straightforwardly

I’ve been feeling very distant from my internet communities recently. Obviously, not having a computer for over three weeks didn’t help, though I think it actually started about a week or two my laptop’s untimely demise. I do want to get back to posting and interacting on dreamwidth more regularly again, so, here we are.

Some things I’ve been up to recently:

★ there was an approximately two week period in September where I found myself roaming through itch, playing numerous visual novels and chat-sims, all of them either free or demos. I was actually working on a write-up of my thoughts on most of them when my laptop died, but now it’s been too long and the thought of finishing that post does not spark joy, so. I will say that my favorite of the games I played was probably Criminally Yours (M/F visual novel, free full game with optional paid DLC that adds a second love interest).

★ Since then, though, there’s been basically no gaming in my life. I did finally get around to installing Steam onto my new PC this morning, so maybe that will change?

★ I also seem to have fallen down an Ali Hazelwood rabbithole…. yeah, I don’t know what’s happening there either, especially since I’m usually not interested in contemporary romances or paranormal romances, and those two genres are 100% of what she writes. I also don’t like large height differences in romances, first person POV, or (for the paranormal romances) the concept of “mates”, so… arguably, there’s a laundry list of things I don’t like going on in her books. But—I do love single POV romances where the LI is pining madly throughout, and that’s basically all of her books, and there’s something addicting about her writing, even in those books (namely the novellas) that I don’t actually think are very good, and the end result of that is that I’ve been devouring her backlog over the last two months, slowed down only by the need to wait on library holds. I’m deeply baffled by what’s happening here, but I am enjoying myself, so I guess it’s of the good?

★ I’ve also been working on approximately zero of my creative projects. (I was about to say “zero of my projects”, but then I remembered I have made progress in some apartment-related things, so that’s not fully true.) (...Actually, I did just remember that I finished a cross-stitch that I was making as a present for my younger sibling a few weeks back, so let’s adjust that sentence to “zero progress on creative projects that I’ve mentioned online or are relevant to my online existence".)

★ Over the last couple of weeks I have, however, spent several afternoons on non-work days wandering the fields and forest above the town I live in for several hours while listening to music and thinking about things, so. I do love a walk, but this is not my usual routine, haha, and especially not to this extent. The weather is looking quite grim and rainy today, though, so I don’t think I’ll be indulging today.

★ while walking, I’ve been listening to my bandcamp purchases, since I don’t stream things while out and about and that’s the only music I have actually downloaded onto my phone (well, that and the Death Note musical), and one album that’s been particularly standing out to me is Rachel Rose Mitchell’s Heart of Mine, particularly “Farewell Song”, “Wither”, and “Thorns”, in that order. Tbh, I actually have no memory of buying this, though I know I’ve had it a while, and I have listened to it multiple times before. But I feel like this is the first time I’ve really paid attention to what she’s singing instead of letting it flow as background through my ears.

My labtop unceremoniously died last week, so this is a belated heads-up that I'll likely be pretty quiet until I can get it replaced. (Obviously I have internet, still, but I dislike typing on my phone and hate it even more when I'm trying to do so on dreamwidth, as can be demonstrated by how long I procrastinated on making this update.) I'm hoping to get it sorted by the end of next week, but we'll see!

► Last night, while doing some link-hopping through people’s personal websites, I came across a link to Orisinal’s Winterbells... what a blast from the past. I have such vivid memories of discovering it for the first time near the end of my high school years, and over the years, every so often, I end up rediscovering it and indulging in the nostalgia for a little bit.

I’m usually not a fan of games with no real endpoint / where the main goal is simply to get the highest score possible, but this one has always charmed me. The music, the graphics, the winter atmosphere… <3 There are other games on the site too, but none of them have ever clicked with me the way this one did.

► As long as I'm already here, have trio of other links that I've been meaning to share:

• a tumblr post comparing older/""dying""/small fandoms to their annual community picnic — I thought this was lovely, and echoes some of my own feelings on the topic.


• a Rem/Misa fanvid based on the Japanese musical — I’ll be honest; I’m here less for the fanvid aspects and more for the excuse to stare at all the shippy prettiness of it all. Which is not a critique of the fanvid! Just me being honest about my own priorities.


