Yesterday we ran All The Errands! We made ten or so stops, all told, which is a pretty good outcome; there were two places on my list that we ultimately opted against, because it was really quite a lot (and one of the two is a stop ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
scruloose can make pretty easily when coming home from work).
The critical thing, of course, is that I did indeed get the lemon ice cream. I'd initially decided to go all in and get the lemon sundae, which IIRC also involved lemon curd sauce (I'm pretty sure that was the phrasing, and I don't really know why "curd sauce") and some sort of crunchy lemony thing, but one or both of those toppings was out of stock, so the sundae wasn't on offer.
The ice cream itself was tasty and I'm glad to have gotten it, but I didn't fall in love. (Just as well, really, since it was a temporary thing. I'm not good at ephemeral joys.) The flavor wasn't terribly intense, I think? But it was a delicious thing on a hot day.
The absolutely ridiculous thing I bought was this Hallowe'en figure from Michael's, which I saw go by on Bluesky a few days ago and for which I felt an immediate mighty need. It's very small and very inexpensive and is genuinely cute in person. It's presumably meant to be a Sphynx cat, but still looks enough like Sinha that I feel gleeful just looking at it. It may have to be a bit of year-round decor. ( other things that came home )
( and lo, we have a tomato plant! And...a rodent in the garden? o_o )
scruloose can make pretty easily when coming home from work).The critical thing, of course, is that I did indeed get the lemon ice cream. I'd initially decided to go all in and get the lemon sundae, which IIRC also involved lemon curd sauce (I'm pretty sure that was the phrasing, and I don't really know why "curd sauce") and some sort of crunchy lemony thing, but one or both of those toppings was out of stock, so the sundae wasn't on offer.
The ice cream itself was tasty and I'm glad to have gotten it, but I didn't fall in love. (Just as well, really, since it was a temporary thing. I'm not good at ephemeral joys.) The flavor wasn't terribly intense, I think? But it was a delicious thing on a hot day.
The absolutely ridiculous thing I bought was this Hallowe'en figure from Michael's, which I saw go by on Bluesky a few days ago and for which I felt an immediate mighty need. It's very small and very inexpensive and is genuinely cute in person. It's presumably meant to be a Sphynx cat, but still looks enough like Sinha that I feel gleeful just looking at it. It may have to be a bit of year-round decor. ( other things that came home )
( and lo, we have a tomato plant! And...a rodent in the garden? o_o )
- Mood:
tired
Because I felt like it, I wrote up a few quick tutorials for icons that were either difficult or unusual for me this year, where I think writing it up might help me reproduce the effect and be enjoyable to read for others. Here are the first two. I hope you like them!
These icons:
This is the cap (open or download the image to see at full size):
1. I used this texture:
2. and applied a motion blur filter with an angle of (more or less) -15 degrees and a distance of 19 pixels:
-> 
3. and desaturated it:
-> 
4. then I masked the two subjects out of the original cap and sharpened them and put them above the background:
+ 
-> 
5. they were too dark, so I duplicated them and set the second layer to Linear Dodge (Add) (100% because they were *that* dark):
->
6. they were still too dark, so I duplicated the layer again, inverted it (black background only for visualization purposes), and set it to Soft Light 100%:
-> 
Now they're light enough not to get overshadowed by the background! \o/
7. On to the text. The color is a light, almost grey shade of blue (#a0adb5) that I picked out of the background, and the font is Tarzan at 10pt with a kerning of 180 (black background only for visualization purposes):
8. Then I distorted the layer with the wave function. For that you have to rasterize the layer. (I duplicated it so I would still have the text layer later. The original text layer I set to invisible.) I have no idea what settings I used, I usually click randomize until I like the result:
-> 
-> 
I put the distorted text layer behind the subjects.
