ase

tinny

Aaaand another one! We're on round 19 at

celebrity20in20 and I picked Wu Lei again. Surprise. I enjoyed making these, I hope you like 'em.

Teasers:

( 20+7 icons of Wu Lei )

I love comments, and if you have concrit for me, I'm open for that, too. All my icons are free to take and use, credit is appreciated. The list of makers whose textures and brushes I like to use is here in my resource post.

Previous icon posts:

duckprintspress

1. What are you currently reading?

The Apothecary Diaries vol. 2 (LN) by Natsu Hyuuga: the more Apothecary Diaries I engage with across adaptations, the more I'm starting to think that the problem here is just... I don't actually like Maomao very much, and I also think it irks me (not the book's fault) how often I see her touted as such ~excellent~ autism rep and how relatable she is. I know the folks saying that are ultimately talking about themselves but idk I really really really don't find her relatable. It comes back to: I want to see these characters grow and change, especially Maomao, and them not doing so is annoying to me. It keeps hovering right on the edge of "why am I still reading it if I don't like it that much?" because I DO like it enough to keep reading, but only barely. Idk.
The World We Make by N. K. Jemisin: I'm stalled. Ostensibly it's because I have three novels on Libby rn and they're gonna come due, whereas this I own and it can wait, but also I really didn't like multiple things about the previous chapter, and with the amount of book left I have no idea how everything that's been introduced can possibly be satisfactorily resolved. All in all, this has felt more like the idea of a book instead of an actual book. It's like how people will be like "fanfic authors, did you know, you don't have to write the whole thing, you actually can just skip to all the parts you're excited for and leave the rest out and it's okay because this is all for fun!" and that's what it feels like happened to the book except while I'll tolerate it in a fanfic it really doesn't work in a novel. It's disappointing, because I thought the first one was much stronger than this.
盗墓笔记 vol. 2 by 南派三叔: keeping at it, tho I'm behind my page-a-day pace. Oh well.

2. What have you recently finished reading?

You can tell I wasn't enjoying my novel reads much cause I read so much manga.

Cherry Magic! Thirty Years of Virginity Can Make You a Wizard?! vol. 15 by Yuu Toyota
Dandadan vol. 8 by Yukinobu Tatsu
My Love Mix-Up! vol. 8 and 9 by Aruko: finally got the last two volumes of this through Libby. The amnesia fake out in vol. 9 nearly made me furious enough to rage quit, I'm glad it was a fake out. The pacing on vol. 9 still felt off, tho, but oh well. A cute series, all in all.
SHWD episode 1 by sono.N: modern paranormal, GL. This was kinda a mess, there kept being logical leaps between panels and the way it talked about women in the workplace was just weird. If the episodes were longer I'd probably not bother keeping on but it's only 4 episodes long and each episode is only about 40 pages so I guess I'll read at least one more.
Sakamoto Days vol. 18 by Yuto Suzuki
Cute but Not Cute by Senmu Sakishita: modern BL. Two unpleasant people making each other less pleasant. Y'all know I like toxic but this was so meh.
The White and Blue Between Us by Kiyuhiko: modern BL. Another mediocre BL, premised on one character lying to the other to break up with him and then their reunion years later. Random pointless rape for no reason? This all seemed so pointless and bad.
Star and Hedgehog by Nayuta Nago: modern BL. After reading the other two, this was a breath of fresh air. Very cute, likeable characters, good chemistry.
Kase-san and Bento (Kase-san vol. 2) by Hiromi Takashima: more jealousy, more insecurity, the constant circling back to these themes is so annoying.
Murderous Lewellyn's Candlelit Dinner manhwa vol. 2 to 6 by Sumnagi: okay so I went to the library yesterday, and was like !!!! cause they had vol 2 and 3 and I'd really liked vol 1 when I read it last summer, and so I read those, and nope couldn't stop, pirated the rest, and oh dayum. I might have a new obsession. They're such precious fucked up hurt/comfort murder beans, I love them.

3. What will you be reading next?

Novels: I have Apothecary Diaries vol. 2 and 3 and The Baker Thief by Claudie Arseneault (which I started last month) on Libby, so I gotta read those. (...when I went to check Libby I discovered my hold of A Drop of Corruption has also come through so now four, FOUR novels due imminently on Libby, hahaaaaa)

Graphic Novels (Physical): I haven't actually put my new library loans in a coherent pile yet so I'm not sure, but I'm most excited about Spy x Family vol. 15 so odds are that'll be next.

