the carnival of you and me

Pandemic life
I've been relatively slack about masking lately (supermarket always; other public situations, it depends on how busy it is, how well-ventilated, and what quality of interaction I want to have). So far I've escaped unscathed. *knocks on wood* *tries not to pathologise my low-level tiredness*

Previous poll review
In the Reading speed poll, 55.8% of respondents estimate their reading speed as faster than average, which ha, is probably about right, or maybe on the low side given Dreamwidth's self-selection. One fifth of respondents went for "average", and 23.1% said "it would be faster if my so-called attention span didn't keep dropping out."

In ticky-boxes, raindrops (48.1%) came second to hugs (65.4%), followed by stripes waiting for a cat (44.2%). Thank you for your votes! ♥

Reading
Slowly listening to Borders of Infinity by Bujold, read by Grover Gardner with Andrew, mostly while doing the dishes.

The only thing I've read in text is a beginner story in Chinese about a stray cat who's found a home. It's sliiiightly above the "see Spot run" level, but not much.

Kdramas/Cdramas
We're watching the last two episodes of Miraculous Brothers tonight, and I'm really hoping it'll stick the landing. If it does, I might do a write-up. It's a good show, and I can see it appealing to people who aren't regular Kdrama-watchers too.

Still rewatching Love Scout with Pru. We're nearing the end.

And on my own, I'm watching The First Frost (Cdrama), which is pathologically repressed m/f roommates-to-lovers. Both of them are skittish for reasons, and I'm enjoying every tiny crumb of progress. I'm about halfway through. (Note: the leads are super pretty. There's probably AI-enhancement going on, blah, but I'm (thankfully) mostly oblivious to that and trying not to think about it.)

Other TV
Wow, it's been a month!! Not that we've been watching a huge amount, but still.

We finished Blocco 181 season 1 (gangs, drugs, interracial tension, m/m/f threesome), watched all of The Other Bennett Sister (really excellent! A+!) and The Tourist season 2 (Irish-Australian black comedy about a hitman with amnesia; season 1 is set in small-town Australia, and season 2 is set in Ireland), and have just started season 2 of Blocco 181 (so far plenty of gangs, drugs and interracial tension).

Sitcoms: Dinosaur (Glaswegian woman with autism and her sister), Fisk (socially awkward Australian and her law office), and People of Earth (support group for "alien experiencers," with Wyatt Cenac).

My sister and I are watching White Collar season 1, awwww.

Once we've finished Miraculous Brothers with our friend, I think we're going to try Legends (hapless customs agents vs drug traffickers in 1980s Britain).

Online life
I have five bursting-at-the-seams browser windows open, which is three too many. I'm going to give myself an amnesty and cull them. | Saw on Instagram a reference to Deepstash (socmed with factual content from books instead of AI slop). I think it was in an ad, though, so who knows? Anyone? It's paid, so I couldn't just give it a try. Not that I have time for another platform anyway. I'm already not quite keeping up with Dreamwidth (but almost). *waves to you all*

Writing/making things
I finished a flashfic (of the niche interest variety), and in the week since posting it have written approximately a dozen words of fiction, total. Like, I poked briefly at the "flashfic" I was writing before that, but mostly it's been rewatch comments and political submissions. Basically, writing and I are on a break. (But it's not long till guardian_wishlist, at which point I'll want to get my head back in the game.)

Life/health/mental state things
I got three political submissions in last week. The last one was just four paragraphs of yelling/scolding, but still.

I'm spending infinitely more time on my phone than I did pre-Chinese, and thanking the stars for my stylus. (Against the odds, I haven't lost it, but I did buy a back-up shaped like a pencil and another backup shaped like a ballpoint pen and incorporating a real ballpoint, a flashlight, and an alleged phone stand that doesn't work (but not a digital clock, because this isn't the 1980s) for $3.50 each, just in case.)

House/car
( State of car, storage/organising, and the oven saga continued. )

Language Learning
( Cut for length. )

Goals
One more political submission to go (graaaaar).
Get the oven in this year, and maybe re-carpet the living room(???).
Get my Chinese reading level up to Elementary by my birthday.