9. I still thought it was too dark, so I took this texture by dragonslayer, desaturated it, and set it to Hard Light 32% above all other layers:
-> 
-> 
10. Now for the final touch of the watery look, I wanted some water effects in front of them, too, so I painted a few lines with the same color I used for the font into an empty layer (black just for visualization), and masked away some of it in front of their skin so it wouldn't turn blue:
11. I duplicated that painted layer and stretched it out (I usually use Free Transform for everything):
12. I set the first one to Color 100% and the second one to Color Dodge 26%, to get the effect of a water ripple reflecting on their bodies, and that's it! Final layer palette and result:
-
The important part in this icon is to make the person stand out and to clean up the background. I always make sure not to leave any distracting details in icons.
This is the cap of Fitz sleepwalking through St Pierre in his pyjama pants (open or download the image to see at full size):
1. First I cropped it so he's in the middle:
2. Then I removed the raised flower bed (or whatever that is) in the lower left corner. I don't remember how exactly I did this, but I suspect I painted over it with the clone brush with the empty street from his other side:
3. Then I made him stand out more by masking away everything apart from his body. As you can tell I just did this haphazardly with a small hard brush. Then I set this layer to Linear Dodge (Add) 100% :
-> 
4. I thought his pants were still too dark, so I copied the layer again and removed the mask for his upper body. I set this to Linear Dodge (Add) 100% as well:
-> 
Yay, now he's lighter than the background!
5. Now for coloring. I wanted the background to be more uniform and also warmer. So I added a plain brown color layer (#9a725a) on Overlay 100%. I put this layer in front of the background layers but behind the subject layers from steps 4/5:
-> 
6. I liked the way the street lights illuminate the scene from the far back, so I added more colors to enhance this (but not too much, he has to stay in focus). The colors are yellow on top (#ffcf16) and orange on the bottom (#ff8937). The middle is transparent - I only added a white background here to make it easier to see for the tutorial. I used the same mask I had already made for his body, just inverted, so his body wouldn't get affected by the colors. The layer is then set to Multiply 100%:
+ 
-> 
7. I thought he still wasn't standing out well enough yet, so I added a bit of black behind him. I used the same mask as before and set it to Multiply 63%:
+
-> 
8. Textwork! I couldn't think of anything good to say, so I just added the words "sleep" and "walk". I put each on their own layer. I used the font Franklin Gothic Condensed BT at 18 and 12 pixels, the colors are yellow (#ffde00) and orange(#ff6600). I set both layers to Color Dodge, around 70% opacity:
-> 
9. I thought the top half could also use some text, so I duplicated the text layers and moved them around. I didn't change size or color. I set those three all to Color Dodge 61%:
-> 
I then decided that the text at the top wasn't well readable and detracted from the depth of the street background, so I did not use that layer group after all. So I set those to invisible and called it done! Final layers and result:
-
I enjoyed writing these up, I hope you enjoy reading them! <3
These icons:
icon one - Lone Star icon with water effect
This is the cap (open or download the image to see at full size):
1. I used this texture:
2. and applied a motion blur filter with an angle of (more or less) -15 degrees and a distance of 19 pixels:
-> 3. and desaturated it:
-> 4. then I masked the two subjects out of the original cap and sharpened them and put them above the background:
+ -> 5. they were too dark, so I duplicated them and set the second layer to Linear Dodge (Add) (100% because they were *that* dark):
->
6. they were still too dark, so I duplicated the layer again, inverted it (black background only for visualization purposes), and set it to Soft Light 100%:
-> Now they're light enough not to get overshadowed by the background! \o/
7. On to the text. The color is a light, almost grey shade of blue (#a0adb5) that I picked out of the background, and the font is Tarzan at 10pt with a kerning of 180 (black background only for visualization purposes):
8. Then I distorted the layer with the wave function. For that you have to rasterize the layer. (I duplicated it so I would still have the text layer later. The original text layer I set to invisible.) I have no idea what settings I used, I usually click randomize until I like the result:
-> -> I put the distorted text layer behind the subjects.
