, negotiations but it's no less precious for all that. I deeply appreciate this aspect of her writing because it feels very real and immediate, especially in a world that (at times) can encourage us to just break things off with any relationship that involves conflict.

She's also really good at placing her characters in situations where they have to make difficult choices and are torn by dueling loyalties or moral commitments. The choices these characters make matter in a way that's rare in the kind of frothy fiction that these books get shelved alongside. Obviously, I dig anything that involves people making difficult moral choices, so I eat this up.

Honestly, my only real complaint about the book is that I wanted to spend more time with the characters and their problems. I wanted to dig deeper into their family stuff, have them struggle with the moral choices for longer, etc. I personally felt like this book could have used more room to breathe. But if this sounds appealing to you, I recommend it!

Oh, another thing I dig about Zen Cho's contemporary books-- they give me a glimpse of Malaysia, a really interesting multi-ethnic society I know very little about. And Cho doesn't over-explain things--she'll throw words in there that she doesn't take the time to define, so you either figure them out from context or look them up if you really want to know what they mean. I like this a lot! It feels like I'm being treated as an adult and also it feels like she's pushing back against the exoticizing that can happen in books published in Anglophone countries. For the characters, these aspects of their life are normal and not to be commented upon, and the specter of the white reader doesn't intrude through too much handholding by the text. It's great!

What I'm currently reading:

+ I'll be finishing up The Dawn of Everything for the last week of book club. As always, this book makes me want to write a dozen different anthropologically-focused fantasy novels a la Le Guin.

+ I read the lovely forward to Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine and I'm looking forward to reading the book. Shockingly, I've never read anything of his besides Fahrenheit 451.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: U.R.A. Fever - The Kills

Entry tags:

Ugh.

I have felt like rolled garbage for the last two days.

ANYWAY, I am also mildly grumpy. I am paying off the negligible amount on my credit card this month just to put it back on at the end of the month. End of August means oil change and the fact that it's 2025 means I'm getting a new battery. I am VERY aware that my current battery is probably fine, but having lived through the Ford Escort debacle of 2004-2010, I will absolutely be paranoid about following the car maintenance schedule.

My car mechanic mildly rolled his eyes at me the last time it happened and I told him the story of the time the car died while I was parallel parking it on Armitage at 8pm on a Friday night in summer. This time, when I called, he went "Yup, been five years. Ordering it now." I do not enjoy sobbing in the street while screaming "I FUCKING TOLD YOU SO" at my mother while desperately trying to push the car into the parking spot while she was on the phone trying to call AAA.

The only reason I continue to own a car is if I'm meticulous about maintenance and the instant this starts dying on me, I want it gone. I have enough internal anxiety, I refuse to add stressors to the pile if I can help it.

In other news, I've managed to read a few more books this month. I'm most of the way through You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried by Susannah Gora. It's kind of a sum-up of John Hughes' career, which is geographically interesting to me. I also got my library copy of Frostbite back! I only have ~25% left of that one and it's been hanging for me since May. Apparently I'm not alone in my fascination with refrigeration and the cold chain?

Also,

lyssie I think you'd really enjoy a novella I just finished. It's called Murder by Memory by Olivia White. It's a cozy sci-fi with murder? It was a quick, fun read. I forget how much I enjoy short sci-fi until I remember.

My excitement for the evening is that I get to go to Menards to pick up cleaning supplies that I'm almost out of at home.

Current Mood: pleased
Current Music: Star Trek Discovery Podcast

Entry tags:

fandom: hugos

Hugo Awards 2025

I remembered to become a member this year in order to vote, huzzah! Which means I had access to the voting packet (AKA the giant packet of PDF books), which meant I was able to review many more things than I can on my own (given affordability and library waiting times).

Also, ALSO, WorldCon is in Seattle this summer, so I'll theoretically get to be there in person when they announce the winners!

( So many books! And other stuff! )

Entry tags:

tv: buffy the vampire slayer

Two New Vids (BtVS)

It's my monthly update on

periru3 and my vid album Jagged Little Slayer, a mashup of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Alanis Morissette. Here are the two we've posted since last time:

Title: Head Over Feet
Character/Pairing: Willow/Oz
Summary: Don't be surprised if I love you for all that you are

AO3 | DW | Tumblr

Title: Right Through You
Character/Pairing: Buffy and other Slayers v. The Watchers' Council
Summary: You took me for a joke — you took me for a child

AO3 | DW | Tumblr

Entry tags:

music

three music-related things

+ My girl Lissie (who I've been following since her song "Everywhere I Go" was used on an episode of Dollhouse) just released a cover of "America" by my boys Simon and Garfunkel. The video is made of home videos from the 40s-70s and I love it so so much. The cover is good but the video really elevates it.

