saw a post about an upcoming chinese folklore discolike and immediately thought of this lol (for reference: kotaku.com/butterfly-so...)

[Rereading an old and flatteringly well-received fic of mine]: oh damn, this is like, so horrible and upsetting in many ways (positive). Wow. Just really went in with the serrated knife right to the spleen there.

I'm making another romance of the 3 kingdoms (adapted version) thread bc I can Gotta say, I wasn't expecting a BL romance but lemme tell you, I am not complaining. Cao Cao wants Guan Yu to work for him so he's trying to court him; Guan Yu just wants to find Liu Bei. This makes Cao Cao "feel empty"

All my best posts* are replies so here, have a short thread of me talking about B plots *don't get too excited

Looking at my recent bsky posts feels a bit ridiculous because I am at least 60% here for the yaoi The fact that I am also the most massive nerd is just, you know, a pile of side hustles so large it dwarfs the main event, so to speak.

teacher/student is best when it knows that a beloved teacher is frequently someone whose affection and notice looks like putting you in a saw trap on an intellectual and creative level because they know you can take it. someone they are not torturing is someone they don’t take seriously

Incidentally I mean this in the sense that Chinese is a high context language, not in the slightly orientalist sense that it's written in a lot of deeply mysterious divinatory symbols. Which it isn't, but arguably given the oracle bones it perhaps used to be at its origin.

Making another attempt at this Romance of the Three Kingdoms series which I bounced off previously due to Too Many Names. This time there's a prologue about the oath of the peach garden with Liu Bei, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, so I've stopped mixing up Liu Bei and Lü Bu.

Sometimes I become mildly frustrated that I'm only about as literate as a very *young* Chinese child, and then I remember I had to take 2 years off to learn German and then deal with the visually triggered migraines. It could be worse, I guess.

Doing some bedtime reading on Ao3 and in the author's note I found the quote "god gives his hardest battles to his silliest clowns" which feels so correct actually. Story of my fuckin life tbh, and I mean that with both humour and exasperation.

Why am I in a history of Arabic research rabbit hole? Oh, because I became terribly impatient with the current feeble attempts at transcription of Arabic into English which give me NO idea how to pronounce said word and it's becoming quite embarrassing to guess poorly

One weird thing about researching the history of Arabic is that you run into a lot of: the X nomadic tribe conquered a lot of territory and called themselves the Kingdom of X. Where did they originally come from? With absolutely no acknowledgement of the rather large contradiction

Yesterday I learned the word for the silk road in Chinese (it's just. I mean. It's 丝绸之路 idk what I was expecting) and then fell into a research rabbit hole upon finding out that basically the entire thing is desert rather than just stretches of it as I thought

It's been a weird day, you guys. I've had to lie in bed a lot and my weird got all restless

So I got into...... let's do an inaccurate summary and say "philosophy" via the Dao De Jing and some TCM writings and theory From which perspective it has been *wild* to hear lectures about Neo-Platinism/Plotinus' stuff in esoterism/occult theory/theology/whatever we're calling it.

Update: this is quite difficult. I expected the difficulty of having some sort of consistent warp tension and making the weft not wonky and so on. I didn't anticipate it being physically difficult to turn the cards! It looks so easy in the tutorials! It is: not easy.

I am speaking like a person who didn't take their ADHD meds and I absolutely did. I'm just doing a lot of thinking lately, and also I fucking love textiles.

I think this is also responsible for the Boyfriend Sweater phenomenon. Because a lot of people will start knitting a gift sweater and it's their first time knitting a garment 1) not for themselves, 2) where it really matters that it fits well, and/or 3) where the outcome really matters to them.

Thought I'd bring a little whimsy into my life and learn to do tablet weaving (aka card weaving). My first remarks are 1) I fucking love black and red, and 2) the tools for wrangling hair are, perhaps unsurprisingly, very useful for wrangling warp threads.

A thing I am very proud of myself about is that I buy materials for a textile project and then I make that project. For a while I had the materials lying around for - 1 summer house robe - 1 pair black pj pants (plus probably enough for a t shirt) - 1 pair smart tapered leg pants

Suddenly I'd be talking about how beautiful this new handdyed yarn is and getting excited about fabric (as usual) but the fabric is like a silk damask or a suspiciously tightly woven linen. I'm probably also getting excited about all the fairtrade stuff I'd suddenly be able to buy

new bucket list unlocked for my adhd craft friends:

I do not want to create an account or open a subscription I just want to buy a thing and never hear from you again why is this so hard.