Link dump
Video clip from The Sheep Detectives on the nature of God (Tumblr, via a friend) | I'm sure there were other things I was going to put here, but I really want to get this posted.

Good things
Reading in a new-to-me language (magic!). Biking weather. The gradual imposition of order on my house. Andrew, Halle, my sister, my friends. Hope for the upcoming NZ election (it could go either way, so there is room for hope). TV-watching dates. A wealth of Asian media.

Previous poll reviews
In the Space poll, 44.7% went with Douglas Adams ("that's just peanuts to space"), and the other options were pretty evenly split. Books came second to hugs, 57.4% to 70.2%.

In the Legacy media poll, 82.8% of respondents have a lot of DVDs and access to a DVD or Blu-ray player. Far fewer have cassetts or VHS tapes, and there's only one other person who has Super8/MiniDVD/etc tapes. *high fives* "At this point, it's just a lot of old stuff, help!" garnered 31%. Thank you for your votes! ♥

Reading
A little more Cetaganda (Bujold, narrated by Grover Gardner), and that's all. I haven't even started the little Chinese grammar book I bought for 99 cents. *hides* (It's not that I don't want to; my attention span is currently not conducive to sitting down and doing one thing.)

Kdramas/Cdramas
I finished To My Beloved Thief, which had a slightly draggy ending, but was otherwise a delight. Historical magic realism ftw! It made me want to rewatch the old Hong sisters' version of the Hong Gil-dong story, too (unfortunately, not available in streaming).

Also finished Absolute Value of Romance, which

spoiler

navigated between the ending I didn't want (teacher/student romance), and the ending I craved (teacher is gay) to find a slightly unsatisfying middle ground. I don't know if Ga Woo-Su was actually oblivious to Ui-Ju's love confession or just ignoring it to avoid the awkwardness of rejecting her outright, but an unnecessary childhood connection and significant "first snow" moment kind of point to them getting together in the future, when a) that would still be completely inappropriate and jeopardise his teaching career, AND b) Ga Woo-Su has previously shown no sign of interest in her at all (imo). He and Yoon Dong-Ju are obviously boyfriends or pining for each other! Why on earth else would he have reacted so weirdly to being the second lead in Ui-Ju's webnovel? (Which, btw, was wildly inappropriate.) Someone please write me slash for this!! (Note to self: tag this post for Yuletide.)

So now, in solo-watching, I've started episode 1 of Hong Gil Dong on my phone (ie, on my exercise machine), and gone back to The Spirealm (fantasy horror Cdrama) when I'm in front of the TV.

We're still watching Miraculous Brothers (contemporary thriller, time travel) with a friend at a rate of two episodes per week. The central character is a hot mess with no moral compass but somehow likeable enough that I'm engaged, and the mystery built around a cold case is pretty cool. I'd put it in the same category as Glitch and Sisyphus. Hopefully it will delve into the scifi/supernatural aspects more at some point.

Pru came over for some Love Scout, and even with our erratic viewing schedule, it's completely swoony and great. I think once we're done I'm going to zoom through it again by myself.

Andrew and I watched two episodes of The Story of Pearl Girl (Netflix Cdrama), but the acting is too melodramatic for him, and I want some humour in my shows, so I think we're calling it.

Other TV
We're halfway through the first season of Italian drama Blocco 181, which I heard about on polyamships. It contains a trope I find super stressful

to wit:

leading characters steal drugs from drug dealers, argh,

but the three leads are all really charming. Warning for violence and a ton of drug use.

Finished season 1 of Scottish sitcom Dinosaur, about an autistic woman and her newly engaged sister. It's not laugh-out-loud, but I really like it and am looking forward to season 2.

A bit more Night Train with Wyatt Cenac on Youtube. Vaguely looking around for a new show, preferably English-language.

Audio entertainment
Writing Excuses, Cross Party Lines, and approximately a billion newbie lessons of ChinesePod. (I feel like I'm fiddling while Rome burns, but oh well.)