Watch on YouTube

I am deeply moved by ordinary people living good lives, so I got teary-eyed.

Anyway, watching it made me think of how much I love Lissie's covers. She's actually known for her covers as much as all the songs she's written herself, and for good reason. She has SO many good covers and I like how she'll often go for something really unexpected and outside her genre (folk-rock singer-songwriter, basically).

Here's "Pursuit of Happiness" by Kid Cudi:

Watch on YouTube

"And Nothing Else Matters" by Nirvana:

Watch on YouTube

"Bad Romance" by Lady Gaga:

Watch on YouTube

"Go Your Own Way" by Fleetwood Mac:

Watch on YouTube

"2000 Miles" by the Pretenders:

Watch on YouTube

"Wrecking Ball" which is apparently by Miley Cyrus:

Watch on YouTube

+ I've been listening to a lot of The Strike lately and I've realized they've written my two favorite songs about being a struggling working band.

"Painkillers" is IMO the very best song ever written about being a wedding band. It may not have a lot of competition lol! But I just think it's so clever and moving (and has a great hook)--the singer is reminding themself of why they have to play the same songs over and over at every wedding--because they're painkillers for the people listening and give them a way to escape reality for a hours and go back to when they were young. The bridge is "tonight we're going to dance our pain away," which should give you some idea of the song.

Watch on YouTube

The other one is, imo, an even stronger song. "Down" is just about the struggle to make it. The singer is asking themself, "Why are we still doing this? Why have we invested so many years into this even though we've never struck big?"

"Another night sleeping in the car
Wondering what we’re even looking for
Burning the gas that we can’t afford
To heal the broken hearts

"And they still call up the radio stations
And ask us how we’re not so frustrated
Because they saw us way back in 15
And I say I’m not sure where the time goes."

The answer is the magic of live music, tbh.

Watch on YouTube

Anyway, I love both of these songs madly.

+ I Do Not Do video games, but apparently really great music is getting written for video games? Someone posted a clip of a symphony playing a beautiful piece of music, so I went to find it on YouTube, only to find that there's two hours worth of additional music, equally beautiful! Apparently Undertale is a video game that was created by one genius dude and he also wrote all the music for it??? Even though he had no background in music???

Anyway, I've been listening to this a lot and loving it:

Watch on YouTube

MCU meme thing-y

Hey! A wild meme that I can distract myself with while I pretend that I'm not worried as I wait for the vet to call me to pick Freya up. She's in getting two teeth pulled because her life long endeavour of 'everything is food if you try hard and believe in yourself' has finally caught up with her. It's not major surgery, but is under anaesthetic, and she's an older pup now...

Anyway.

( What parts of the MCU have I watched )

The funny thing is, everyone I've seen post this has had roughly the same arc of having been super into the early MCU and then gradually falling off. Whereas my arc is more like aggressive disinterest in the early movies shading into outright dislike of the OG Avengers, a brief period of, like, Ragnarok, Black Panther, Captain Marvel that I actually really dug, that eventually turned into 'It's free on Disney+' ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Entry tags:

prog rock

Fates Warning - The Light and Shade of Things

( You're about to view content that a community administrator has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: and I howled at my ma in the driving rain

Entry tags:

i was born in a crossfire hurricane

3 things make a post:

a. So I hurt my back yesterday doing something normal and innocuous. Ugh. Everything about it is terrible. Icy-hot helps, and tylenol, but it was hard to find a comfortable position to sleep in last night. I did eventually get to sleep, but only for like 5 or 6 hours.

b. I did still manage to make this fried rice recipe with ground pork, but it's only okay. I think the meat could use more seasoning before it gets fried and sauced, and I'll probably stick with the Woks of Life recipe going forward, but it'll do for lunch for the week.

c. In other news, Baby Miss L is having a rough time going to school 2 days a week. I sent her a couple of books about it (including a Pete the Cat one, though it's Pete the Kitty in this case), so hopefully that will help (as much as anything helps other than time and patience). Poor kid - I wouldn't want to go be around strangers all day either!

*

Current Mood: silly
Current Location: Bamberg

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Meme Time!

Meme time! Bear in mind that we Germans used to get not just tv shows about a year later than they were broadcast (if not longer), and even blockbuster movies took their own sweet time in ye olde days before getting released overseas. This changed in the past 25 or so years, of course, and now we sometimes get to see coproductions in Germany before they're released in the US, and can stream tv shows simultanously.

