Elbow still hurts. Physiotherapy helps, but I definitely need more of it before my elbow is fine again. Just writing this post took me three days. Apart from that things are pretty good in RL. And spring is already here with a lot of sunshine and an ability to finally wear a thinner jacket. 😊


I finished:

Melody of Secrets

It wasn’t bad, but in general rather mediocre. There were a few lovely scenes, but if not for my love for ForceBook I would probably drop it somewhere in the middle. But I love them both, they’re good actors and their chemistry always delivers. I’ll gladly re-watch it in a year or two, and I think it might even benefit from not waiting a week between each episode.


Dare You to Death

I did watch all of it, but that one was so, so bad. I would still recommend Melody of Secrets to someone looking for crime + mystery + amnesia BL, but this drama, no. I absolutely wouldn’t rec it. Bad script, bad directing and very poor tone balancing. They really should have chosen if they wanted the show to be a gritty crime drama with a lot of horrific, graphic deaths, or romance with classic romcom elements, and suitable sound effects and lighting. These two parts didn’t mesh at all.

And I’m sorry, Dunk, you’re a gorgeous boy, but you’re not a good actor. And Joong couldn’t carry such a bad script all by himself. But their chemistry is still there, so you know – all the flirting and kissing was enjoyable to watch. And I liked Aou and Boom in their small supporting parts.


The Art of Sarah

That was a fascinating watch, even though IMO it fell apart a bit at the end. But Shin Hae Sun was amazing, mesmerizing and charismatic.

Dramabeans review is good (and spoilery) if you would like to know more.


The Night Manager

I watched the 2nd season last week. I enjoyed it a lot. Except one thing, which I really disliked. The reasons for both are spoilery, so they go behind then cut.

selenak wrote a good review here. I agree with all of it.

Read more.

It’s always a pleasure to see two such wonderful actors like Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie going head to head. And I didn’t read any spoilers before watching, but after that ‘previously on’ segment at the beginning of the 1st episode I instantly knew that Roper would be back. But I don’t mind because, like I’ve said, it’s a pleasure to watch Hugh Laurie be ruthless and evil and homoerotically obsessed with Tom Hiddleston.

And I liked what they did with Teddy and Jonathan’s relationship. And I don’t even mind that Teddy died at the end. Of course I wouldn’t mind reading a fix-it fic or two. But I opened I think around 10 fics, and closed the tab after a paragraph or two every time. Because in all those fics I tried, Teddy was presented as a blameless woobie, who never did anything wrong in his life. You know, the guy we see killing innocent people on screen, they guy responsible for training kids to be soldiers. That guy. *sigh*

But what I do mind is everything they did with Angela Burr. I hate that she died. And I hate that they made her less competent and looking like for six years she didn’t care that Roper was out there killing people and doing other illegal stuff.

I dropped Our Universe (so disappointing, even super adorable kid and fantastic acting by Bae In Hyuk couldn’t make up for a bad script, a bland female lead, a very annoying SML and a very unnecessary love triangle, and a few other annoying things) and My Romance Scammer (nothing’s really wrong with it, I just got bored).


I started Love Like a Bike - another Thai BL drama that is on Netflix here. It takes place in Pattaya and it’s about three adopted brothers and their three very different romances.

The 1st episode was mostly lovely and cute (there were two scenes with traumatic backstory for two characters). And sexy, too, thanks to Ta and Us. I like them as a couple a lot, and I already feel they will be my favorites in this drama. 😊

Here is the trailer:



And I have one rec – a funny and educational vid about Korean language.

I've had a couple of pretty busy days, but I think (I *THINK*) I can chill now. I have some more bureaucratic stuff to take care of, but it's gonna have to wait until next week (pretty sure that the office I need is open like three hours a single day each week lmao). 

Now that the health stuff is on its way to being taken care of and that I finally got my new ID, all I have to do is sit my ass down and study. That's gonna take a massive amount of effort, depressingly, because my brain is fucking fried :°

Anyway, it's almost the weekend, so I can allow myself to listen to some music!