Writing/making things
This fic is never going to end. I don't even know why I'm writing it anymore. Maybe when we get to fan_flashworks' amnesty round I'll get some momentum back? /o\

Life/health/mental state things
Messing around with storage and sorting out stuff. Biking a lot. Battling brain weasels at night. I'm in my mid-fifties, and I don't know what I'm doing with my life. My arms are hanging in there, just.

Language Learning
I've been posting Chinese practice sentences, vocab, and occasional observations to china_shops_kjnl; feel free to follow. * The fact that I can parrot phrases from the podcast into Google Translate and it mostly comes out with the right characters/meaning still feels like magic. * I'm not learning enough characters. (I don't really know how to learn them except through Duolingo? Possibly ChinesePod's character course?) * I have little previous exposure to gamificiation, ergo no immunity, so Duolingo had eaten a big chunk of my life -- and would be gobbling more if my arms were up for it. (Stylus has arrived; shorter than I expected, but a vast improvement over fingers. I might get another, full-size one.) But I think the podcasts are better for listening and pronunciation anyway.

Goals
1. Sort out my stuff. Throw some of it away. (Do I want to start in on my books/DVDs? /o\)
2. Learn enough Chinese characters that I can read a graded reader.
3. Get started on the project of replacing my ancient gas oven with an induction hob/electric one.

Good things
Making sentences in a new language is really satisfying, and I love noticing grammar patterns and looking them up to see how they work. Podcasts generally. TV-watching-with friends. Walk in the bird sanctuary in the not-quite-rain. Good biking weather forecast for this week. Guardian and the Dreamwidth corner of Guardian fandom. *loves*

Previous poll review
In the Circus poll, 25% of respondents would like to be the knife-thrower, while 18.2% would prefer to be the acrobat. In ticky-boxes, eight hours' sleep beat hugs, 79.5% to 77.3%! Artistic poetry-reciting tigers came third with 54.5%. Thank you for your votes! ♥

Reading
Cetaganda by Bujold (read by Grover Gardner) is fun, but we're not getting through it very quickly for logistical reasons.

I started Ann Leckie's latest Radch book, Radiant Star, read by Adjoa Andoh my beloved, but I'm having trouble focusing. My usual method of audiobook listening is to surf the emotional wave, so to speak, and this is political, worldbuildy omniscient POV. Maybe I should try it in text instead.

I also have some Nghi Vo and the latest Amina al-Sirafi (Shannon Chakraborty) to catch up on, along with the entirety of the 520 Day Guardian Reverse Exchange collection, which went live this week, yay!

Kdramas
I'm super enjoying To My Beloved Thief, a historical that bears similarities to Knight Flower but manages to be crackier. The prince plays against type, which is great, and I'm hanging out for an enemies-to-lovers OT3 (not my usual flavour of OT3, but they're all so entangled). We shall see. No spoilers, please!

Also still into Absolute Value of Romance, though last week's episodes were a bit weird. I'm increasingly conspiracy-theorising that it's a stealth m/m show. Could it be? Surely they realise who their audience is, given the starting premise?! (I haven't been able to watch this week's eps yet. Please don't tell me anything, not even a hint.)

And last weekend, Andrew and our friend Ed and I semi-randomly started a supernatural mystery/thriller called Miraculous Brothers, which I was mostly interested in for Bae Hyun Sung (Hae Joon from Family by Choice). I have no idea where it's going, which is always fun.

Other TV
Pardon My Icelandic - Ari Eldjárn standup special on Netflix. Great linguistic humour, fun with accents. (Hilariously, it came up when I searched for British stand-up.)

Cunk on Earth - one episode. Did not click.

Scrubs (original flavour) has outstayed its welcome. I'm starting to actively dislike JD, and the male-gaziness is off the charts. (Sorry to people who like it!)

The Burroughs - three episodes of the Duffers' new show. It's a bit slow, mostly an exercise in "who's that actor?" but it's only 8 episodes, so we'll probably finish it. (Honestly, I don't think it needs the monsters.) My favourite part is Geena Davis and her younger love interest.

