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ZhuBai picspam (sort of)

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2025 02:35 pm

I'd mentioned to

mumblemumble making desktop wallpaper calendars from Zhu Yilong & Bai Yu photos, and to commemorate my 6th Guardianniversary here's a little picspam of what they have looked like.

( Years 2020-2025 )

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6 years

sakana17

Tuesday, July 1st, 2025 09:17 pm

My 6th year Guardianniversary was a couple of days ago. ♥ I have a Guardian-adjacent post in mind but it requires some digging through folders and I haven't finished that yet.

Instead, today's post isn't about Guardian... ( but about a sus AO3 encounter )

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fan meta

Extra-long-weekend mishmash post: office furniture, phone keyboards, family, hair, lilacs...

umadoshi

Monday, June 30th, 2025 02:30 pm

With Canada Day rudely falling on a Tuesday,

scruloose and I both booked today off. I haven't managed a whole lot of manga work yet, but hopefully between today (as soon as I finish this post) and tomorrow I'll get a reasonable amount done. While I'm doing at-my-desk things,

scruloose is working on the next step(s) in getting a dedicated hose set up for our individual townhouse.

Last night we finally got around to switching the desk chairs in our offices, ( cut for the uninterested )

It occurred to me very late in the game that I might do better at spending non-work time at my desk (where, y'know, most of my writing used to happen) if I didn't hate my chair; I've been attributing the fact that I spend 95% of my evenings down in the living room these days to the fact that Sinha's such a lapcat, and that's definitely a huge factor, but...being able to sit comfortably in here would sure help.

Another pleasing tech-related development has to do with my phone keyboard. ( again, cut for the uninterested )

Speaking of things that feel so much better now, Saturday also involved Ginny chopping my hair off for me. I've been leaving it alone (other than the undercut) since whenever the last time we buzz cut it was, and maybe a month ago I found that it was long enough to easily ponytail. That was pleasantly novel for about a week, even though the front bits weren't long enough to get into the ponytail and quickly started to need clips or something when it got hot. By last weekend, I was very, very done with the whole thing, and this weekend Ginny was able to deal with it. Such a relief.

My younger nibling and their spouse of eight months or so stopped by a few days ago to pick up a few years' worth of my spare comp copies from Seven Seas. Only one box, since I've technically scaled back my freelance workload (and I think there's also a backlog of comps that I should be getting sooner rather than later), but a hefty box that was bulging a bit at the seams, so it's nice to have that all sent off to a new home. It was lovely to see my nibling and meet their spouse, however briefly. (They politely rolled with the "we're going to stand in our driveway and chat while masked and overheat more than a little" element.)

A final thing before calling this a post and getting to work: last weekend

scruloose and I gave the Sensation lilac a long-overdue aggressive pruning (and it should probably get the same amount cut out of it in a year). The poor thing was all spindly limbs and mostly-high-up blooms, so hopefully this will help it for next year.( But what to do with the mutant hybrid? )

Current Mood: apathetic

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Two weeks' worth of reading

umadoshi

Sunday, June 29th, 2025 03:16 pm

A weekend post never happened last weekend, but here's what I'm been reading over the last couple of weeks. (Watching has been basically unchanged: we're up to date on Murderbot and continuing to slowly work through Leverage season 4.)

I finished reading Tchaikovsky's Service Model, which I thought was...fine? It was interesting enough, but if it had been my first exposure to his work it wouldn't have made me rush out and try more right away.

I read and liked Margaret Owen's Little Thieves in April, and Jenny Hamilton on Bluesky was recently talking about the trilogy as a whole (and this reminds me that now I can go read her "How to Break a Heart: Subverting the Hero’s Breakup Trope"), so when I decided a week or so ago to finally burn through all of my Kobo points and clear at least a bit of my wishlist, I included the second book, Painted Devils, which I enjoyed enough to want to read the third (Holy Terrors) right away. I try not to buy many ebooks at full price, though, given how many more I buy overall than I'm ever going to manage to read, and thankfully my library not only has it but had it available right away.