MCU Meme from

vaysh and

muccamukk:

Bold = Watched Entirety
Italic = Watched Part
* Watched more than once.
† Watched in the first few weeks of release (at least initially, for TV shows).

( It seems I watched a lot of Marvel )

Star Trek Meme from

aurumcalendula :

Bold = Watched Entirety
Italic = Watched Part
* Watched more than once.
† Watched in the first few weeks of release (at least initially, for TV shows).
( And I've watched even more Star Trek )

Entry tags:

daily: check in

WIP Challenge Check-in, Day 11 -- Monday

Hello on Monday! How's the day going so far for fic? (If you haven't gotten started on your day as yet, how did yesterday go for writing fic?)

- Excellent!
- Terrible
- Somewhere in between
- Nothing doing

How much time have you spent on writing fic today, roughly?

- None
- 30 minutes or less
- 30-60 minutes
- 60-90 minutes
- More than 90 minutes

In five words or less, how do you feel about that?

Entry tags:

Photographs and Memories index

In July 2007, I wanted to commemorate having 500 posts memorised on my Livejournal. So, I wrote five ficlets, none rated higher than PG. See below for title, fandom and other details. The overall title and theme for the collection comes from the ER episode, 'Photographs and Memories'.

Disclaimer: None of the characters are mine, and I make no profit from this fan-written fiction.

Photographs and Memories one: we'll cross the seven seas
Swallows and Amazons, Universal. 358 words. Nancy, gen, post-series future fic.

This index is a work in progress and will be updated as I repost the other ficlets.

Entry tags:

Reposted fic: we'll cross the seven seas (P&M1)

we'll cross the seven seas - Photographs and Memories one, Swallows and Amazons, Universal, Nancy, 358 words. First posted: July 2007.

Disclaimer: None of the characters are mine, and I make no profit from this fan-written fiction.
Gen, post-series future fic. With thanks to astralis for looking over this.

( we'll cross the seven seas: shallowness )

The Photographs and Memories index is here.

Entry tags:

star trek

Star Trek Meme

(snagged from

colls' post)

( Read more... )

Entry tags:

daily: check in

WIP Challenge Check-in, Day 10 -- Sunday

Hello on Sunday! What kind of a writing day has it been so far today -- or if today hasn't gotten going yet, how did you fare yesterday?

- I thought about my fic once or twice
- I wrote
- I did some planning and/or outlining
- I did research and/or canon review
- I edited
- I've sent my fic off to my beta
- I posted today!
- I'm taking a break
- I did something else that I'll talk about in a comment

Sunday Discussion: It's a new writing week, and we're still less than half way through August. How are you doing so far with meeting writing goals for the month?

Entry tags:

Rec [fic]: The One Where Hardison Meets The Doctor by seraphina_snape

Title: The One Where Hardison Meets The Doctor
Creator:

seraphina_snape
Rating: Teen
Word Count/Length/Size: 1813 words
Creator's Summary: Hardison gets to meet the Doctor for Christmas.
Characters/Pairings: Tenth Doctor, Alec Hardison, Tenth Doctor
Warnings/Notes: None

Reasons for reccing: It's a fun fic, since Hardison is a Doctor Who fan, but the Doctor can explain it away.

Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28381302

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: Mets pregame show

Entry tags:

books: dungeon crawler carl

he got a great charge on it

Arrgh, book 7 is not the last book! And the next one doesn't come out until next year! Arrgh!

*

Current Mood: contemplative

Entry tags:

seren is a little out of sorts

Um...hi?

Well, hullo Dreamwidth!

So...it's been a minute! I am thinking about dusting this place off a little as I go through a bunch of stuff and dang it, I miss longform blogging and posts. I'm wondering if having a space to write STUFF might help my brain and health some. I'll put the bigger stuff under a cut 'cause A LOT is going on.

However, here's my not-so-deep-thought for the day:

I was scrolling through something the other day and I just realized how much I miss movies. They haven't gone away, obviously, but my attention span and my ability to afford to take three hours out of my life to drive across town to watch something that may or may not be good is just plain gone. I actually had the urge to watch the new Jurassic World movie (cause I love a creature feature), but it was freakin' $20 to RENT. Nope. There feels like there's too much choice and yet not enough choices? Like I said, this is definitely a not-so-deep-thought and others have commented on it far more eloquently than I have. I'd just like my attention span back. That would be nice.

Anywho, I think I might try to be on here a bit more often. I miss writing and I miss y'all.

Have a Happy Saturday!