Graphic Novels (Libby): A Tropical Fish Yearns for Snow vol. 4 by Makoto Hagino is due in 4 days, and Flip by Ngozi Ukazu is due in five days, so. Definitely those, at least.

conuly

and god, I love her so much. She truly is a sweet and gentle kitty.

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james_davis_nicoll

What dark motive leads a successful teen comedian who has vowed never to date anyone less funny than her to help an unfunny but otherwise personable young man work on his comedic skills?

Someone Hertz, volume 1 by Ei Yamano (Translated by David Evely)

asakiyume

I've been reading Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo because it was our book group book. Usually I can take or leave (or prefer to leave) our book group books, but this one I expected I'd like, because I loved Acevedo's The Poet X (ended up teaching that one in the jail). And I am liking it! So much that although the book group date came and went, I've kept on reading it because I want to finish it.

It's about two generations of Dominican women, whose life stories we get in bits and pieces around the occasion of a living wake that one of them is throwing for herself. The characters, their lives, the language--it's all so vivid. I marked this, one woman (older generation) talking about her older sister:

The person I've hugged most in the world, beside my own offspring, has been Flor. It was she who carried me on her hip. As a child, hers was the first body I remember vining around, the way climbing plants claim homes.

Also, the women all have gifts. One has dreams that foretell when someone will die. Another can tell if someone is lying. Another can salsa like nobody's business. And one has an alpha vagina ;-)

( cut for frank talk about down-there )

I've been surprised and delighted by how much I'm enjoying this character's thoughts and experiences with her gift. The book is overall super sensual and VERY sex positive.

I'm also still reading and enjoying Breath, Warmth, and Dream, by Zig Zag Claybourne, but I had to put it aside to read this one. But this one is nearly done, and Breath, Warmth, and Dream is very easy to fall back into.

rionaleonhart

A fourth batch of fills for the

threesentenceficathon! I continue to mainly write for The Goes Wrong Show, with one fill for something else per roundup, in a desperate effort to prove I'm still capable of thinking about other things.

( Merlin (BBC), Merlin, 50 words, prompt: 1,026 years of waiting. )

( Assorted ficlets for the Goes Wrong Show, mainly Chris and Robert, 900 words total. )

It's tricky to write Goes Wrong fanfiction because the entirety of canon consists of the characters putting on plays, making it challenging to envision these characters in any situation other than 'putting on a play'. Not that that's going to keep me from writing, apparently.

princessofgeeks

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

vass

Books
Finished Evelyn Araluen's The Rot, which was, as mentioned last week, very good indeed.

Reading KC Davis' How To Keep House While Drowning and Victoria Goddard's Plum Duff.

Tech
Still working the phone side of my tech problems: prolonged backup of All The Things onto a different external drive. But I did also run Slay the Spire on my desktop once, just to confirm whether that would cause it to shut down: it did not. But of course it's less resource-hungry than Hollow Knight.

Garden
Three more ripe tomatoes. I tried to plant some basil, but it didn't survive the heat.

Cats
Ash's nose looking good. Both cats coping with the heat as well as can be expected, i.e. better than I am but still largely horizontal.

Nature
I am a delicate flower and do not like hot weather. This is a problem at this time of year. Slight understatement. But only slight. (My part of the state is not the worst-off. Our highs are low 40s, not high 40s. And I have aircon at home and don't have to go out. It's still bad, and I do have medical conditions that make me more sensitive to heat.)
Also I sustained mosquito bites on my arms while doing my nightly "try to keep the plants alive" water, and am very itchy, which at least has the advantage of being a small problem to grumble about without the undercurrent of constant dread.

Current Events
Australia Day bringing out the racists. Some unmitigated arsehole threw a bomb at an Indigenous elder at one of the Survival Day protests. I didn't protest: couldn't manage the logistics of getting to a protest.
Watching the events in Minnesota and thinking of you all.

conuly

Do you know how hard it even is to get people to protest in this sort of crappy weather? It's cold out!

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beanside

It's Wendnesday morning and today is going to be a better day than yesterday!

Actually, yesterday wasn't horrible, just frustrating. First up, my sister went to get her car out for work, and couldn't. She's stuck half in and half out of the spot. Jess went out to help her clean up, but even with them pushing, it would go nowhere. I tried again at lunchtime, and still no luck.

Work was fine. I did a lot of filling in slots and wheeling and dealing to make room for other things. Mostly I was successful, so I was actually pretty pleased with myself.