9. I still thought it was too dark, so I took this texture by dragonslayer, desaturated it, and set it to Hard Light 32% above all other layers:
-> -> 10. Now for the final touch of the watery look, I wanted some water effects in front of them, too, so I painted a few lines with the same color I used for the font into an empty layer (black just for visualization), and masked away some of it in front of their skin so it wouldn't turn blue:
11. I duplicated that painted layer and stretched it out (I usually use Free Transform for everything):
12. I set the first one to Color 100% and the second one to Color Dodge 26%, to get the effect of a water ripple reflecting on their bodies, and that's it! Final layer palette and result:
- icon two - sleepwalking Fitz
The important part in this icon is to make the person stand out and to clean up the background. I always make sure not to leave any distracting details in icons.
This is the cap of Fitz sleepwalking through St Pierre in his pyjama pants (open or download the image to see at full size):
1. First I cropped it so he's in the middle:
2. Then I removed the raised flower bed (or whatever that is) in the lower left corner. I don't remember how exactly I did this, but I suspect I painted over it with the clone brush with the empty street from his other side:
3. Then I made him stand out more by masking away everything apart from his body. As you can tell I just did this haphazardly with a small hard brush. Then I set this layer to Linear Dodge (Add) 100% :
-> 4. I thought his pants were still too dark, so I copied the layer again and removed the mask for his upper body. I set this to Linear Dodge (Add) 100% as well:
-> Yay, now he's lighter than the background!
5. Now for coloring. I wanted the background to be more uniform and also warmer. So I added a plain brown color layer (#9a725a) on Overlay 100%. I put this layer in front of the background layers but behind the subject layers from steps 4/5:
-> 6. I liked the way the street lights illuminate the scene from the far back, so I added more colors to enhance this (but not too much, he has to stay in focus). The colors are yellow on top (#ffcf16) and orange on the bottom (#ff8937). The middle is transparent - I only added a white background here to make it easier to see for the tutorial. I used the same mask I had already made for his body, just inverted, so his body wouldn't get affected by the colors. The layer is then set to Multiply 100%:
+
->
7. I thought he still wasn't standing out well enough yet, so I added a bit of black behind him. I used the same mask as before and set it to Multiply 63%:
+
->
8. Textwork! I couldn't think of anything good to say, so I just added the words "sleep" and "walk". I put each on their own layer. I used the font Franklin Gothic Condensed BT at 18 and 12 pixels, the colors are yellow (#ffde00) and orange(#ff6600). I set both layers to Color Dodge, around 70% opacity:
-> 9. I thought the top half could also use some text, so I duplicated the text layers and moved them around. I didn't change size or color. I set those three all to Color Dodge 61%:
-> I then decided that the text at the top wasn't well readable and detracted from the depth of the street background, so I did not use that layer group after all. So I set those to invisible and called it done! Final layers and result:
- I enjoyed writing these up, I hope you enjoy reading them! <3
Unfortunately some stuff came up and I wasn't able to catch any of DC Slash's online convention this weekend. I am looking forward to checking out the vid premieres once they're posted!
Reading: I finished both of the non-fiction titles I was reading in last week's roundup. I'd somehow thought Burn It Down would shine a spotlight more strongly on more specific shows than it did, but it was an interesting read nonetheless, if mostly grimly unsurprising.
scruloose and I are now maybe two-thirds through the All Systems Red audiobook.
Other than that, I read Antonia Hodgson's The Raven Scholar, which went on sale in ebook right after I heard it mentioned by a couple of different people. (It may still be on sale! Worth checking!) It was a really good read that surprised me quite a few times via some great redirects. The main downside is that it's very recent and is the first of a...trilogy, I think? Hope I'll be able to remember what happened in this book, because it was a LOT. (Also, I assume this was a deliberate style choice, but it's rather a cascade of comma splices.)
I've just barely started Sky on Fire, E.K. Johnston's second book of the summer. In the leadup to its release I repeatedly forgot and was reminded that it's a sequel to Aetherbound, which I read when it came out in 2021. In this case my memory is a bit fuzzy on what came before, but this book is set a fair bit later and (I think) recapped the major plot outcomes from Aetherbound, so here's hoping I do okay! ^_^ (A definite downside to ebooks--if I had a hard copy I could pretty easily flip through it, but I find that a huge pain with ebooks, and between that and how infrequently I reread anything, sequels can be tricky for me. >.<)
Watching: Minimal.scruloose and I watched episode 1 of the The Summer Hikaru Died anime, which is only a few episodes along so far. I know almost nothing about the manga (and don't know how long [this season of?] the anime is expected to be or how faithful it is so far), but ep. 1 seemed like a good start.
