another post? already?

Aug. 18th, 2025 06:27 pm
yaaurens: (sad pouty LFS)
[personal profile] yaaurens
Yeah, it feels weird after so much time not posting.

BUT. When one spends three hours in the ER, one has much time to ponder.

I didn't really ponder that much, because I was in pain, but y'know. It ended up not being anything super serious; I woke up earlier than usual on Sunday with some lower-right-side abdominal pain. It was annoying, but whatever. But it didn't go away, and it kept getting worse, and started shifting around to my side and back. Nothing I did helped, and by late afternoon it was probably a good 7 on a 1-10 scale. Mom was like, Try Tylenol (did that in the morning), and Dad was all, Let's get you to the ER. Soooo off to the ER we went, just in case it was appendicitis. 

Surprisingly, the visit wasn't too awful? Like, everyone was nice, the wait wasn't too long. The longest wait was for the results of the CT scan, I think. Everything else happened within what I would consider reasonable periods of time. Obviously, if I had been higher on the pain scale, I may have had a different view on things, or if I were bleeding all over, but y'know. The staff were all very polite and relatively chatty which was a nice distraction. 

Long story short, not appendicitis, but a kidney stone. Not had one of those before, or a CT scan before, so that was... fun? They gave me the good drugs for the pain, IV fluids, antibiotics because my body is weird (the CT scan was like, you might have an infection in your kidney? and I came in with a fever, but the blood/urine tests were negative, so they were being careful), and something that helps dilate the urethra to make it easier to pass the stone.

Which seems to have happened overnight/early morning? I was up a lot in the night, but by morning is when I finally was able to sleep comfortably (cuz they didn't give me any overnight painkillers? why?). So thankfully, the pain is basically gone, just a little sore, and very tired. Which saves me a little in med money, cuz now I don't have to take the painkillers, anti-nausea meds, or the dilation meds, just the antibiotics. 

Is it sad that I'm mostly annoyed that this is throwing off my "work this week and reassess on Friday" plan? And that I'm more likely to stick it out at the job for a while longer because of how much I had to pay for the ER visit copay? Sigh.

Anywho. Dad and I finished Legend of Zang Hai and have started in on Beyond Evil. So far it's very intriguing; we're about halfway through and I am very much uncertain as to where we're gonna end up.

No work again tomorrow, yay? But mom wants us to do stuff for her business and I'm like... can I please stop. I have never WANTED to do this work, and I still really don't want to. She'll make these comments about "that's why you get paid the big bucks," and I'm like... no, I really don't. 

Anyway. Back to sleep, because wow this whole event kicked my butt. Oh, wait, first I must take my once every twelve hours antibiotic, cuz I sure wasn't gonna do it at 1:30 when it arrived at the house, because I am not waking up or taking pills in the middle of the night, thanks.

Losing By Winning The Wrong Argument

Aug. 18th, 2025 01:41 pm
unspeakablehorror: (Default)
[personal profile] unspeakablehorror
I think a common way to lose an argument is a way that superficially looks like winning. And that is to substitute one's real argument for one more palatable to the opponent. The problem with this is that not only does this cause the arguer to actually lose the argument with their opponent as the opponent is not accepting or even challenged with the original position, but it is actually a win for their opponent as they will tend to internalize their new argument because of the reward of greater personal power, even while they decrease support for their original argument (and not only with themselves, but with anyone who aligns with them).

It's far better to have no agreement in a stalemate than to attempt a "compromise" where the opposing side stays right where they are while you move ever closer to them.
profiterole_reads: (Nü Er Hong - Shi Yi and Hua Yu Tang)
[personal profile] profiterole_reads
A Wild and Ruined Song by Ashley Shuttleworth was amazing! It's the fourth and final book of the Hollow Star Saga, a modern story mixing fae courts and Greek mythology.

This was a splendid finale from start to end, tying up many plotlines from the previous novels and making all the protagonists shine at one point or another.

There's a new non-binary main character, major f/f and double m/m, with one of the m/m pairings being ace4aro.

Weekly proof of life: mostly media

Aug. 17th, 2025 10:56 am
umadoshi: (fancrone - china_shop)
[personal profile] umadoshi
Reading: [personal profile] scruloose and I finished listening to Artificial Condition and have started Rogue Protocol (but only barely--we've listened to however much of chapter 1 we could get in over supper on Friday before [personal profile] scruloose had to be doing something else).