Consider that a recommendation, but beyond it I'm just going to quote the non-spoilery part of Jenny's essay that describes the series (and the essay then details how things stood at the end of book 2, so consider that the spoiler warning):

This year brought us Margaret Owen’s Holy Terrors. It’s the third in a trilogy about an angry, selfish girl named Vanja who made it through a lifetime of neglect and abuse with a crop of emotional and physical scars, a talent for picking pockets, the favor of the gods (sometimes), and a healthy hostility for rich people. Against both their better judgment, she falls in love with prefect Emeric Conrad, whom she variously describes as a “human civics primer,” an “accounting ledger made flesh,” and an “intolerable filing cabinet.”

(Here the author of this piece has been compelled to delete a ten thousand–word manifesto about the greatness of the Little Thieves series. If you like the TV show Leverage, or you enjoy digging your teeth into solid character development, or you just hate rich people, you should read it. The first book is Little Thieves. Thank me later.)

For a dramatic change of pace, I'm now reading Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 by M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi (also a with-points acquisition), which I keep wanting to file under non-fiction, although the title will clearly tell you that it's speculative fiction. (IIRC I learned about it from

skygiants' post.) Its fictional interviews build a distressingly plausible picture of global collapse through this decade and the couple to come, but also offer glimpses into how we could come out on the other side, if we're willing to largely raze and rebuild ~human society~ in a way that actually takes care of people. (The book came out in...2022?...so it in no way accounts for the most recent and current forms of the political hellscape.)

On the non-fiction side, I read Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen, a book of essays and corresponding recipes that I'd previously read maybe ten years ago. Colwin died in 1992 (I think I've got that right), and this book (and the follow-up, More Home Cooking) is a food-writing classic for good reason, although also very much of its place and time--very American, very '80s.

(The rest of my using-all-my-Kobo-points haul: The Hands of the Emperor, We Are All Completely Fine, Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower, All Under Heaven: Recipes from the 35 Cuisines of China, and Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World. Did this put a visible dent in my Kobo wishlist [which is a relatively curated list of books I keep an eye on for preorder purposes and sighting sales]? Yes. Has the dent since been filled in? Also yes.)

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Initial Air3 usage report!

umadoshi

Wednesday, June 25th, 2025 02:10 pm

Over a month after the arrival of our (in my case, long-yearned-for) Microclimate Air3 powered respirators, I finally took mine out on its maiden voyage yesterday. (It may result in me going more places than I have been, but it may also mainly result in me feeling safer in the places I do go.)

Yesterday there was a casual in-person meeting at Dayjob where the team properly met the two people who our office's managing editor answers to. Donuts were promised (and turned out to be quality donuts, although I opted not to bring one home with me [since I sure wasn't about to unmask to eat anything there!]. Fun times in needing to be picky about what I spend my sugar intake on). We also had a heat warning, so I was all the more glad/relieved to have a drive to and from the meeting rather than taking transit for the first time in, oh, three years or so.

I'll put most of the rest under a cut, but I do want to note--especially since probably at least one or two of you clicked on the link for the Air3, and the price looks horrifying--that I'm incredibly glad we didn't order ours immediately when they first became available, because at that point the Air3 alone (as opposed to the kit) was more like $1000 USD. The original plan wasn't for

scruloose to get one at all, given that initial price and given that they have a respirator setup that works well for them. But then a few weeks later, the price dropped to $549(/$649 for the kit with extra stuff, which is what we opted for, as well as a few extra filters etc. in the name of minimizing future need to deal with shipping), so we got to say "Well, that's still really spendy, but it's also now not completely outrageous to get two." (And then we wound up having to contact the company because of shipping/import charge shenanigans, but those were on the courier's side, not Microclimate's, and the person

scruloose dealt with was great, so it's all good.)

I should also note that one of the review videos I watched about this made sure to point out clearly that its price (which initially was a MAJOR jump up from how much the Air2 cost when that was available) was in line with the cost of other NIOSH-certified powered respirators. It's far from cheap, but it's not the gouging attempt it might seem like. (I do wonder what the deal was with the massive price drop so soon after its release, though!)