Cooking/Baking: Berries continue to be gloriously available, and I hear the first early peaches have been glimpsed in at least one of the local-produce stores. (It's so lovely to have several of those!) We once again made it to the corner market and came home with raspberries, blueberries, and cherries; strawberries are still around, and I enjoy them, but I don't love them the way I love raspberries and I find them harder than blueberries to eat quickly enough.
Mid-week we made Smitten Kitchen's Strawberry Summer Sheet Cake to use up a whole heap of strawberries and froze most of the cake (*ritual but intensely heartfelt grumble about needing to eke it out in the name of sugar intake etc.*); the slices we took out to thaw this afternoon are the first previously-frozen ones, so we'll see how it does with this treatment.
Planning: It's been a good chunk of time since the last time we both took the day off to run errands on a weekday, so we're planning to do that in a couple of days. Apparently the day we've chosen is going to be a scorcher (which is a bit awkward since, while we've booked a car for the erranding, AC in vehicles usually nauseates me pretty badly but will be necessary so we don't completely melt. Here's hoping proactive gravol does the trick). (Could we do it another day? Well...yes. But the core inspiration for doing it at all is that there's a local ice creamery that does weekly feature flavors and has legendary lineups, and I've never actually had their ice cream and this week's flavor is lemon. Hopefully going midday on a weekday will mean the line isn't too horrendous when we go on lemon's final day in rotation.)
scruloose and I are now maybe two-thirds through the All Systems Red audiobook.Other than that, I read Antonia Hodgson's The Raven Scholar, which went on sale in ebook right after I heard it mentioned by a couple of different people. (It may still be on sale! Worth checking!) It was a really good read that surprised me quite a few times via some great redirects. The main downside is that it's very recent and is the first of a...trilogy, I think? Hope I'll be able to remember what happened in this book, because it was a LOT. (Also, I assume this was a deliberate style choice, but it's rather a cascade of comma splices.)
I've just barely started Sky on Fire, E.K. Johnston's second book of the summer. In the leadup to its release I repeatedly forgot and was reminded that it's a sequel to Aetherbound, which I read when it came out in 2021. In this case my memory is a bit fuzzy on what came before, but this book is set a fair bit later and (I think) recapped the major plot outcomes from Aetherbound, so here's hoping I do okay! ^_^ (A definite downside to ebooks--if I had a hard copy I could pretty easily flip through it, but I find that a huge pain with ebooks, and between that and how infrequently I reread anything, sequels can be tricky for me. >.<)
Watching: Minimal.
scruloose and I watched episode 1 of the The Summer Hikaru Died anime, which is only a few episodes along so far. I know almost nothing about the manga (and don't know how long [this season of?] the anime is expected to be or how faithful it is so far), but ep. 1 seemed like a good start.Cooking/Baking: Berries continue to be gloriously available, and I hear the first early peaches have been glimpsed in at least one of the local-produce stores. (It's so lovely to have several of those!) We once again made it to the corner market and came home with raspberries, blueberries, and cherries; strawberries are still around, and I enjoy them, but I don't love them the way I love raspberries and I find them harder than blueberries to eat quickly enough.
Mid-week we made Smitten Kitchen's Strawberry Summer Sheet Cake to use up a whole heap of strawberries and froze most of the cake (*ritual but intensely heartfelt grumble about needing to eke it out in the name of sugar intake etc.*); the slices we took out to thaw this afternoon are the first previously-frozen ones, so we'll see how it does with this treatment.
Planning: It's been a good chunk of time since the last time we both took the day off to run errands on a weekday, so we're planning to do that in a couple of days. Apparently the day we've chosen is going to be a scorcher (which is a bit awkward since, while we've booked a car for the erranding, AC in vehicles usually nauseates me pretty badly but will be necessary so we don't completely melt. Here's hoping proactive gravol does the trick). (Could we do it another day? Well...yes. But the core inspiration for doing it at all is that there's a local ice creamery that does weekly feature flavors and has legendary lineups, and I've never actually had their ice cream and this week's flavor is lemon. Hopefully going midday on a weekday will mean the line isn't too horrendous when we go on lemon's final day in rotation.)