The new ERRA album, "silence outlives the earth", out today! I really enjoyed "gore of being", "further eden", and "echo sonata" when they first came out, and I'd been looking forward to this album a lot! I'm maybe halfway through my first listen and it's definitely not disappointing so far :)
(By the way, I found out ERRA did a cover of "Stockholm Syndrome" by Muse and it actually kinda slaps!)

Also, I was fucking around the list of new releases on r/metalcore and bumped into a band called "The Gloom in the Corner" and their new album "Royal Discordance", and... holy shit. I'm such a sucker for music that blends genres, and these guys mix metalcore with a kind of theatricality that in certain points reminded me of My Chemical Romance (and whoever knows anything about me at all, knows that that's the highest of praises I can give anybody lol). I need to listen to the whole album again, but man, I really, really liked it!

A bunch of random songs that are going straight into my March playlist:

• Pain is a Must - Angel Du$t
• CONSTANT TENSION - Held.
• Reflection - Opal In Sky
• there's no place in heaven for people like us - hush, darling
• The Coldness of Your Absence - Sugar Spine
• Paradox Man - Shoreline
• Liminal - Haste the Day feat Silent Planet
• Locked and Loaded - The Cab
• Free - Beartooth

ALSO!!!
Did y'all hear about the Fall Out Boy demos thing? Apparently some people are being sent CDs in the mail with a bunch of previously unreleased old FOB demos. The person from the reddit post I liked uploaded them on the Internet Archive :O 
What are those dudes even up to, this time??? >_>

I'm gonna listen to some music for a bit, and then either watch the latest JJK episode or start the new documentary miniseries The Dinosaurs, because fuuuuck yeah, it's finally here! \o/

I've been trying for some time now to get a landscaper not to ghost me, so we can redo the front and back yards of my house.

Am I trying to hire a contractor, or an artist?

Yes. Both. Year Nine's discussion of how we've reshaped the land focused entirely on utilitarian aspects: draining wetlands, filling in shorelines, flattening land for agriculture and roads. We entirely skipped over the aesthetic angle -- but that matters, too! The land and what grows atop it can become a medium for art.

A fairly elite art, though. At its core, landscaping for the purpose of a garden or a park is about setting aside ground that could have been productive and using it for pleasure instead. Not to say that there can't be some overlap; vegetable gardens can be attractive, and parks might play home to game animals that will later grace the dinner table. But there's a sort of conspicuous consumption in saying, not only do I have land, but I have enough of it to devote some to aesthetic enjoyment over survival.

We don't know what the earliest gardens were like, but we know they've been with us probably about as long as stratified society has been, if not longer. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon (named for their tiered structure) were one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and those -- if they ever existed -- were a continuation of a well-documented Assyrian tradition of royal gardens, which included hydraulic engineering to supply them with water. So this was not a new art.

But when did it become an art? I'm not entirely sure. The boundary is fuzzy, of course; gardens can exist without being included in the discourse around Proper Art. (As we saw in Year Eight, with the shift toward recognizing textiles as a possible form of fine art.) Europe didn't really elevate gardens to that stature until the sixteenth century, as part of the Renaissance return to classical ideals. The earliest Chinese book I've been able to find on the aesthetics of gardening, as opposed to botanical studies of plants, is from the seventeenth century, but it wouldn't surprise me if there were earlier works. I think that when you start getting specific aesthetic movements and individual designers famous for their work, you're in the realm of Art instead of a functional thing that can also be pretty; I just don't know when that began.

There definitely are aesthetic movements, though! In particular, gardens-as-art swing between the poles of "nature in her most idealized form" and "intentionally artificial." Many Japanese gardens exemplify the former, while European gardens laid out in complex geometric beds demonstrate the latter. It's not entirely a regional differentiation, though; Japanese dry ("Zen") gardens, with their carefully raked seas of gravel, are obviously not trying to look natural, and Europeans have enjoyed a good meadow-style garden, too.