We'll Prescribe You a Cat (Syou Ishida) was a very quick read and hard for me to pin down. It's a story in the vein of "~mysterious~ place provides X [often wishes granted or strange/deadly creatures, as in xxxHOLiC or Pet Shop of Horrors], but the actual cats being prescribed mostly appear to be just ("just") cats. I think this is the first in a series. Alas, I find the prose of the translation awfully flat, and can only hope I would've found the book more engaging in different hands.

I also read The City in Glass, which was my first time reading Nghi Vo. Gorgeous prose, a neat concept, and a great read overall.

Watching: We're six episodes into The Summer Hikaru Died (which is, I suppose unsurprisingly given the premise, touching on a significant existential question from Newsflesh [and from plenty of other places]). It continues to be very good. ^_^

I think we also saw an ep. of Silo sometime last week.

And on Friday I started watching Glass Heart on my own. As so often turns out to be the way, choosing it from my horrifying to-watch list was mostly random. Sometimes the choice is made simply because something is short (ten episodes, in this case) and I've seen several friends talking about it very recently. I'm six episodes in now.

I knew going in that Machida Keita is in it (who I knew only from Cherry Magic). I did not know in advance that Satoh Takeru is one of the leads, and then couldn't place him until I caved and looked up the cast. (He played Kenshin in the live-action Rurouni Kenshin movies [of which I've still only seen the first], and was impossibly good in the role. I keep meaning to rewatch the first and watch the others, despite my feelings about the franchise overall being irrevocably poisoned now by the horrible revelations about the creator. I still need to offload my set of the manga. >.<)

Weathering: The drought continues. Parts of the province are on fire, although the uncomfortably-close-to-me wildfire is under control, last I heard.

Planning: We don't have tickets yet, because there aren't yet showtimes for it, but the plan is to see Dongji Rescue late in the week. *fidgets*

Icon Drop June and July

Aug. 16th, 2025 11:48 pm
tinny: Commandant Karadec from the French series HPI, looking perplexed (as always) in rose-brown soft colors, with the text "so hot when he gets angry" (hpi_karadec hot when he gets angry)
[personal profile] tinny
Here are the icons I made in June and July - most of them are HPI, and most of them were made for [community profile] land_of_art. Hope you enjoy!

Teasers:


58 total, most of those HPI )

Comments are love - and concrit, too. <3 Take and use as many icons as you like, credit is appreciated. Texture and brush makers: here in my resource post.

Previous icon posts:

High School Survival

Aug. 16th, 2025 11:32 am
sartorias: (Default)
[personal profile] sartorias
A recent book review by [personal profile] rachelmanija reminded me of a forgotten, and now unmourned, novel I wrote somewhere between tenth and eleventh grade, about a high school that barricades itself in a "revolution" for a time. This wasthe mid-sixties, when student unrest was a news item. The escalation of the Vietnam war--the concomitant intensification of what we called the military-industrial complex--'Don't trust anyone over thirty'--no jobs for women except service (secretary, nurse, grade school teacher), and those underpaid--and meanwhile, the ferocious overcrowding caused by the world trying to squish the baby boomers into existing spaces while conveying, repeatedly, the message 'There are too many of you, you don't matter, you'll never have meaningful jobs'--you have the atmosphere.

But this high school revolution was really about the hypocrisy of teenagers using the news as theit excuse in their hierarchical battles with each other. What I was going for, in my clueless sixteen-year-old brain, was the lethal artificiality of being locked up with a few thousand of your age mates, which prepared you for. . . . what? In the workplace (or marriage, supposedly the destination for women) you weren't having to negotiate crowd of age mates suffering from the same hormonal chaos as you were.

But what came out was teenage boy violence for the sake of violence--something I knew firsthand--and the more insidious violence of mean girl crowds. My small friendship circle and I, experts at drifting into the woodwork to avoid attention, divided our gender into two groups, the indes and the pakkies. Indes--inde, for independent--were frequently the targets of the pakkies, the ones who roamed in packs, looking exactly alike in their teased behives, layers of Twiggy eye make-up, short skirts and t-strap shoes. They took over the bathrooms at every break and lunch, filling the air with hairspray and cigarette smoke, and the meanest would target any loner who dared to go in to try to pee. So you got used to holding it all day.