• a partial animatic for “Stalemate” from the Death Note Musical — I love how the artist did the opening sequence, and especially the framing/composition for the lines but if you ask me here and now / I'm pretty sure Kira is your son. Very cool <3

I mentioned the other day that I’ve been thinking about the Death Note manga and listening to the songs from the musical quite a bit lately. Which in turn has got me thinking about one of my favorite Misa moments, from early in the manga: ( beneath the cut )

On a different note: Today, I was also thinking about how, if you told teen!me that, nearly twenty years later, she would find herself thinking a great deal about Amane Misa, her reaction probably would have been something like this:

Teen Me: “yeah, of course, that makes sense! Misa Misa’s great! ^_^”

However, if you told her that she would also become increasingly Not Normal about the Yotsuba businessmen…

Teen Me: “I. I’m a what now??? About who?? Huh???”

And yet, here I am… against all reason or sense, emotionally invested. RIP me.

I’ve been in a rather inspired mood recently despite work being so busy and tiring, which is delightful but also a little dangerous, in that I feel like I might be at the risk of taking on too many different projects and then it all inevitably collapsing onto me when I (also inevitably) retreat back into low energy mode. Nonetheless! I am excited now, and want to talk about the things that have been exciting me. So here are the projects I’ve been finding myself tempted by most recently:

1. Fanbinding. Technically… this is one that’s been in progress for a minute already? I typeset the fic I want to bind back in July, and in the process discovered that I really like typesetting! There’s something rather soothing about the little tinkering that goes into it, and I like seeing it come together into something that (I find to be) visually appealing. ( more beneath the cut )

2. Over the past week, I’ve been splitting most of my post-work free time between playing Palia and browsing through people’s small/personal websites. I think I started my linkhopping from something I saw at smallweb? Either that, or it was makeashrine. (...Actually, now that I think about it, it was definitely the latter, but I'm leaving in the links to both.)

There’s something quite nostalgic about it all—that particular experience of hopping from link to link, looking at what can be found. It reminds me of my teenaged years, trying to find fan-content outside of livejournal, particularly websites for older fandoms—( more beneath the cut )

3. I did have one more point to tackle in this “yay fun projects! …hopefully I’m not piling too much on myself Q_Q” vein, but it has taken me far too long to write the above, it’s getting quite late, this last point is not technically a fannish project, and I’m still not quite sure how I want to phrase my thoughts on it, so I think I’m going to set talking about that one aside for another day.

...also, I should mention that I did not write this entry in order, and in fact was constantly jumping back and forth between paragraphs (sometimes while mid-sentence), so if there are any half-finished sentences or incomplete thoughts dangling around... sorry that I didn't catch it, but that would be why.

Reading: Wen Guan / Reading the Remnants by Qi Xiao Huangshu, specifically this translation by Pale Mirror Translations — more of my thoughts on it below!
Listening: I took a long break from podcasts over June/July because my brain was too full of Scum Villain to compute anything else, but now I’ve been catching up on Re: Dracula, and even more recently have started working on catching up on Fic Clique.
Playing: Palia!
Watching: The Liar Game anime, together with my brother. We just finished episode 7 last Sunday. He has no familiarity with the series; I read many, many chapters of the manga as a teenager & really liked it back then, though I’ve forgotten almost everything about it in the time since.
Writing: Still working on chapter two of the Original!Ning Yingying fic. It’s going much slower now, but I’m still adding sentences here and there, and still very fond of the story I'm telling.

On Reading the Remnants: I went into this not knowing too much about it outside of “baihe” and “I think this is the tomb-robbing one??” Currently, I’m on chapter twenty-six or twenty-seven, so about a quarter of the way through. ( beneath the cut )

I've been slowly rereading the Shijing recently, and today, I came across this poem:

In your lamb's wool sauntering,
In your fox-fur at Court—
Oh, how can I help thinking of you?
My heart throbs with pain.

In your lamb's wool roaming,
In your fox-fur there in the Hall—
Oh, how can I but think of you?
My heart is sad and sore.