This is partly a question of how you're supposed to interact with these spaces. Some -- including many of those Japanese examples, dry or otherwise -- are meant to be viewed from the outside, e.g. while sitting on a veranda or looking down on it from an upstairs window. Others are meant to be walked through, so they're designed with an eye toward what new images will greet you as you follow a path or come round a corner. Meanwhile, hedge mazes may purposefully try to confuse you, which means they benefit from walls of greenery as close to identical as you can get them -- until you arrive at the center or some other node, where the intentional monotony breaks.

In pursuit of these effects, a garden can incorporate other forms of art and technology. Hydraulics may play a role not only in irrigating the garden, but in fueling fountains, waterfalls, artificial streams, and the like, which in turn may host fish, turtles, and other inhabitants. Architecture provides bridges over wet or dry courses and structures like walls, gazebos, arches, arbors, bowers, pergolas, and trellises, often supporting climbing plants. Statuary very commonly appears in pleasing spots; paintings are less common, since the weather will damage them faster, but mosaics work very well.

But the centerpiece is usually the plants themselves. As with zoos (Year Four) and the "cabinet of curiosities"-style museums (Year Nine), one purpose of a garden may be to show off plants and trees from far-distant lands, delighting the eye and possibly the nose with unfamiliar wonders. The earliest greenhouses seem to have been built to grow vegetables out of season, but later ones saw great use for cultivating tropical plants far outside their usual climes -- especially once we figured out how to heat them reliably, circa the seventeenth century. In other cases, the appeal comes from carefully pruning the plants to a desired shape, whether that's arching gracefully over a path or full-on sculpture into the shapes of animals or mythological figures.

One particularly clever trick involves accounting for the changing conditions inherent to an art based in nature. Many gardens go dead and boring in the winter -- or in the summer, if you're in a climate where rain only comes in the winter -- but a skilled designer can create a "four seasons" garden that offers shifting sources of interest throughout the year. Similarly, they may use a combination of artificial lighting and night-blooming flowers to create a space whose experience is very different at night than during the day.

And gardens can even serve an intellectual purpose! Like a museum, its displays may be educational; you see this in botanical gardens and arboreta, with their signs identifying plants and perhaps telling you something about them. Many scholars over the centuries have also used gardens as the site of their experiments, studying their materials and tweaking how to best care for them. But this doesn't stop with plain science, either. We often refer to dry rock gardens as "Zen gardens" because of their role in encouraging meditative contemplation, and actually, it goes deeper than that: the design of such a garden is often steeped in symbolism, with rocks representing mountains in general or specific important peaks. I don't actually know, but I readily assume, that somebody in early modern Europe probably created a garden full of coded alchemical references. The design of the place can be as much a tool for the mind as it is a pleasure for the senses.

Which brings them back around to a functional purpose, I suppose. Gardens very much straddle the line between aesthetics and pragmatism!



(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/O7UpKN)

There's been a downpour on and off tonight, hitting a couple hours ago and then coming back loud enough I can't miss it. There was a little snow left in the parks and at the very edges, but this is going to see to everything. The feeling of knowing this is exactly it, more than it felt on Sunday, is somehow both peaceful and unsettling. There's an acceptance and a sense of gratitude of not having missed the moment. It's not something I'm eager to seek out, and it's one I can hold onto and sit with a while.

I put in three bids for this year's Fandom Trumps Hate, two for beta readers and one for a vid. Whether they'll end up getting outbid remains to be seen. I've got at least a day to figure out what my absolute maximum collective bid should be and which ones to prioritize. Not something to think about for the rest of the night, at least.

⌈ Secret Post #6999 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


01.


