idiosyncreant | Recent Entries

I decided to try out the new posting page and ooooh, shiny new things!
...I mean, it's no beauty, but it would be hard to not be *improving* on the previous one, as far as graphic design goes.

I am working on the beginning of the first sleeve of a sweater for my goddaughter's birthday. Which is tomorrow. I seem to be missing a week in here somewhere, because I had the time to make it, I could swear...

Which I am giving up on for the day now. It turned all to fiddly work and I'm just done with it.
(I had nothing else on my schedule to do but knit and write. So of course.
I did about 2 inches of knitting, and no writing.)

The good news?

I have to go to work tomorrow, so I'm probably going to actually accomplish something in the lesser amount of time I have to do it. Why this works I don't know, but I probably would just wear old clothes and never buy anything and stay home if I didn't need to have something else to do so I could actually get around to writing.

I watched Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon while carding wool and spinning today.

I really wanted to watch something straight-up in that vein, because I'm interested in the genre to an extent and actually moreso now I've watched more of the fusion-historical dramas with strains of martial-arts-movie in them.

I heard a lot about the movie when it came out, but only recently saw that the director made Sense and Sensibility, with Kate Winslet, Alan Rickman, Emma Thompson. Now THAT'S such a great contrast it was its own kind of hype to me! I'd noticed the name "Ang Lee" the last time I'd had it out. (Now I see he's done a ton of things, and the beautiful looking Life of Pi that's coming out is his as well...)

In a way, I watched the movie thinking, hmm, this is alright. It's fairly classic Asian cinematic story-telling, and I'm not accustomed to the wuxia tropes well enough to ignore the ridiculousness of certain aspects of the wirework.

And yet...

my brain is just spinning with the images and elements of story--it's the kind of totally archetypical tale that makes it so easy to start thinking of your own ways to adopt things you like.

In that way, it may be the best movie I've seen all year.

Current Mood: kidnapped by bandits is good

So here is the silk I dyed:

It spun up quite nicely, too, except for the fact that my fingers, with their dry patches of callous, kept catching on some of those tiny fibers...

But it seemed to turn out okay! I'm going to ply it with another that's just sheer white.

Also, happy NaNovember to those of you celebrating! I am non-observant this year. Unless you count adding a poem a day and being sure to work on other projects as well as my main novel when I have the time.

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.

I cut (half) of a lock of hair off this morning to poke into a dye-bath, just to test it out.

I am pretty sure the dye bath is not strong enough for conclusive evidence, and I will have to buy twice as much blue KoolAid for the next batch (and in fact, I may buy more and redo this roving, too).

However. I thought you all should be forewarned.

{I am also dyeing one of the silk hankies* that I've left in that hallowed spot of the stash for "things too nice to use" for too long. I am tres excite about this! I hope it takes.)

Current Mood: graaaaah the spam comments!

HALLOWEEEEEN
I dressed up for the first time in years on the actual day, just a kinda bounty-hunter or Spidergirl in Urban Camo remix of my usual clothes with my spider hoodie and huge real worn-in combat boots
And only to work to pick up tips from Saturday and see if there was a schedule up for the month. Still! It was fun.

Anyone else doing anything?

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.

I am chain-reading Tokyo Crazy Paradise, which didn't really strike me much when I first started it, but after a certain point *really* grabbed me. It's an earlier series by Yoshiki Nakamura, writer of Skip Beat, and man...does she do complicated relationships and following through on ins-and-outs of concepts brilliantly.

Manga is one of those forms in which it takes a weird balance of control and lack of embarrassment to make a good one--this is a yakuza manga and it plays to all the tropes that make a story about yakuza cool--the chilly guy, the martial arts, the secret world of heirarchy.

But then the subversions: the heroine is "bodyguard" to the yakuza don hero, the main conflict of power is between her and his arranged fiance (who also is supposed to be a tough woman who can protect him). Of course, there are birth secrets and love triangles and druggings and kidnappings and loss of limbs, but the substance of it is something indefinably more than it's elements.

***

...I really know I've had a stressful week when I don't wanna work on anything, not even a drama, and just read manga, though. Yesterday I went from work to my old place of work, where I was to promote the pumpkin patch parable book I did drawings for as the illustrator, there for a signing.

I brought my spindle and demonstrated that to make it a little less awkward.

Tomorrow morning, I'm up at 5:46 to take my dad to work, so we can have the extra car while he's gone on a business trip for the week!

I think I am going back to bed after that thought. Phew.

On Twitter this was promoted by a friend as "steampunk Jane Eyre"--naturally, I was onto this like jam to toast. My library had a copy, even!

"Steampunk Jane Eyre" was enough to get me to order it, but it's not precisely the best descriptor. It's more of a fae-in-early-Industrial Age urban fantasy.

It *is* however, a Jane Eyre-made-fantasy. And marvellous.

A factoid that I found a bit startling to just read without warning--an early novellette version of this K.D. Wentworth told Connelly it read as a Jane Eyre story, and it's since been developed into that more fully.