In your lamb's wool glossy
As the first rays of dawn—
How can I help thinking of you?
My heart is sick within.

—poem 146, from the Airs of Gui, trans. Arthur Waley

( hiding the bingqiu thoughts beneath the cut )

I.

Sign-ups for iddyiddybangbang have opened! I'm pretty excited for this year's round.

For those unfamiliar: this is a fairly chill panfandom challenge dedicated to iddy fanworks (with the definition of "iddy" being "whatever you, the creator, find iddy, regardless of rating"), open to writers, artists, mixers (as in fanmixes), and podficcers. For writers, the minimum is 5K. Sign-ups are open from now until 03 August. The drop-out deadline is 23 September, with the posting period being 27 September - 04 October.

II.

Though Luo Binghe was still a youth, he’d always remained calm and unperturbed, often acting mature beyond his years. Now actual panic surfaced on his face, like he was frantic to explain but didn’t know where to start. —volume 1, page 246

I’ve been (slowly) working on typing up quotes that I marked for potential future meta during my reread, and while I was skimming the page looking for the quote I'd actually noted, I couldn’t help but notice this line as well. Mostly, I just wanted to make note of it as a reference for myself for white lotus-era Binghe characterization reasons—how his younger self tried so hard to be mature and reliable, versus his post-canon adult self playing up the sticky crybaby aspects of his personality.

Fuck I love Binghe so much. ;_; The first time I read the novel, Shen Qingqiu was easily my fave, but at this point, it truly is a “don’t you dare to try to make me choose” situation.

III.

I just finished a reread of Bright Moon, White Clouds (a collected selection of Li Bai’s poetry, as translated by J.P. Seaton), and the final section of the book involved a discussion of what goes into translating Chinese poetry into English, as well as some discussion/analysis of the two poems he used as an example. I remembered really enjoying that section the first time around, and I really enjoyed it this time too! But there was one section in particular that struck me for reasons unrelated to poetry.

In North China and in the mountainous regions of the West and Central China as well, frost marks the beginning of Autumn and the coming of the trials of Winter. It is also, of course, symbolic of the onset of old age. To die away from home, among strangers, is to chance being unable to find a place in the family graveyard, and to find only a diminished place in the memorial rites for family. The significance of this content is not nearly so powerful in any modern society as it was in any premodern ones. In ours, travel is just too easy. If I’m lonely in Chicago in late Autumn, I can fly home to Sydney in less than a day. It doesn’t take a lot of sympathy to understand how powerful the content alone could have been in another age.

— excerpt from J.P. Seaton’s analysis of “Thoughts of a Quiet Night”

( brief thoughts beneath the cut )

I do wish that my younger self had typed up more of her thoughts on Scum Villain, because I have done so much overthinking and analysis of the text, and very little of it exists in a form that I’m able to reference and link to. It doesn’t help that what little meta/meta-like thoughts from my 2019-2020 time in the Scum Villain fandom that I actually wrote down was shared to… twitter… either as tweets that have long been buried or as a part of conversations in other people’s threads, half of whom have since deleted their accounts…

The reason I’m thinking about this now is because I’ve had a thought about Without A Cure in relation to something that came up in the new extra, but although the thought itself is relatively brief, I feel like I want to talk about it within the context of my thoughts on Without A Cure more generally… if I’d only written up those thoughts before, I could have simply linked to that before saying [thing I actually want to say], but instead it’s more complicated. I’ve been contemplating how I want to structure this, and I think I’m just going to split it up into distinct parts: first my general thoughts on Without A Cure (based solely on the main novel + original extras), then tackling the relevant part of the new extra and how it led to that thought I had, that had me wanting to write this all up in the first place.

…Because I'm me, I do go on a few tangents in the process, lol. (Most notably, I go on a tangent about my thoughts on when, exactly, Binghe actually falls in love with Shen Qingqiu.)( beneath the cut )

Thinking about the new Scum Villain extra... from all the new information we learned from it, one of the details that amuses me the most is just how dedicated MXTX is to letting us readers know that Shen Yuan’s original body was, in fact, ( cutting in case anyone is still dodging spoilers? )