( And now, the actual experience: )

Current Mood: pleased

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Become a Farmer (a transcription practice)

sakana17

Monday, June 23rd, 2025 07:37 pm

( An early conversation with guests )

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种地吧 become a farmer

"life's too short and time is flying, I'm looking for baggage that goes with mine" (mimi, rent)

starandrea

Thursday, June 19th, 2025 08:18 pm

Quarterly update!

I've started learning Cantonese, and it's approximately one hundred times easier than Mandarin (because I already know Mandarin; other language learners say learning Mandarin after Cantonese is comparable). It feels more like continuing than starting over.

Last week I reached 100 works on my Chinese AO3 account (none in Cantonese yet), a bit more than 100k words total, which tells you about how long they are. My English account has 248 works, and that's more than 6 million words.

English DW: 8779 entries
Chinese DW: 358 entries

♥ good books
Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment, by George Leonard
This book is about how important the time between climactic moments is, or for language learners (it's not about language learning, but it was recommended in one of my language learning groups): why "the intermediate plateau" is life and we should learn to love it.

Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts, by Oliver Burkeman
This book is about why we don't have to respond to every demand for our attention in order to be a good person, and that knowing how to set a burden down is as important as knowing how to carry it. This was a spontaneous pick, and I expect to reread.

♥ good show
Murderbot, on Apple TV+
The Murderbot Diaries book series by Martha Wells is just as good, arguably better as there's more of it, and available in Chinese translation. Also as an audiobook read by Kevin R. Free in English, who is a perfect SecUnit narrator, and by an enthusiastic AI in Chinese, which is very funny.

♥ great pet accessory
Cooling blanket!!! Daphne says it's her favorite new toy in at least a day, and I'm glad I got the biggest one so we can both use it at the same time.

♥ new in the gardens
6 lupins, 5 roses, 4 weigela, some ferns and hostas and irises from friends and neighbors and the compost pile, a plethora of plant sale finds including more colors of bee balm than I knew existed (I thought it was red or pink but apparently there's also purple and allegedly "rose" which is... what color is that? I will find out if it lives long and strong enough to blossom). Poppies and sage and forget-me-nots, some Solomon's seal and geraniums and even pansies for community reasons.

For future reference, overwintering spring bulbs in garage planters did not work well, but moving overwintered canna and dahlia rhizomes from boxes by the front door to half-full pots in the garage during the early spring did work, somewhat to my surprise. Some had roots by the time I put them in the ground and some did not, but none sprouted early (at least none continued sprouting after being moved to the garage), and so far an intimidating number of them are up and swinging.

♥ new in the dollhouses
I used a chibi metal bookmark to make a couples' portrait for the music room, and then I found some lotus coasters I bought in Vermont last year during the eclipse and set up one as a backdrop for the flute/stand. Dragon earrings as wall-hangings are not as cool as I expected, but scrapbook quotes about the moon and stars as wallpaper make up the difference.

What else do I usually post about? Let's see... dog, writing, dollhouse, garden, language.

I guess that's it! In the world of challenges I'm enjoying

chenqing_100 and

fandom_empire, and looking forward to

battleshipex. In the world of sports the dog has joined me and Marci for some paddling and I think this might be the year she learns to swim. (Not really, but she fell in for the 4.5th time and for the first time did not freak out, so that's progress.)

And now, the weather.

虫洞的彼岸有这么一个地方，一个只有恋人才知道的地方
勇敢的、充满希望的、迷失的、忠诚的、也许就是我和你
你是否愿意和这些傻傻的梦想家一起来
我们称之为家园的星球希望能很快见到你
就在庇护月卫

"There's a place beyond the wormhole, a place that only lovers know
The brave, the hopeful, the lost, the true, maybe me and you
Won't you come with these fools and dreamers
To the planet we call home
We hope we'll see you soon on Sanctuary Moon"

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⋆⁺₊ fishing on the moon ☾⋆⁺₊⋆

quietly dreaming

October 2024

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ZhuBai picspam (sort of)

6 years

Extra-long-weekend mishmash post: office furniture, phone keyboards, family, hair, lilacs...

Two weeks' worth of reading

Initial Air3 usage report!

Become a Farmer (a transcription practice)

"life's too short and time is flying, I'm looking for baggage that goes with mine" (mimi, rent)