- Music:Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre Soundtrack
- Mood:
okay
Reading: Mostly non-fiction last week, oddly. Still slowly reading through An Everlasting Meal, as well as flipping through a couple of new cookbooks in hard copy*. I also started reading Maureen Ryan's Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood.
As for fiction, I started--brace yourself--listening to an audiobook. I don't really do audio formats at all! Butscruloose has never read Murderbot, and the audiobooks seem to be WIDELY beloved, so I thought maybe we could follow Kas and Ginny's example and listen to one or more of those together. So I borrowed All Systems Red from Hoopla (another first for me), and yesterday we listened to the first three chapters or so. (I highly doubt I'm going to take up non-music audio media in any meaningful way, but who knows? Three chapters was definitely not enough to make it stop feeling weird, though.)
*A small order from Book Outlet contained What Goes with What: 100 Recipes, 20 Charts, Endless Possibilities (Julia Turshen); Half the Sugar, All the Love: 100 Easy, Low-Sugar Recipes for Every Meal of the Day (Jennifer Tyler Lee and Anisha Patel), which crossed my radar early on in the "must keep an eye on blood sugar" process and stuck because it doesn't use any artificial sweeteners (since I've never met one I didn't hate); Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End; and the first and third installments of the Murderbot Diaries consolidated editions, which means I now own books 1, 2, 6, and 7 in hard copy.
Not sure if I'll just keep an eye out for the second volume to turn up there too or if I'll cave and just buy it. I'm glad there's a release that combines novellas! But I'm also eyeing the hard copy option for Network Effect and wondering if there's going to be a release of it that matches this set. I like all the original covers, but I also like my physical books to match. (Does anyone know if there's any plan for a matching rerelease?)
(Am I still grumpy that--unless something's changed?--it seems like the first three of Wells' Raksura books got released in mass market paperbacks, which I pounced on because that's my preferred format, but the fourth and fifth didn't? YES.)
Cooking/Baking: Mid-week,scruloose picked up some strawberries that tasted and looked fine but had a slightly odd texture (kind of...mushy? But nothing was visibly wrong?), so we turned most of them into this Buttermilk Blueberry Strawberry Breakfast Cake. It was tasty enough, but not so tasty that I immediately understood why it's one of the two most popular recipes on the site; that said, in addition to swapping the berries, we didn't have fresh lemon zest on hand and used the granulated peel from Silk Road (and also, my impression is that while blueberry and lemon are an iconic flavor pairing, that's not true of strawberry and lemon) and did the vinegar-in-milk substitution for buttermilk. So who knows.
Yesterdayscruloose had to go downtown to one of the large markets because that's the only place our usual meat guy vends and we'd placed a fairly large order (sadly, to replace one from a few weeks ago that met a tragic end by not getting put into the freezer soon enough). But en route, they stopped at the little corner market and got two containers each of raspberries, strawberries, and blueberries, plus some new potatoes. So now we are SWIMMING in berries, which is a wonderful state of affairs. I imagine there's no way we'll make it through all of them by just eating them straight, so we'll see what we wind up doing.
As for fiction, I started--brace yourself--listening to an audiobook. I don't really do audio formats at all! But
scruloose has never read Murderbot, and the audiobooks seem to be WIDELY beloved, so I thought maybe we could follow Kas and Ginny's example and listen to one or more of those together. So I borrowed All Systems Red from Hoopla (another first for me), and yesterday we listened to the first three chapters or so. (I highly doubt I'm going to take up non-music audio media in any meaningful way, but who knows? Three chapters was definitely not enough to make it stop feeling weird, though.)*A small order from Book Outlet contained What Goes with What: 100 Recipes, 20 Charts, Endless Possibilities (Julia Turshen); Half the Sugar, All the Love: 100 Easy, Low-Sugar Recipes for Every Meal of the Day (Jennifer Tyler Lee and Anisha Patel), which crossed my radar early on in the "must keep an eye on blood sugar" process and stuck because it doesn't use any artificial sweeteners (since I've never met one I didn't hate); Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End; and the first and third installments of the Murderbot Diaries consolidated editions, which means I now own books 1, 2, 6, and 7 in hard copy.