It works as a skeletal structure for a fantasy story quite beautifully--of course, horror-tinged paranormal stories do tend toward the Gothic. This retelling has cleverly detoured the often-troublesome midway of St. John and Sisters in the original (much like the recent movie) without removing it.

( more disconnected thoughts )

Overall, a truly strong debut--I really look forward to seeing what Connolly does next. I'd even recommend if you're going to buy some new books to read this is a good one! And I hesitate to tell people how to part themselves from their money.

Actually, I had an idea that you could do something similar with Rebekah, except I don't think I should be the one to write that book, so...

Just put in some tulip bulbs. Some of the ones in the beds are trying to come up again, they are WELL confused by the current weather, apparently.

I hope they do well--they're suppose to come up a beautiful burgundy-black color. I'm not in love with tulips usually, they tend toward flat colors. But these! BLACK AS MIDNIGHT which means velvety purple.

Oh, I hope I hope...

It also feels so good to get dirt, good clean dirt, on the hands. Dirt you've built yourself from eggshells and coffee grounds, dust piles and orange rinds.

I need to go stand out on the raised bed, where I've cleared the weeds, and let some of that good jive of the dirt soak up from the soles of my feet, too.

They warn us to beware the mandolin blade when slicing vegetables--
I have cut myself twice on the plastic wrap box.

I mean, I should probably count my blessings and knock on some wood, but wrap-blade cuts are like paper cuts--annoying, and unheroic.

One of the silly things on my to-do list was change my journal theme, since the old one was no longer making me happy just to see it.

TADA~

it's one of the kinds where you have it on your f-list too, which...I may never be able to read my f-list without squinting again, but it's PRETTY, haha.

Today's been a pretty good walking of the impossible line for last-day-before-work day: both accomplishing things and getting a break.

Morning Pages. Posted new yarn to Etsy*. Watched The Half-Blood Prince**. Did laundry. Did yoga. Wrote some fiction pages. Ate a couple of times.

Right about now I'm panicking about not having updated my Tumblr, or done my Essential Oils webvideo. But over the weekend I glued some shoes back together, reorganized my wool cabinet, and asked my cousin for my god-daughters measurements, now I'm half-finished with her sweater.

So. It's a relative triumph.

*the yarn is my first K-Pop themed one:

NOT A MONSTER

**Half-Blood Prince was one of my favorites of the books that came later. This gorgeous movie did so much justice to the elements and concepts that are awesome about the story I fell for it way more than I've felt anything for Harry Potter in some time...
Also, Draco wears homg great suits in this, yowz.

The library was thronged with teens this evening when I got there to kill an hour or two,
after dropping the kids off at dance, before my yoga class.

I went back to the bathroom and pulled the sweats out from under my skirt and redid my hair,
just to not feel like they might be snickering at me, and because the legs were sliding down
(the bathroom there feels like a church or school bathroom--I don't know why
I always end up changing my outfit or fixing my hair there, when I hardly ever do that
away from home unless it's really necessary at work.

I sat in a booth close to the table where some high school students were "studying"
and felt that sense of dislocation, to not be their age anymore, and to have forgotten
...the inanity of it, as well as the desperateness?

I need to eavesdrop on more teens. I can't keep writing on my own experience anymore--
first, because I had such an atypical experience of being a teenager, that while it serves
(very vividly) as material, it's not enough.

And then, as I tried to read Rolling Stone over the phone conversation one was having
with a boyfriend (one half of a cellphone volume conversation is impossible to block out)
I saw that Gangnam Style got into Rolling Stone, with some notes on the music video.

So I put that on Tumblr.
It has more likes than anything else I've put on that blog, of course, so apparently I'm not the last person to see...

or why two shows I was thinking about watching swapped priorities after Ep. 1 of each.

I was pretty excited about this show--Lee Min Ho's comeback, a nice noona romance maybe, a pretty show with some whack elements, and a certain sense of humor.

( and I'm even pretty sure it delivers! )

Whereas Arang and the Magistrate?

( is that show that I fell for instead )

meme, originally written for Tumblr, but fabricalchemist was doing it here, too, so...

( Layers - which could be a cool concept in a meme, but this is not that meme )

Thought I'd slithered out of doing the food all week at the Belvidere Mansion, but it has transpired elsewise.

Hurrah?

Thing is, as long as I've slithered out of getting up and out the door at 6:30 to drop my dad off all those days, well, same difference.

Though I do feel bad about getting picked up, like the shiftless rogue I only wish to be.

I got some cabbage soaking in salt before I left this morning, for kimchi. Because I might as well be an overachiever, now I've slithered out of some of it...

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.

Today I managed to do everything, except write, which is next.

I'm not always writing what I *want* to be, right now (my novel is fighting, I think because I'm boring it) but at least getting to do something. Okay, not always writing what I THINK I should be. Not the same, eh?

I'm not doing good posting about my second round with The Artist's Way, because I already *talked* about that here, and I am stupidly averse to repeating myself. But I am at least rereading and refocusing with it, and feeling better all the time.

I put lemon oil on my temples for an essential oils video, and was reading the bit where she talks about artists needing to withdraw, and I said, "Feh with this, I'm going to go spin some TOP yarn" and put on my earphones and zoned out so hard I took them off later feeling like I'd napped or cried, rather than just sat and done fiber work.