In the morning, I put a message out for someone to help us dig our cars out. And a guy answered, so I gave him the info and we agreed on a price. Needless to say, he no-showed and has ghosted me. I think my sister got the number of a dude who one of the BIL's family used, so we'll try him this morning.

Then, since I was unable to get the car out, I Ubered over to the pharmacy to get my inhalers. And the pharmacy was closed. No clue why. Just locked up and no one there. I'll have to call them today and hope that they're open, otherwise I will need to call the doctor and beg them to switch my meds to another pharmacy, because I am down very low on my rescue inhaler. This of course, will mean that they won't have my new prescription in, because they had to order it, and they weren't there to receive it, apparently. I'm beginning to panic about how low I am on albuterol. It's really not great, especially seeing that I still have a bit of a cough. Hopefully, they're in today and I can just take an uber over on my lunch break to pick it up if the cars haven't been dug out.

Like I said, hopefully today will be less frustrating, and hopefully, our cars are freed tonight so I can run to the dispensary. I'm also out of my sleepy pills, though I used Jess' relaxing mints, and those work really well, possibly better than the ones crafted for sleep.

Work will either be really quiet or it'll pick up today. We'll see which it is. If nothing else, it's payday and that's exciting. All of my overtime comes in on today's check, so that'll be lovely. It looks like it's about $300 extra. Definitely will have to think on what I want to with it. Definitely a nice lunch or dinner this weekend, but something else as well.

They're talking about a possible snow this weekend as well. Probably not like this, but some. We'll see how the forecast goes. Right now, its only a 40% chance. Hopefully, it stays the hell away.

We're now down to 99 days til the cruise! Double digits!

Okay, time for me to get myself together. Everyone have a lovely Wednesday!

rmc28

My aunt died on Saturday. The funeral will be in Australia, and streamed online. I am so grateful that technology allows this. It will be at midnight my time; I'm going to aim to be awake for it, but apparently there will be a recording if I don't manage to.

Donations are encouraged in her memory:

https://donate.strokefoundation.org.au/stroke-appeals
https://donate.stroke.org.uk/

And now is probably as good a time as any to remind you of the signs of a stroke and the importance of reacting FAST

Face weakness
Arm weakness
Speech problems
Time to call 999

minoanmiss posting in

agonyaunt

supplier said not to do business with them if we disagree politically ( Read more... )

toastykitten

What exactly are we remembering? The things that caught my eye, just today:

In 6,000 families, just “a single sole survivor” has been left behind in Gaza, according to Hani Mahmoud of Al Jazeera. 2,700 families have been entirely wiped out.
There have been multiple deaths in detention camps. I still haven't seen a single politician, Republican or Democrat, call for their closures or for the people in them to be freed.
Jake Tapper, CNN host, arguing with a Minnesota resident about whether a detention camp should be referred to as a concentration camp or not.
A Chinese asylum seeker who recorded evidence of Uighur detention camps in Xinjiang is fighting deportation.
TikTok censoring content worse under US ownership than under Chinese ownership.

What, exactly, are we to do with remembrances that become meaningless in the face of current events?

adafrog

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

james_davis_nicoll

I think the schtick is the crew gets sent out to investigate potentially revolutionary tech and it's always legitimately amazing but also not what they're expecting. Case in point, they were looking into a supposed teleporter and now everyone is ant-sized.

Among my other ideas

( Read more... )

hannah

I'm wanted for three full days a week at the day gig for the next three weeks, minimum. I'd be foolish to turn it down. I'd also be foolish to leave other people in the lurch and hanging, even if all that's happened is a couple of emails. That it's a project with a defined end - eventually, they're going to run out of books - helps a little bit in assessing the coming days.

To my pride, last week I'd suggested they move the children's books they wanted to save to the closet in one of the kid's rooms. They decided to pack them up to move them, so last week I packed them up - too much per box to be practical, but finally contained. Today they said they wanted them in one of the kid's rooms, so I unpacked, sorted, and put them all away, and they were deeply pleased with the end results.

There's a lot to get through, and there's rooms of books in this place. They're coming out of closets, they turn up in boxes, they're hiding behind each other, and I haven't even touched the other side of the apartment. Rarely do I look forward to having to be at work in the morning, but then, rarely do I have this much fun at the job.

Current Mood: exhausted
Current Music: nothing now

muccamukk

I honestly never did finish the last season of 9-1-1 Lone Star because I didn't like it as much after the cast change, and the new stories weren't grabbing me. Then I changed streaming services, and couldn't be bothered to find it another way.