( More! )

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 08 secrets from Secret Submission Post #999.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

I'm always the last one to jump on the bandwagon and everybody probably knows this already, but I just found out about Every Noise at Once and my mind is blown. There is SO MUCH STUFF to discover on there! And it's so neatly categorized! There are previews! And lists of bands for each genre! And massive playlists! I think I'm in love ;^;

These questions were suggested by dray.

1. Do you know of any other words for snow? What's your favourite and why?

2. What's your ideal temperature range for winter?

3. Favourite winter activity? What about it makes it your favourite?

4. What are three things you can't do without when winter arrives?

5. Do you have favourite winter holiday activities?

Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.

If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!

**Remember that we rely on you, our members, to help keep the community going. Also, please remember to play nice. We are all here to answer the questions and have fun each week. We repost the questions exactly as the original posters submitted them and request that all questions be checked for spelling and grammatical errors before they're submitted. Comments re: the spelling and grammatical nature of the questions are not necessary. Honestly, any hostile, rude, petty, or unnecessary comments need not be posted, either.**

Fandom: The Protomen
Pairings/Characters: Protoman & Megaman, Protoman & Dr. Thomas Light, Protoman & Dr. Albert Wily
Rating: Unrated, estimated to be Teen and Up
Length: 3,178
Creator Links: ricefu on Ao3
Theme:
Siblings, Science Fiction, Apocalypse/Dystopia, Robots, Androids and AI, Trauma & Recovery, (Not Really) Character Death, Old Fandoms
Summary:
You have heard me tell this story many times before you sleep... This time listen carefully.
Reccer's Notes:
A beautiful and sad character study of Protoman, the older sibling of two tragic brothers in the Protomen universe. It connects his backstory and dives into psyche throughout the canon storyline, including his relationship with his younger brother, his father, and the main antagonist. Although I'm tagging the Not Really Character Death theme for a reason, this is a tragedy, so tread carefully.

Fanwork Links:
The Inevitable Fall of the Firstborn on Ao3

Every Thursday, we have a community post, just like this one, where you can drop a rec or five in the comments.

This works great if you only have one rec and don't want to make a whole post for it, or if you don't have a DW account, or if you're shy. ;)

(But don't forget: you can deffo make posts of your own seven days a week. ;D!)

So what cool fanart/fics/fanvids/fancrafts/other kinds of fanworks/podfics have we discovered this week? Drop it in the comments below. Anon comment is enabled.

BTW, AI fanworks are not eligible for reccing at recthething. If you aware that a fanwork is AI-generated, please do not rec it here.

The missing episode 5 scene in Ilya's hotel room at the All-Star weekend in Tampa.

Many others have had a go at this, and I wanted to try my hand at it.

If We Could

At 1361 words, it's short and probably a little over-optimistic, but obviously in writing it I already know what's coming in the rest of eps 5 & 6. 😊

Community Thursday challenge: every Thursday, try to make an effort to engage with a community on Dreamwidth, whether that's posting, commenting, promoting, etc.

---

Over the last week...

Posted and commented on bnha_fans.

Commented on booknook.

Commented on dw_dev.

Commented on getyourwordsout.

This is your weekly read-in-progress post~

For spoilers

<details><summary>insert summary</summary>Your spoilers goes here</details>

<b>Highlight for spoilers!*</b><span style="background-color: #FFFFFF; color: #FFFFFF">Your spoilers goes here.</span>*

This has been a less easy day.

It's the 35th anniversary of my mom's death.

It still hurts, all of it.

At least, I'm not reliving the whole thing, just dealing with emotional splashback this year.

She died in hospital, during an ice storm, and I was not informed of it until after I'd come up there, so I traveled expecting to see her when she'd passed before I'd gotten the phone call.

And that ties into even nastier family crap that I'm not even going to mention except to say it happened and was absolutely shitty.

So I am sticking to the more cheerful reruns of shows to watch, plus Colbert, and the sillier novels. They don't dig me out, but they keep me from going deeper into the Marianas Trench.