Not sure if I'll just keep an eye out for the second volume to turn up there too or if I'll cave and just buy it. I'm glad there's a release that combines novellas! But I'm also eyeing the hard copy option for Network Effect and wondering if there's going to be a release of it that matches this set. I like all the original covers, but I also like my physical books to match. (Does anyone know if there's any plan for a matching rerelease?)
(Am I still grumpy that--unless something's changed?--it seems like the first three of Wells' Raksura books got released in mass market paperbacks, which I pounced on because that's my preferred format, but the fourth and fifth didn't? YES.)
Cooking/Baking: Mid-week,
scruloose picked up some strawberries that tasted and looked fine but had a slightly odd texture (kind of...mushy? But nothing was visibly wrong?), so we turned most of them into this Buttermilk Yesterday
scruloose had to go downtown to one of the large markets because that's the only place our usual meat guy vends and we'd placed a fairly large order (sadly, to replace one from a few weeks ago that met a tragic end by not getting put into the freezer soon enough). But en route, they stopped at the little corner market and got two containers each of raspberries, strawberries, and blueberries, plus some new potatoes. So now we are SWIMMING in berries, which is a wonderful state of affairs. I imagine there's no way we'll make it through all of them by just eating them straight, so we'll see what we wind up doing.- Mood:
sleepy
Welp, at last I have fallen into the DMBJ hole. As usual, the h/c got me, then the actors, then the podfics.
One podficcer in particular has incredible pieces and I was finally able to draw fanart for her fic & podfic, Tongues (Wu Xie/Hei Xiazi, 2k, rated Explicit). It's a gorgeous story stet right before Sand Sea, as Wu Xie gets lost in snake venom, his mind spiraling and loosing its grip on his sense of self, which is shown as his language-switching unconsciously. Hei Xiazi rouses him back out of it via sex and connecting with him. It is a stellar written and audio work.
My piece is:
[Fanart] Forked tongues (1 illustration, 9 close-ups) by Mo_on_raccoon
Fandom: 沙海 | Tomb of the Sea (TV), 盗墓笔记 - 南派三叔 | The Grave Robbers' Chronicles - Xu Lei
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Hei Xia Zi/Wu Xie (DMBJ Series)
Characters: Wu Xie (DMBJ Series), Hei Xia Zi (DMBJ Series)
Additional Tags: Fanart, Hurt/Comfort, Love Bites, Altered Mental States, Implied Wu Xie/Snakes, Complicated Relationships, Watercolours, Inspired by Podfic
Summary:
( Work in progress and chatter (9 pictures) )
( Final piece and details (1 large picture, 6 close-ups )
One podficcer in particular has incredible pieces and I was finally able to draw fanart for her fic & podfic, Tongues (Wu Xie/Hei Xiazi, 2k, rated Explicit). It's a gorgeous story stet right before Sand Sea, as Wu Xie gets lost in snake venom, his mind spiraling and loosing its grip on his sense of self, which is shown as his language-switching unconsciously. Hei Xiazi rouses him back out of it via sex and connecting with him. It is a stellar written and audio work.
My piece is:
[Fanart] Forked tongues (1 illustration, 9 close-ups) by Mo_on_raccoon
Fandom: 沙海 | Tomb of the Sea (TV), 盗墓笔记 - 南派三叔 | The Grave Robbers' Chronicles - Xu Lei
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Hei Xia Zi/Wu Xie (DMBJ Series)
Characters: Wu Xie (DMBJ Series), Hei Xia Zi (DMBJ Series)
Additional Tags: Fanart, Hurt/Comfort, Love Bites, Altered Mental States, Implied Wu Xie/Snakes, Complicated Relationships, Watercolours, Inspired by Podfic
Summary:
Fanart of Thimblerig's gorgeous fic-podfic, Tongues. Set right before Sand Sea, as Wu Xie spirals and coils.