Audio entertainment
Writing Excuses, Better Offline, Tech Won't Save Us (episode: "The UK Government's AI Obsession is a Big Risk w/ Will Dunn" /o\), Cross Party Lines, Guilt-Free Pleasures ("Whitesnake's Here I Go Again"), Dreaming Against the Machine, about 20 minutes of Pod Save America, Keep It Steady episode 7 (timeline cleanse), a bunch of ChinesePod beginner lessons ("不好意思, 我先走了"), and half an episode of You Can Learn Chinese.

Online life
The 520 Day Reverse Exchange is live, yay!!! I'll post separately about my Utterly Delightful Gift and the thing I wrote. I haven't been very present on Dreamwidth, but I've been around a lot, modding and writing, which feels Dreamwidth-adjacent (at least to me).

Writing/making things
I spent an hour on Wednesday rewriting a single sentence in my 520 Day fic. That's sort of how it's going. I have 687 words of a flashfic that I started for the last fan_flashworks round (Avalanche), which I'm now planning to squeeze into this round (Late). Hopefully I'll finish it soon, so I can keep my "one fic a month" average steady. And then I'll get back to my Yuletide fic.

Life/health/mental state things
At some point pre-Covid, I had standing lunch dates every weekday, plus (at one point) multiple weekly language exchange meet-ups and TV-watching dates. These days, almost all of my socialising involves friends coming over here for lunch or dinner/TV. My sole remaining regular lunch-date-in-town friend moved away last year but has been commuting, so we've met up roughly every second week. But she's just taken a job nearer her new place. I still see people a reasonable amount, but soon I won't have regular reasons to leave the house anymore. I may need to do something about that...

Some bad attacks by middle-of-the-night brain weasels lately. Bah!

House
My IKEA shelves arrive next week. I'm trying to plan how to organise things so I don't just stuff them full and close the door. Maybe I should watch some home organisation youtube videos? *loses half an hour* Oops!

Language Learning
I'm still going on Duolingo and Hello Chinese. The former has given me 30 days of free Premium (I can say, 我的爸爸不去中文书店和韩国饭店，你的爸爸呢？-- though, ha, when I came back to it, I didn't recognise the characters for bookstore or restaurant, despite knowing the pinyin.) With Hello Chinese, I'm still on the free option, so I mostly practice the 10 most commonly used characters (这是和不在有一的了人) and 一 to 十) and take the pronunciation quiz. (Typing is still a work in progress, but I'm getting there.) Question: is vocal fry part of 3rd tone? It seems really common, especially when people are enunciating clearly.

NZ politics, argh
( Cut to spare you. )

Good things
520 Day, woohoo! The weather has been conveniently mild. I made lemony fish pie on Friday; it was yum. Imminent new pillow and shelves (both in transit). My car actually started on Friday. A friend is lending us an EV to go up the coast and have lunch with my parents.

Previous poll review
In the Search engine recs poll, 49% of respondents use Google, 46.9% use DuckDuckGo, and 10.2% use StartPage. There were two write-ins for Kagi, a paid search engine that apparently works like it's 2004.

In ticky-boxes, apocalypse fatigue came second to the inevitable winner, hugs, 42.9% to 69.4%. Clumsy parrots came third with 42.9%. Hugs to you all, and thank you for your votes! ♥

Reading
Andrew and I finished Bujold's The Vor Game, and I've downloaded Cetaganda but we haven't started it yet. I've also grabbed the new Murderbot, which might save me from my swamp of easy-listening podcasts.

Still dipping into Refuse to Be Done by Matt Bell. Really need to pick up a novel and devour it with my eyeballs sometime, but I accidentally filled my spare moments with something else (see Language Learning below).

Kdramas
Finished Phantom Lawyer, which was enjoyable enough. I wasn't invested in the romance, but the general vibe was good-hearted and cosy.