The novel had plenty of action, but central were the heroic indes, who of course knew how to survive, and when they didn't know what to do, they went to their retreat, the library. It all came to a satisfactory close, but I knew at the time that therre was something crucial missing, so I never typed it up and inflicted it on a New York publisher after scraping together postage from babysitting, the way I'd been doing with various other projects.

I finally gave it to a friend to rewrite, which was kinda cool, seeing what someone else would do with your story, but unsurprisingly the friend just doubled down on how great the indes were, and how stupid the rest of the kids. And so it finally went into a box, with varous other things piled on top over the years.

In culling all that old stuff, I rediscovered it. Glancing through, I wondered if there was any hope of resurrecting it as a period piece, but five minutes'perusal made it plain that it'd have to be completely gutted: the non-indes were all one type, even though on a personal level I knew better. The indes had no arc whatsoever, except in the wish fulfillment sense--they were the despised cool ones at the outset, then the heroes at the end, but Revenge of the Nerds did it better twenty years later (making me wonder if the originator of the idea was a peer). The story's potential interest would have to focus in on the pakkies, who would have to confront the very conformity they were trying to enforce. There was a possible story worth telling.

So out it went to the recycle bin. But it was fun to look back and remember the fierce pleasure I got in writing it and reinforcing the conviction that geeks are cool.

Uneven Reasoning

Aug. 15th, 2025 04:34 pm
unspeakablehorror: (Default)
[personal profile] unspeakablehorror
One thing I think is very common is for people to be very meticulous with their reasoning in some matters while disregarding it almost entirely in others. I think this is something to try to be more aware of, whether in ourselves or others.

Because sure, some people might gravitate towards one extreme or the other, but I think a lot of people end up somewhere in the middle, being very thoughtful about some things while hardly considering other things at all.

Chinese or German

Aug. 14th, 2025 10:13 pm
smmg: A circle containing the flags of the six Celtic nations, with a pair of crutches crossed over the top. The disability pride flag is in the background. (Default)
[personal profile] smmg
Can't decide whether I want to continue Chinese or start German next semester. Theoretically I could do both, but I can only do one for free per semester and I might be doing too many languages if I did both. I'm leaning towards picking Chinese I think. I'd really like to do the HSK1 exam as well. But the only Chinese class available at my level clashes with my wind band rehearsals, so maybe I'll do a semester of German instead then... Or maybe I'll get back into Italian actually, who knows.... I'm not the biggest Romance language fan but I did enjoy doing Italian.

I know I could just do Chinese on my own and wait until there's a class next year or whenever at a better time for me, but I want to be around people, I want to talk to people :(

Happy Love Your Bookshop Day!

Aug. 14th, 2025 01:33 pm
duckprintspress: (Default)
[personal profile] duckprintspress
A graphic with text that reads "Our Favorite Bookstores for Love Your Bookshop Day." Below this is a clipart of a shelf of books, showing their spines.

August 14th is Love Your Bookshop Day, and man do we have a bunch of bookstores we love! The contributors to this list are: Neo Scarlett, Rhosyn Goodfellow, Mikki Madison, E. C., Shadaras, theirprofoundbond, Nina Waters, YF Ollwell, boneturtle, Shea Sullivan, Rascal Hartley, Dei Walker, Shannon, Owl Outerbridge, Alex, Terra P. Waters, Sanne, D.V. Morse, Annabeth Lynch, and Linnea Peterson.

Europe and Canada

USA


Watch my brother's film!

Aug. 14th, 2025 08:13 pm
qian: Tiny pink head of a Katamari character (Default)
[personal profile] qian
I posted about watching my brother's first feature-length film Hungry Ghost Diner (2023) under access lock, but then found out it's available in the US/UK on Apple TV and Prime Video. I feel like my DW network has quite the concentration of people interested in c-ent, so thought I'd post publicly to draw some attention to it!