I also read this poem/story today, and thought it was incredible:

Spark by Steve Taose, in Jabberwocky Magazine.

...I also, on my to-do list, got to read a great story by Ken Liu he's entering into a contest on the Codex Forum, which I can critique as a non-~~combatant~~ participant. :gloat: It'll probably be MONTHS or even next year before you can read it. But I will take pity and let you know about it when that happens.

I am having growing-pains with this TOP yarn, not sure of myself because I'm not happy with the motley look of my past several, and am trying to find a way to make it look dynamic, and am holding myself to a certain standard.
But.
I think I'm going to figure it out.

i dunno, I feel like there's a story here, so I am posting this.

Also, Avengers is for rent on iTunes, but it said it would be FOUR HOURS DOWNLOADING
for the love of Pete
I could probably find a pirate download that in half that time, translating from the Chinese
but at least I was downloading it to a computer no one's using today?

IT'S NOT EVEN HD
and these people tell me that computer doesn't run slow.

hisashiburiiiiiii Drama Filter!

So. I haven't been watching much of anything...at my normal pace. And have been posting random thoughts on a Tumblr account. But that Tumblr account is not giving me the gratification of actual interaction. SO HERE I AAAAAM.

*
And here is Oguri Shun, oh mama

I would like to note that if I'd seen THIS poster for the show instead of whatever dramafever was using, I probably would have picked it up before half the dramanet was crying love for it, but this is aside the point.

"Rich Man, Poor Woman" like many English word-play titles for speakers of another language, not really all that accurate.
More like "genius boy, study girl" tho she has her own little corner on the genius market, which is a plot point that does not get overused OR underused, props to the writers!

Oguri Shun's latest character is an autism-spectrum tech innovator whose company launched through unique cellphone games. He has a secretary-type vice-president who cleans up after him, since you can dress him up but you can't take him out.

(Oguri's work on the physicality of this character who is a little bit awkward when behaving, and spastic when relaxed, was kind of jaw-dropping: uncool, very real, and almost unself-conscious.)

The girl is one of those poor sots graduating over-educated in an over-staffed field--a brain but without that spark. She's pounding the pavement for jobs when she comes to his company. She gets picked out to be looked down on by President Hyuga--she's about had it up to here with her failure to find jobs and stammers back, confrontational but not making a dent in the swagger of this guy.

Who has come a long way from his origins, too, okay:

Aaaaanyway, no need to say fate throws them together.

Things to love about this show:

1) There is no romanticizing of Hyuga's social ineptitude.
He's not a swaggering Alpha, typical in his suaveness when insulting girls, and yet oozing so much sexiness the girl has to take it as a compliment. (as much as I've enjoyed some of those.)
He's honestly in trouble because of his brusqueness with his board, for example, and it's more his vision and brilliance with problem-solving that appeals.

2) The deep emotional connection with where the characters are.
Ugh, one of the things some J-dramas get right is pulling you into the heart of the character without physicalizing it at all. The girl looks up and smiles after seeing him go off with the other girl and you *ache*. Same for the guy character.

who
3) is realistically obtuse sometimes. Hah.

4) the end I was rolling my eyes at the teaser. "Not the AIRPORT. Drama, no!" But. In fact, they do a cool thing of letting the girl, off doing her own work apart from her guy interest, and that is accepted by him. Is this a spoiler? Kind of... But it's a character moment that's great, too.

Um, and, Ishihara Satomi is CRAZY CUTE.

It's only 11, tightly written episodes.

The Dramanets was right to be going crazy.

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.

it's so nice that no matter how long you wait for something to be published, it feels unbearable more than ever, but in retrospect it's all exactly the same...

The first issue of Through The Gate has gone up! It looks great so far.

And the poem I am proud to have in it is "Things you would pack when taken hostage."

Let me know what you think of it!

I'm just going to say a few words

CONGRATULATIONS FABRICALCHEMIST

on this day of the week almost exactly a year ago (yea, verily a year tomorrow)

She had a fabulous party! Oh, and also got married. Confetti and sidewalk chalk! IT WAS AMAZING

so, wishing you and your TSH cook fella many many more

TOP says so too, once he gets over his handsome self, especially to the TinyCap child of yours!

That is all.

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.

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Page generated Jun. 6th, 2025 10:21 am

Ever Bethany

do we make it out alive?

Recent Entries

but I did start a new k-drama, because that's important (yes, WHILE knitting, I'm not totally stupid

Brain Candy

I am in a fiber phase...

schemes in KoolAid

Every Day We're Cosplaying

a various, including old manga

Ironskin by Tina Connolly

gardening: an exercise in mighty optimism.

working woes

and last on my list of accomplishments!

(no subject)

adventures in party town Claremore

Arang vs. Faith - Fusion Sageuk FACE OFF

oh right, and there was this

I'll toss you a salad.

sundry.

cute faces. we are weak to them

ugh LJ, your photo thing is now COMPLETELY BROKEN THANKS FOR THAT

a day long awaited

HAPPY HAPPY

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June 2022

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