A VCR never sold my private info to a nazi

If you have any sort of anxiety or exec dysfunction can I recommend the One Item To-Do List? Because I have a lot of those things and still, I now also have a reporter sized notebook with several pages of completed tasks. This feels surprisingly good

Now look I basically don't drink at all but I have drunk a fair amount in my life and I have a question. Does anyone else at all have the thing I do which is: no matter how drunk I am, I can still taste the alcohol?

I need to make pyjama pants for @casualcheese.bsky.social too as soon as she hands me whichever ones she actually wants cloned

Experience from observing how my mending is holding up: man, there's just nothing that beats whip stitch for really attaching things. I've tried the blanket stitch edging for patches and herringbone/cross stitch and. Nope. Whip stitch it is. Hand sewing is genuinely very simple and easy.

Pomegranate molasses vinaigrette "doesn't call enough and won't expose every inch of my life for their judgement and advice" doesn't really. Scan.

This is a very silly ad. And he's clearly having the most fun!!!!

Literally since HR a constant in my head and subvocal stim has been a Russian accent. Not Connor's. Bless him, because he genuinely does a good job, but the real thing is much...meatier? There's more to chew on?

While I'm here, if you made a vid recently you'd like me to see, or your friend did, or you have a reclist or just a few recent faves, pls feel free to show them to me! We (I) love self promo bc then I get to see what my cool friends are making.

Can I be a huge bitch for a second and say that in my day people made proper fanvids instead of quitting 15-20 seconds in

Listen I'm still not sane about Heated Rivalry but idk what to DO about that really so I'll just be over here. Thinking about them.

I am awake at an extremely fucked up hour. But at least there are a few delightful publishers who have started making audiobooks of the kind of slightly-to-very fucked up MM romances I have been looking for forever

The absolute funniest thing happened to me: I pronounced one single word in Arabic (my partner's last name, to the chemist) that she became immediately convinced I was Arabic and threw a whole paragraph of it at me at which point I had to embarrassedly admit that I'm not very good at it

Important announcement: did you all know I love gay people? I love gay people. Thank you and goodnight!

The Algorithm(TM) has my number these days Used to be if I wanted to be recommended music/videos/etc in [language I'm learning] I'd have to go out of my way and make new profiles etc These days I watch 1 show with Russian and it's like: hey how about this Russian song? And this Russian YT Channel?

I do think my brain's Languages Thing is at least 50% an attempt to direct the energy of my frankly overwhelming echolalia somewhere useful and/or find new and exciting sounds and phrases to feed the echolalia In related news I heard a Russian person say "Ilya Rozanov" and that's my newest. Ugh.

AO3 IS BACK FOR ME!! I had to refresh a few times but it let me over the wall again

"Should we invite Andrea Dworkin?" Is a clapback that will be joining my repertoire actually

I...listen. I just posted this to do psychic damage to my friends because I have absolutely zero thoughts rn

For reasons completely unrelated to exploring intimacy and compartmentalisation in HR ......I need to know more about the hockey in the book.

First up: I have been hearing a lot of things about the book, and while the is a remarkably faithful adaptation, there are differences, and one of them is that the actors (god bless them) are absolute hopeless romantics

Update I still have not slept well and my brain does not produce stable happy chemicals on drastically insufficient sleep so!!!! I will be once more simply having emotions about HR

I am obviously watching queer people react to HR because queer joy is beautiful And these guys are SO real. One just responded to the facetime call Ilya in Russia where Shane is all "you can talk to me, I wanna help" and Ilya goes, "I'm serious, if you wanna help take off your clothes":

I have an entire brain full of HR thoughts and the only trouble is that a lot of them are the variety of complicated and nuanced where what you really need to do is write a fanfic presenting your case and its emotional plausibility

There's been a very small and quiet and honestly incredibly unexciting gender journey going on for me for the last couple of years that's had me somewhat nervously identifying as broadly a man* instead of the masc end of non-binary In light of which, I'm really enjoying queer men reacting to HR

*Blinks* did I just fail miserably to set up bsky properly? Since I tentatively came back to this website I keep noticing people who are my friends who I'm mysteriously not following (sometimes they're even following me!????) Unsure how I managed this but do holler if you think I forgot you