The Red Sleeve is heavy on the palace politics, so I don't know how long I'm going to last. Ot1h, Junho; otoh, a hundred scheming ministers and princesses. Maybe I should rewatch The King Loves instead?

Absolute Value of Romance is on a collision course with my DNWs, so I have my fingers crossed that it isn't going where everyone seems to thinks it is.

Other TV
We finished Dark Winds season 4 last night. It is a great show with very charismatic leads.

Still watching Rooster, Fringe, Bluey, Deadloch season 2 (no spoilers, please!) and People of Earth. Also original flavour Scrubs, though the comedy is wearing thin on the workplace bullying and constant misgendering, hmm. (Does the reboot keep those elements?)

Not sure what we're replacing Dark Winds with -- probably the latest season of The Lincoln Lawyer.

Audio entertainment
Like, just way too many episodes of Bill and Frank's Guilt-free Pleasures. /o\ Writing Excuses and half an ep of Cross Party Lines, which is diminished by the loss of one of its hosts to offline politics.

Online life
I'm really enjoying polyamships' prompts for 3weeks4dreamwidth and, similarly, maevedarcy's memes. Continuing to struggle with keeping up with my reading page, but that's probably the new normal.

The Slo-Mo Rewatch on sid_guardian has quietened down a little, but it still absorbs about a quarter of my fannish/writing time, and I love it.

Writing/making things
I'm being incredibly slow to make beta edits to my 520 Day fic. Where do the hours go? Never mind, I'm working reasonably steadily, and that's more important to me than output rates.

Life/health/mental state things
Sleep is improving, but my shoulder's been sore for a week... since I downloaded certain apps. Hm.

I have a number of political submissions on my to-do list, each of which require me to think coherent thoughts.

For those following the saga of my car, we called NZAA on Monday 4 May, took it for a long drive (and finished The Vor Game while we were at it), and it's now snuggled against the bank at the bottom of my path, with the trickle charger theoretically doing its thing. I've only driven it once for non-battery-recharging reasons since the oil crisis started, and that outing was at least partly motivated by keeping the battery charged. I'll see how the Warrant of Fitness goes on Monday.

House
The reputtying is complete, and the builders have decamped with the scaffolding, hooray! The next big job will either be [paint upstairs, replace the 1960s gas oven with electric, and refloor the kitchen] or [replace the toilet with a non-cracked, less water-hungry model, and refloor the bathroom]. Neither of these is super urgent, and both require research, decisions, and expenditure, blah, so I'll catch my breath first.

In the meantime, Andrew is filling some gaps in the kitchen wall, and I've ordered an IKEA shelving unit for the built-in wardrobe in my spare room. Which means soon there'll be less random clutter around the living-room, woohoo! In theory, it won't all go into the cupboard; I'm hoping to dispose of some of it while tidying away the rest.

Language Learning
I've spent the last eight years in a Chinese drama fandom, going, "Sunk cost, sunk cost, Korean is my One True Asian Language Love ♥ ♥ ♥" and "I wouldn't have the first clue how to even start with Mandarin" and "argh, tones! argh, characters!" Now, thanks to starandrea's inspiring/encouraging post about starting their Chinese-learning journey, I have nine-day streaks for both Duolingo and Hello Chinese.

I prefer Hello Chinese: it has a good mix of speaking/listening/reading/writing, a variety of practice options, and occasional audio lessons about usage. I like its focus on teaching grammar-adjacent words like "to be", "this", "possessives", etc, rather than Duolingo's noun clusters (though of course you need both). But I've finished the free portion and am now wrestling with whether I'm actually doing this and whether tracing characters on my screen is what's messing up my shoulder. Also, I had a moment of extreme outrage about stroke orders yesterday, lol.

Idk. I'm not sure how much of this I can cram into my aphantasic little head. *dithers with finger hovering over the "one month" (ie, lowest commitment, least cost-effective) option*

Good things
The re-puttying is complete! My sister's coming over tonight. My lemon tree is singing a song of a hundred lemons. My 520 Day fic is nearly done. Guardian, fandom, Dreamwidth.