But I was looking at what was on Crave, since I have that right now, and saw that there was a new show called 9-1-1 Nashville, and thought I'd give it a whirl.

Boy, whatever new direction notes they got, were not my thing. It's all about some rich guy and his sons fighting with each other, and a scheming baby mamma, and we basically don't meet any of the other characters in the pilot. How on earth did they talk Chris O'Donnell into this nonsense? He can't be that hard up!

Plus the rescues were just very silly. And this is by standards of the 9-1-1 franchise, which is already extremely silly. This girl gets carried into the air by a kite! Not like a special kite, just a... regular one. A tornado is bearing down on a country music festival and they save it with the power of heart!

I vaguely considered watching the second half of the pilot before deciding there's got to be other trash shows I'd enjoy more. When is the new Stargate show happening?

I think if you're interested in foe-yay half brothers who want to fuck, you might be in business?

chez_jae

Reaper by Apryl Baker

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

View all my reviews

Last night I finished reading Reaper, which is the first book in “The Reaper Chronicles” by Apryl Baker.

Ella Banks is used to being uprooted and moved frequently, due to her father being in the military. Her first day of school in Jacob’s Fork, she’s the victim of a hit and run that leaves her in a coma for days. When Ella wakes, she learns that she is now a living reaper, whose job it is to help spirits cross over. And Eli, that beautiful boy she saw at school, is her guardian angel. It’s his job to protect her, even if that means from her own father.

Either this was a spin-off of another series, or the author is horrible at providing backstory. I’m going with spin-off. You would think Ella is the main character, but more time (and narrative) was devoted to Eli, including the fact that the last living reaper he was charged with protecting is now under someone else’s watch, and he’s in love with her. Mattie made a cameo appearance for no discernible reason other than to beef up Eli’s backstory. This seemed more like a prequel, in that there was no resolution. It was more of a character introduction, scanty backstory providing, scary stuff coming up type story. There were a couple aggravating editing issues, too. Was one character Selena or Selene? As a child, did Ella get lost in the mountains of Germany or Russia? Errors like that can throw the reader out of the narrative.

Favorite line: "Fear makes us remember that we’re alive, that there’s a reason to fight. It doesn’t make us weak.”

I don’t want to be a snip, but I can’t score this any higher than a two. It was confusing and disappointing.

Current Mood: cold
Current Music: Blackhawks at Wild

loligo

Cut for all the things you'd expect.

( Read more... )

ashelterofpages

So, my sleep is really weird right now. One day I'll go to bed some time after midnight and wake up around 8am. The next day I'll go to bed before midnight and wake up after 2pm. I have no idea what's happening there, but it'd be super cool if my body got its shit together.

I had stuff I meant to do today, but instead I slopped around in bed, even after I woke up, and cuddled my cat. I'll go to bed late tonight, wake up early tomorrow and get all that stuff done. At least I queued up some posts I needed to put out yesterday, so I wasn't late on releasing a thing, and will have something else going out on Thursday.

(On the off chance there are people on my reading list who enjoy speculative short fiction, I put out a newsletter on (most) Tuesdays recommending two stories I've really enjoyed recently. Feel free to subscribe if you're into that kind of thing!)

Mention of doctors but nothing serious/bad

I have a psych appointment on Thursday that I have to dig out some money for, but I also found out that my health insurance is going to cover my birth control stuff for my PMDD, so I'm fucking thrilled by this! I got the script yesterday and will be picking that up once I get disability for February. I'm really hoping this is going to be good for me, cause without doing something, my cycle is absolutely debilitating.

I hope all of you have had a nice time of things and those of you with the kinds of pets who do that kind of thing have gotten many cuddles.

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27 icons of Wu Lei for celebrity20in20

WWW Wednesday

My precious Callie is sitting on my lap, purring up a storm

Someone Hertz, volume 1 by Ei Yamano (Translated by David Evely)

Reading Wednesday

Our Audience Is Normally Long Gone By Then.

Stop the presses

Things

Both the news and the weather continue awful

Got out of town on a boat going to southern islands, sailing a reach before a followin' sea

Helen Burke, 5 June 1950 — 24 January 2026

Ask a Manager: Business and Politics

it's international holocaust remembrance day

Half Day

So, in my Outgunned

Nine to five.

I'd like my trash TV paramedics to be a little less trashy!

Book 9, 2026

so yeah, I have a kid living in Minneapolis right now

Oh hey, I've managed this two days in a row!

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