Hungry Ghost Diner is a supernatural family drama/comedy about a food truck operator, Bonnie, who has a difficult relationship with her dad, and has to balik kampung/go back to small-town Perak, where her dad runs a kopitiam/coffeehouse, when her uncle dies. Her dad is closing down the coffeehouse; it's Hungry Ghost Month and there are lots of ghosts about, and family issues that need resolution ... It's unusual among the c-ent you might have watched before in that it's Malaysian, so features multiple languages -- I think Cantonese gets the most screen-time, but Mandarin, Hakka, Hokkien, English and Malay are also spoken.

I am obviously not remotely objective, but having just finished watching it yesterday, I thought it was good and if anything I felt one might enjoy it even more if one was not related to the director lolol. It got a positive critical reception in Malaysia when it came out a couple of years ago and has won awards at film festivals, and you can see why. It's beautifully shot, quirkily scored, and very Malaysian -- the charm of the accumulated details of (Chinese) small-town Malaysia is impossible to resist if you have any connection to such places, and probably still hard to resist if you don't know Malaysia personally. I thought the cast all delivered strong performances. I was particularly taken with the lead's sweet maternal uncle (played by an actor who sadly died suddenly not too long after the film was released). The lead was impressive, too: she played the main character with directness and sincerity.

And the film's such a heartfelt homage to Malaysian Chinese culture, from the beverages ads in Bonnie's dad's kopitiam to the Potehi glove puppet performances (I found these very interesting, I'd never seen them before). I think it's a film that would interest anyone who follows me on DW, or has read my books, or is generally interested in world cinema!

Evelina again

Aug. 13th, 2025 06:50 pm
sartorias: (Default)
[personal profile] sartorias
I don't know how many times I've read this, but as my book group is meeting Saturday, I dug it back out of the box and have been rereading it. The influence on Jane Austen is clearer with each reread. Astonishing that it was considered so genteel at the time, with all the thoughtless animal cruelty as well as abuse of the characters set up as comic villains.

The hero and heroine are dull as ditchwater, of course; she is unswerving in her maidenly modesty (and beauty) and purity, and he remains at a distance, regarded by all as a cynosure, and ever ready to rescue her though they scarcely have an actual conversation. But there's too much delicacy to actually get to know one another as people; she has to know that he's a gentleman, and he has to know her virtue before the wedding bells can ring.

The fun is in the secondary characters in all their vulgarity, and in the minute descriptions of life in London in the 1770s.

I'm halfway through, maybe more to come.
unspeakablehorror: (Default)
[personal profile] unspeakablehorror
One of the frustrations I increasingly face is that I want to actually be able to directly present my arguments to people who disagree with me and get a well-thought-out critique, but formal debates and debate culture in general are antithetical to the type of engagement I am looking for. This is because these things are largely popularity contests and often don't actually evaluate the rigor of any of the arguments involved in any meaningful way. And part of this has to do with the focus of debates on winners and losers. Because sometimes everyone is arguing badly, so who cares who "wins"? And why should anyone care about winning a contest that judges sophistry a positive in one's favor?

And while I've come to deeply abhor the "walking on eggshells" approach I often see taken with disagreements where smoothing over personal relationships is prioritized over being firm in one's stances, I also abhor the substitution of personal attacks over actual analysis of the positions under discussion. I've come to wonder if the kind of discussion I'm seeking is just not something I can realistically ever expect to have.

Like the problem is that a lot of people will claim to be devoted to truth but don't care about facts or logic, and a lot of people who claim to be devoted to facts and logic *cough* Rationalists *cough* also do not care about facts or logic.

WWW Wednesday

Aug. 13th, 2025 09:46 am
duckprintspress: (Default)
[personal profile] duckprintspress

1. What are you currently reading?

The Wizard by Shi Wu. This is my first Chinese BL novel not from mainland China (it's from Taiwan). My research suggests danmei is more specific to being from China?? does anyone know for sure on that one? Anyway, I'm halfway through it and it's interesting so far, though sometimes it feels like it's trying to be so subtle that I end up missing whatever was being hinted at. I've also JUST started The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett; once I finish The Wizard this'll be my focus, but The Wizard is due in like 5 days so I gotta do it first. 