Watercolours, coloured pencils and white gouache, 9 x 12 in.
( Work in progress and chatter (9 pictures) )
( Final piece and details (1 large picture, 6 close-ups )
TV ongoing
There was one more ep of HPI in June. I wasn't sure whether I enjoyed it at first, it takes a while to grow on you, and it ends on a cliffhanger, too. I think they could have moved faster in this last ep, nothing at all moved forward in it, it just heightened the tension. The show is usually better at pacing than this. And now we have to wait until September for the final four eps. At least there's a smallish fandom on AO3 with very good authors who will tide us all over, I'm sure. Even one or two who write in English. \o/
I finished Murderbot. I didn't enjoy the middle episodes as much as the previous three. I didn't hate them, either, but they were definitely farther away from the book, and not in a way that made me go "oh yes, this makes sense". I had difficulty finding the parallels and figuring out why they changed so much in the first place. I did enjoy the Sanctuary Moon self-insert, and hated the added sexual harassment (of Murderbot). All the Murderbot emotional things were good, except for when they intersected with the romance/sex aspects. By ep 6 I really enjoyed it again right through the end. Either I'd gotten used to the many changes by then or they were indeed getting more logial, idk? I thought it had great character development, good novel-divergent choices in service of telling us more about Murderbot's character, and they really stuck the landing. They gave the character of Gurathin in particular more of a bond with Murderbot than I remember from the novellas, but that was definitely one of the choices I enjoyed. You can watch it on Apple or where I live it's on Disney+.
Finally finished the Parallel World watchalong. By the end, it got more and more absurd, trying to squish its remaining plot into the last few episodes, with important plot points happening off-screen and mentioned off-hand, oh, and a two-year time skip. The last ep was even more weirdly paced than the previous ones, and almost none of it made any sense. We're glad we're done with it. We'll start watching When A Snail Falls In Love in July, which is a rewatch for me. I'm interested in how well it holds up compared to when I first watched it seven years ago. My other watchalong has finished HPI (s4 - I'm still in the process of translating the subs for s5), and started North of North. Instant hit, as I expected. <3
I watched two more eps of Love Scout (which I'd started ages ago, in March), the kdrama about a workaholic female boss and her male secretary - and I think I should stop. The main couple is good, but lots of the rest of the show is annoying me. The pacing is very slow in places, both leads have other romantic interests that bother me, and overall it's just not doing what I want it to do. Mostly I just went back to it because I was so tired I couldn't concentrate on anything else.
TV new
I tried the first few minutes of Dept Q, because several people on
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tv_talk mentioned it, but I think it's too dark for me. I might try again at some later point.I also watched part of the first episode of Phineas and Ferb, a new season came out last week, after a break of 13 years(!). I have never watched this in English before (only ever dubbed on TV), so that'll be a change I'll have to get used to.
I watched all of The Residence within three weeks. It's not something I'd get fannish about, but the humor was very much up my alley and I enjoyed it. It had a weird thing where five minutes into every episode they'd do a recap of the things that had *just* happened. Not even in previous episodes, just in that same episode! I thought it was just cdramas that did weird unnecessary flashback things, but that was noticeably weird, too. But on the whole, the show is a solid rec. It's a homage to old detective stories, with a beautifully eccentric detective played perfectly by Uzo Aduba, and just overall very funny and very well cast. It's on Netflix.
Lastly, I watched the first few eps of The First Night With The Duke, which is a transmigration kdrama with Ok Taecyeon - he's the duke who falls in love with a secondary character instead of the 'planned' female lead, and the transmigrated fan first tries to fix the narrative and then of course falls in love with him, too. Taecyeon is the only reason I've watched even a few eps of it. It's not terrible, but also not really my thing, and of course the historic kdrama costumes don't do anyone any favors, not even Taecyeon. Not all episodes have aired yet, it's on viki. Im really looking forward to his BL, which is slated for August, if they don't push it back, so that's not too long now.
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