2. What have you recently finished?

  • Lip and Sword vol. 3 by Jin Shisi Chai: yeah the remaining extras were relatively unmemorable. Overall this trio was fine for what it was but nothing particularly special imo.
  • What Fresh Hell Is This? Perimenopause, Menopause, Other Indignities, and You by Heather Corinna: this was fine, but I kinda wish it'd been a bit less autobiographical and more focused on info and process. Probably just not quite the right book for what I needed, but it was still helpful.
  • Terano-kun and Kumazaki-kun by Yoriko: this was a fairly enjoyable one-shot modern HS yaoi. I appreciated the nerdy one topping and the punk bottoming.
  • Magical Girl Incident vol. 1 - 3 by Zero Akabane: interesting modern magical girl story where people's transformations are always the opposite of their assigned birth gender.
  • Witch Hat Aterlier vol. 12 - 13 by Kamome Shirahama: caught up with what's available to me in English. Looks like we're about to get more Qifrey story. I am pleased. Give me all the Qifrey. This man is a disaster and I'm here for it.
  • 天官赐福 manhua vol. 5 by 墨香铜臭: caught up to what I own in Chinese, though I'm hoping I can get vol. 6 while I'm in NYC the next few days.
  • Yona of the Dawn vol. 16 by Mizuho Kusanagi: I appear to have accidentally skipped vol. 15 
  • A Beast's Descent Into Love by Rui Asajima: another fairly enjoyable yaoi, this time fantasy.
  • Bite Marks and Fluorite by Seno Yanase: modern vampire yaoi, needed a little more room to breathe.

3. What will you be reading next?

The Tainted Cup will definitely take me through this week, when it comes to novels. For graphic novels, from my physical library, I'm hoping to read Strange Bedfellows by Ariel Slamet Ries later today, but then I'll be traveling until Monday so no more physical library reads. On Libby, only Demon Slayer/Kimetsu no Yaiba vol. 21 by Koyoharu Gotouge is due in the next 7 days, so definitely that, and also probably My Beautiful Man vol. 4 by Yuu Nagira, and then heck if I know.


duckprintspress: (Default)
[personal profile] duckprintspress
A photograph with a graphic overlay. The photograph is of a table inside a room. The table is covered in books, bookmarks, and stickers. There is a banner on the front of it that says "we print diversity DUCK PRINTS PRESS www.duckprintspress.com" and shows a brown and white duck. The graphic overlaid has two people with flame for hair, both wearing eye masks, one wearing a flower crown in the colors of the trans pride flag. This person holds a sign that says RESIST. Text beside the people reads "Flame Con created by GEEKS OUT August 16 & 17 flamecon.org."

This weekend – August 16 and 17 – in New York City at the Sheraton Times Square on 53rd Street is Flame Con, the largest LGBTQIA+ fandom convention in the world! There are panels, dozens of vendors (including yours truly!), special guests, and much more. If you’re already planning to come, I hope to see you there, and if you weren’t yet planning to – it’s not too late to register!




(no subject)

Aug. 11th, 2025 01:52 pm
nundinae: michiru, mirror (Default)
[personal profile] nundinae
Stuff to think about! Vincenzo Latronico on the imperialism-like dominance of English-language literature
Primacy of English and the US/UK cultural hegemony is something I've mostly seen discussed in academic spaces, with colleagues who deal with topics that have little to do with US or UK being frequently dismissed by editors with claims of "irrelevance" (of course some parts of Europe are less peripheral than others). Lorenzo seems to be presenting an interesting and fascinating synthesis.
Also, I was familiar with the Minae Mizumura quote before. Maybe I'm overidentifying with being peripheral, but honestly, regretting the choice of your first language as you first language, and regretting not having given up that language in favour of English is just about the most tragic and heart-breaking thing I can at all imagine. I do real a lot in English, but I also read in other languages, and every time I am deprived of one of them for too long, I'm feeling the deepest existential angst! Who are we but the words that make us? 

Re: the American literary claims to the universalism of the American experience - all human experience has obviously the potential to be universal, but at the same time my American favourites have always been the very particular ones. The Legacy of Q was especially fascinating, because Helene Hanff wrote about her New York, and her experience in the New York theatre (and what a pity that she didn't write more about it!). 
I've also never liked David Foster Wallace. Maybe that's that. 

It's a pity that Latronico's book is about authenticity in the age of social media, as this is one of the least interesting things I can imagine. 

Profile

三人行,必有我师(焉)

August 2025

S M T W T F S
      1 2
3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 181920212223
24252627282930
31      

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Aug. 19th, 2025 07:48 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios