genarti: ([tutu] dance your own story)
genarti ([personal profile] genarti) wrote2025-05-31 12:08 am

A couple of recent theatrical experiences

1. Roméo et Juliette at the Boston Ballet

This was incredible???

More rambling about that )

If you're in the Boston area and interested, it's open through June 8 and I highly recommend it.

(ETA: [personal profile] skygiants has also written this up in a much more detailed blow-by-blow way!)

2. Fun Home with The Burlington Players

Another great show, although this one isn't still going; we saw one of the last performances of the run, a couple weeks ago.

More thoughts (briefer) )

...And I'll leave this post there, because it's already long and the hour is late. I was going to add in an art show that I had a pottery piece in (!?!?! I'm delighted and that still feels fake) but that'll get its own post, instead, in a day or two. I'm mentioning it all the same to remind myself to follow through.
skygiants: Rue from Princess Tutu dancing with a raven (belle et la bete)
skygiants ([personal profile] skygiants) wrote2025-05-30 11:23 pm
Entry tags:

(no subject)

The Boston Ballet production of Maillot's Romeo et Juliette has turned out to be not only my favorite Boston Ballet production that I've seen so far but also tbh one of my favorite Romeo and Juliets full stop. It is Taking Swings and Making Choices and some of them are very weird but all of them are interesting.

we're just gonna go ahead and cut for length )
cyborganize: (fan voy spectacle)
cyborganize ([personal profile] cyborganize) wrote in [community profile] wiscon_vidparty2025-05-30 02:24 pm

Wiscon Vid Party 2025 complete playlist with warnings

Surprise! By a heroic effort of [personal profile] eruthros, a virtual Vid Party happened at this year's Wisconline.

Here is the playlist for the whole show, including warnings/notes and links to watch the vids.

I want to highlight one Premiere: Deep Space by [personal profile] garrideb

If you check out and enjoy any of the vids from this show, I know the creators would really appreciate a comment!
shadaras: A phoenix with wings fully outspread, holidng a rose and an arrow in its talons. (Default)
shadaras ([personal profile] shadaras) wrote2025-05-29 07:25 pm
Entry tags:

(no subject)

occasionally I remember that I actually have the ability to make polls (which I think is because someone gifts me dw paid time periodically? it is very sweet, thank you, I make basically no intentional effort to use those perks and usually forget I have them)

anyway I have been thinking about this and so:

Poll #33178 so if your journey to work involves multiple steps...
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 25


...how long is your commute?

View Answers

8 min (length of time you drive)
2 (8.0%)

20 min (amount of time it takes to reach your workplace)
9 (36.0%)

35 min (how long before work starts you gotta leave)
14 (56.0%)



Context:

I work at a site which is 5-10min away depending on lights/traffic. At the hour when I drive to work in the morning, it averages like 8min to get to the parking lot I must park in (which is further than the actual work site). I must get there before the shuttle to the work site leaves. I tend to get there like 10min before the shuttle leaves because I hate being late. Once the shuttle departs, it doesn't take long to get to the site, and then we are sitting there in the break room for ~15min before work actually begins.

Like! To be clear! This is not a bad commute even at the long form! I just! Don't enjoy being asked to show up to work 20min before work begins/before they'll pay me for my time! (Will I show up early on principle if it's by my choice? Sure.)

(also yes I suppose I could get there later and walk from the parking lot to the site, but uh that would get Commented On unless I still showed up at the work site at least 10min before work begins, so I'd rather just take the bus...)
asakiyume: (feathers on the line)
asakiyume ([personal profile] asakiyume) wrote2025-05-29 05:42 pm

read the comments

It's a general truth of online life that you shouldn't read the comments--it's where the virulent nastiness lives.

Every now and then, that's not true though. After falling in love with the song "Xam Xam," by Cheikh Ibra Fam, I let Youtube take me on a tour of related songs.

It brought me "Gambia," by Sona Jobarteh, a beautiful song written to celebrate 50 years of Gambian independence (in 2015).

I happened to glance at the comments, and--my heart!
I'm a German, 55 years and my husband was a Gambian. He died here in Germany in 2011 (cancer). Today he would have celebrated his 62nd birthday. In 1998 he took me to his country and we spent there two years. This was the most beautiful time in my life. For the first time in my life, I felt like real living – I felt alive like never before. So I want to say "thank you" to my husband again, who showed me a place where my soul could breath. Whenever I feel down, doubting what this life is all about, I go back in my mind and think of those glory days.

And this...
Oh, i can recognise my grandmother at the end of this clip dancing with a group of women's. Thank you sister sona for futuring my granny. This will go down in history. Gambia for ever true.

And this...
I am from Ukraine and this music made me cry. It touches something deep in my heart. I think we missed Africa and we miss it. I play it and dance in the kitchen. I would like the whole world to go out in the streets and dance African dances. As not only live in our brains, but also in our bodies and our hearts.

And this..
From Somalia 🇸🇴 much love ❤️ our brothers & sisters 🇬🇲 beautiful country & beautiful people ❤️

And on and on...

"Am from Uganda ... I am from the Caribbean ... I'm a dutch old (63) man ... I'm latina from Colombia ... Je suis de la Côte d'Ivoire 🇨🇮 ... I'm Argentinian ... I'm a Proud ERITREAN-AFRICAN ... I am from India ... I'm a japanese student ... I'm from Morocco ... I am welsh ... I am from Spain ... I am white African from Mozambique ... I'm Nigerian ... I am peruvian ... I am from Croatia ... I am from Bangladesh .... I am Congolese... Sending love from Ghana ... Greetings and best wishes from Latvia..."

(And several from the United States, too.)

All full of love for the song. Really made me feel like part of one human family.
mrissa: (Default)
mrissa ([personal profile] mrissa) wrote2025-05-29 06:49 am
Entry tags:

Beasts of Carnaval, by Rosália Rodrigo

 

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Sofía has been waiting for years for her twin brother Sol to return. He was taken away by their former owner, now employer, to serve as his valet during a stay at an expensive resort, and neither of them has been heard from since. Adalina, her owner's daughter and her best friend, insists on accompanying her--which means Sofía has access to the absolute most lavish and decadent aspects of the resort while she's searching for her father.

This is, however, a fantasy novel. So the resort is ominously not the paradise it seems. Instead of having her questions answered, Sofía gets lost in a jumbled spiral that even her scientist mind can't make sense of. No one around her seems to notice that anything is wrong, but the one thing she can hold onto--she hopes--is that she is there to find Sol, or at least find out what happened to him.

Most of the other specifics I could give here would be major spoilers, so I will just say some more elements of this book: intense grappling with the interpersonal ramifications of colonialism. Aro-ace heroine. Stubborn, imperfect, caring community members whose vision for their community doesn't always line up. Deeply weird magic happenings. And, of course, the titular Carnaval, in all its vivid glory.

mrissa: (Default)
mrissa ([personal profile] mrissa) wrote2025-05-28 08:50 pm
Entry tags:

Mad Sisters of Esi, by Tashan Mehta

 Review copy provided by the publisher.
 
I like books that don't follow a standard hero's journey or quest narrative, and wow, is this in that category. This one has--and this by itself should tell you a large part of whether you want to read it--a gigantic whale of space--in space? but also comprising space? and multiple worlds inside the whale, that part is certain. Doors into unfolding different worlds, all inside the whale.

The whale used to be something else, but *what* else is a spoiler.
 
So there is more worldmaking than worldhopping here, and the titular sisters--there are two pairs of candidates for the title--are trying to figure out what madness means in their context. It is not a book that is trying to make a commentary on mental health in our own context, or if it is, it's being very roundabout and obscure about it. But there is a lot about how cultures construe madness, sanity, fitting in and not.
 
And there are indeed sisterhoods, very strong sororal relationships. And also space whale. Which you might like, and if so, step right up, here it is.
bloodygranuaile: (Default)
bloodygranuaile ([personal profile] bloodygranuaile) wrote2025-05-28 10:59 am

A fun thing to read after personally dropping many balls in these past few weeks

May’s book club pick was a book I’d vaguely intended to read back when it was published when I was in college and I simply have never gotten around to: Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson’s Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. I remember when this book came out and I’m pretty sure I read excerpts in magazines or interviews with the authors or such other press coverage at the time it was published, although now that I think about it I also think it was a hot enough subject in the years immediately following its publication that I read some excerpts or summaries or something multiple times when I was reviewing various social science textbooks for Pearson in 2011-2013 or so.

As a result, the main ideas in this book weren’t brand new to me–I was already familiar with basic psychological concepts like the fundamental attribution error, and terms like “cognitive dissonance.” It was probably a good refresher to go over what they mean, and there was a lot of interesting stuff in the details. I was also at least sort of familiar with some of the problems with police interrogation and general magical thinking in the criminal justice system, though I think that going over the specifics was quite valuable. The scandals around “recovered memories” I knew less about, although I am pretty sure I have read a little bit about it before (I read a lot of psych 101 textbooks when I was working for Pearson, OK?) and knew that “recovered memories” were hokum (dangerous hokum).

This is not all to say that I am so smart or the book is soooo basic or whatever but this is a longstanding area of at least some measure of interest; I’ve always been interested in questions of perception and self-perception and why otherwise apparently normal people are Like That, and the past almost-decade of time spent in activist spaces laboriously trying to establish halfway decent social norms in the face of people who are always super gung-ho for other people to Take Accountability but are all special pleading when it comes to their own behavior has not exactly made the subject any less relevant.

The chapter about conflicts of interest in science funding seems uhh very important and relevant to the various scandals and such contributing to our current “crisis of authority” and general anti-intellectualism/epistemological fuckery going on in society at large. Let us, in fact, compromise the science! This will surely have no bad downstream effects in terms of how much the public trusts science and scientists! Hey, why are all these people rejecting science? Don’t they know we are smart and objective? It’s bad news.

If I have one critique of the book it’s that by the end of it, the examples get so wide-ranging that it starts to feel a little One Weird Trick About All of Human Existence-y, even though the authors are careful not to actually say that and are in fact doing exactly what they set out to do, which is to look at this specific facet of human psychology at work in a range of situations that, you know, humans find themselves in. It’s not that I think they are wrong it’s just that it feels fundamentally weird to read like “This thing that is why these two people’s marriage fell apart is also what was going on in the Iran hostage crisis”; like, this is just an insane set of things put next to each other, even though I suppose it is in fact true that nobody saw themselves as the bad guys in the Iran hostage crisis either. It’s not that the book is necessarily weak when discussing politics–it’s pretty strong in many parts–so much as it is weak when it is zooming around too much instead of making a sober case study of, for example, George W. Bush’s inability to admit that the war in Iraq was a) going poorly and b) based on lies, or the idiotic things the Western imperial powers say when they do torture while also seeing themselves as great defenders of human rights.

A good chunk of the book examines self-justification in family dramas, especially marriages, which is probably more immediately relevant to the average reader than self-justification around doing war crimes. I hope. At any rate, it effectively conveys that this is a basic part of everyday psychology that we could all benefit from developing more self-awareness about. As some of my comrades once said in a training about using the chapter Slack: If you think this isn’t about you, then it’s definitely about you.

In conclusion, it is important to Know Thyself, and also don’t talk to cops–they’re legally allowed to lie to you.
sartorias: (Default)
sartorias ([personal profile] sartorias) wrote2025-05-27 06:00 am
Entry tags:

New Book...

 

Brigadoon meets Buffy

When I wrote the first of the series, a couple friends said, you can’t ignore the vampires. So I put them in because yeah, they were a thing in Eastern Europe.(Maria Theresia sent investigators, even, in the mid-1700s...) But I don't read horror, and I'm indifferent to vamps unless they are characters, not monsters, so I tried to play around with the uncanny valley/alien idea. 

In THE PRINCESS AND THE SLAYMATE, Ruli, a new vampire, is trying to adjust to this change in…can you call it a life? She’s lost everything. But that including her old reputation for weakness and lack of direction, as she discovers the lure of badassery. 

At the same time, Kim and the crown prince of Dobrenica are on their honeymoon at last, but just as she and Alec are relishing the magic of Venice, they find themselves cornered and nearly grabbed by goons. Whose? More important, why? They have to figure out the roadmap to royal marriage while on the run.

Kim reaches out to Ruli for answers, and so begins a wild adventure as ancient enemies redefine what it means to be human. And inhuman. 

 

skygiants: shiny metal Ultraman with a Colonel Sanders beard and crown (yes minister)
skygiants ([personal profile] skygiants) wrote2025-05-27 07:39 am

(no subject)

I've had great luck in the past with the sort of kdrama in which an angry immortal supernatural woman has to hang out in contemporary Seoul with a nice mortal boy. We were hoping The Judge From Hell would be that sort of kdrama, and, technically, it is; I think in its heart it would love to be Hotel del Luna. Unfortunately, it has also decided that what it wants to be is a violent revenge fantasy with incoherent and punitive ethics. Interspersed with wacky shenanigans! and a healthy dose of Catholicism?

Okay, so the premise: our heroine is Justitia, the DEMON JUDGE of the UNDERWORLD, THIRD IN LINE to the THRONE OF HELL, whose job is to sentence unrepentant murderers to unending torments. However, when a nice young judge gets murdered and accidentally ends up in her domain instead of the lesser hell where she belongs, Justitia refuses to listen to her pleas of innocence, gets ready to sentence her anyway, and promptly gets her wrist slapped by her superiors: she's gotten complacent! Time to go to Earth, wearing the body of the dead judge, and learn! about JUSTICE!!!

Given that Justitia's initial mistake involved accidentally sentencing an innocent person, you might be forgiven for thinking that Justitia's job on Earth might involve perhaps getting justice for the wrongly accused, or learning to temper justice with mercy and a little bit of nuance, or even uncovering faults and corruption within the justice system as it exists. haha! no. Justitia's job is to hit a quota of Unrepentent, Unforgiven Murderers On Earth and sentence them to unending torment, just like in her day job. She does this by chasing them around a sequence of nightmare scenarios that mimic the things they have done to their victims and beating them up, then stamping them on the forehead with a little stamp that says GEHENNA while then the doors of hell open and an ominous voice roars GEHENNA!!!! and they get sucked into hell. We did not enjoy the excruciating sequences of murderers being chased around a sequence of nightmare scenarios that mimicked the things they had done to their victims, which the show obviously wants us to find cathartic and satisfying. We did enjoy the ominous voice that roared GEHENNA!!!! It made us laugh every time.

this got long but tbh not as long as it could have been. this show was so incoherent )
asakiyume: (tea time)
asakiyume ([personal profile] asakiyume) wrote2025-05-24 09:16 am
Entry tags:
asakiyume: (shaft of light)
asakiyume ([personal profile] asakiyume) wrote2025-05-23 12:00 pm

acorn bread and açaí

acorn bread

The leftover acorn meal I had in my fridge had gone moldy! Ah well. Fortunately I had acorns left over from last time, so I ground those up, leached them, dried them, and yesterday made a loaf of ... well it's mainly white bread--three cups white flour--but also a cup of acorn meal. So I am going to call it acorn bread, the same way you call a thing banana bread even though it's not mainly bananas.

Behold its majesty!

acorn bread

I still have leftover meal from this batch of acorns, but I will not make the same mistake twice by letting it linger. I intend to make acorn pancakes, or perhaps I'll use it to make some kind of meatballs or fish cakes.

Açaí

Or asaí, as they spell in in Colombia. We in America use the Brazilian (i.e., Portuguese) spelling. In Tikuna it's waira.

Açaí juice (wairachiim) is so beloved in the Amazon. And with reason--it's GREAT. Drink it sweetened, and with fariña, and it's a real pick-me-up:

Asaí and fariña

The Açaí palms are very tall and very skinny. Traditionally, harvesting the berries involves a not-very-heavy person shimmying up the palm with a knife and cutting off the bunches of berries, as in the YouTube short below. (I say traditionally because in some parts of Brazil I think there are now large plantations, and they may have a mechanized way of doing this. But still--I gather--many many people do it the unmechanized way.)

The video specifies Brazil, but it'll be true anywhere that açai grows


My tutor's dad does this. Here's a picture not of her dad but of her boyfriend with a bunch of berries--gives a sense of how big they are:

a bunch of açai

And the process of making the juice is really labor intensive too. Here's my tutor's mom pounding it. You add water as you go along:

pounding açai

This year the river has really risen high, and in talking about it, my tutor said her dad had been able to go out in canoe and collect the asaí really easily. And I was thinking... wait... you mean the river's risen so high that he's up near the top of the trees? Is that what she's telling me?

I wasn't sure, so I did this picture in MS word (b/c I have no digital drawing tools) and sent it to her and asked, You mean like this?

high water makes getting açai easy

And she said, "Yes, exactly."

Mind = blown.
sartorias: (Default)
sartorias ([personal profile] sartorias) wrote2025-05-23 05:39 am
Entry tags:

Ostrich

It'a tough to engage with the world and its events when the media largely pursues a bread-and-circuses approach in order to catch attention. I realize that that attitude doesn't come out of nowhere, that human beings do turn to look and linger at a crash site.

But it does no good whatsoever for anyone to feel my heart tearing in pieces over any news coming out of Washington DC, either engendered by the assclowns currently infesting governmental centers, or in the environs (the recent shooting) so my intention to ostrich becomes more vigorous. What's more, the spouse, who usually watches the news every waking moment, even turned off the yatter yesterday.

I try to fill my time with purpose and pleasure that harms no one. Plan things I hope will bring pleasure to others, like: my sister's seventieth is coming up. I took a slew of our old super eight films to a place to get them converted and color corrected, to surprise her with--I hope. One of those super-eights is from 1948, when the parents' generation were all young, all those voices gone now. Most of the films are from the sixties and early seventies, before my parents split; then they start up again in the eighties with my spouse having bought us a camera.

It's going to take time to convert that stuff--the small box I chose will be just under a grand. Phew. But I've been waiting years for the price to come down, and I figure I daren't wait any longer.

In just for me, I'm busy reworking some very early stories. And realizing that ostriching was a defense mechanism that started in when I was very young, coming out in my passion for escape-reading and for storytelling.

The storytelling urge was very nearly a physical reaction,a kind of invisible claw right behind my ribs, partly that urge, and partly a shiver of anticipation. I can remember it very clearly when I was six years old, in first grade. I already knew how to read, but that was the grade in which public schools in LA taught reading, so I got to sit by myself and draw while the others were taught the alphabet and phonics. Writing stories was laborious, and I got frustrated easily if I didn't know how to spell a word, but I learned fast that adults only had about three words' of patience in them before they chased me off with a "Go play!" or, if I was especially mosquito-ish, "Go clean your room!" or "Wash the dishes!" (That started when I turned 7)

But drawing was easy, and I could narrate to myself as I illustrated the main events. So I did that over and over as the other kids struggled thru Dick and Jane. This became habit, and gave me a focus away from the social evolution of cliques--I do recall trying to make myself follow the alpha girl of that year (also teacher's pet, especially the following year) but I found her interests so boring I went back to my own pursuits.

I do remember not liking the times between stories; I was happiest when the images began flowing, but I never really pondered what that urge was. It was just there. I knew that most didn't have it, and for the most part I was content to entertain myself, except when we had to read our efforts aloud in class, there was an intense gratification if, IF, one could truly catch the attention of the others and please them as well as self. I remember fourth grade, the two class storytellers were self and a boy named Craig. His were much funnier than any of my efforts. Mine got wild with fantasy, which teachers frowned on. I tried to write funny and discovered that it was HARD. It seemed to come without effort to Craig.

In junior high, I finally found a tiny coterie of fellow nerds who like writing, and we shared stories back and forth. Waiting for a friend to come back after reading one and give her reactions made the perils of junior high worth enduring. One of those friends died a couple summers ago, and left her notebooks to me. In eighth/ninth grade, she wrote a Mary Sue self-insert about the Beatles. I have it now--it breathes innocence, and the air of the mid sixties. Maybe I ought to type it up and put it up at A03. I think she'd like it to find an audience, even if it's as small an audience as our tiny group back then.

Anyway, a day is a great day if I have a satisfying project to work on...and I don't have to hear a certain name, which is ALWAYS reprehensible. Always. And yet has a following. But...humans do linger to look at the tcrash site.
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
Tucker McKinnon ([personal profile] jazzfish) wrote2025-05-22 11:22 am
Entry tags:

HELLO DYING I AM DAD

I'm in Minneapolis with Steph and two round cats, and the sun is shining.

I flew through Saskatoon this time, for reasons that escape me but probably had to do with it being half the price of a direct flight. The flight to Saskatoon was pretty full; Sask-Mpls had somewhere under forty people (I counted), on a 32x6-seat plane.

Having no one else in your row in economy feels positively luxurious.

I've some homework to do today, and some to do in the next few days. I promised to make banana bread today as well. Mostly I'm enjoying the sunshine and the company.
LUCAS: You know, I think things are gonna be alright now, Joe.
JOE: Oh? And what makes you think that?
LUCAS: Who knows where thoughts come from? They just appear.
--Empire Records
sartorias: (Default)
sartorias ([personal profile] sartorias) wrote2025-05-21 08:40 am
Entry tags:

Quick rec

I've been snowed by various loads of stuff, including reading subs for Viable Paradise's workshop in October. My reading has been sporadic, and usually language-related. Like, I'm making my glacial way through a really good biography of Liselotte von her Pfalz, which is in German. I'm reading French comics, and so on and so on.

But! When I lumber this old bod out for daily steps, I listen to audiobooks. I've been making my way through T. Kingfisher's stories, and enjoyed them, but took a break for a real delight called RAVENMASTER, by Christopher Skaife. He wrote about his job as Ravenmaster at the Tower of London.

I'm sure the printed book is just fine--it's vigorously written, full of all kinds of facts as well as legends, etc, and sprinkled with humor. But I highly recommend the audio book, which he narrated. He has a great voice, which adds to the sheer delight. I wish it was longer.

OK, back to work trying to crawl back into my twelve-year-old headspace so I can finish a project that has been hanging fire for too many years.
boxofdelights: (Default)
boxofdelights ([personal profile] boxofdelights) wrote in [community profile] wiscon2025-05-20 10:40 am

Panels needing panelists

These #WisCon panels still need panelists:

We've lost some people and are looking for panelists on the below:

May 23 Fri7:00-7:45pm | Breathe the Pressure: Burnout and Recovery for Creatives

May 24 Sat10:00-10:45am | Pathways to Publishing

May 24 Sat4:00-4:45pm | Small Press Publishing

Please email Panels@WisCon.sf3.org if you are able to participate!
jazzfish: Pig from "Pearls Before Swine" standing next to a Ball O'Splendid Isolation (Ball O'Splendid Isolation)
Tucker McKinnon ([personal profile] jazzfish) wrote2025-05-19 07:23 pm

waving and/or drowning

Okay well that was extremely not fun and I am gonna vote for not doing it again, as soon as I figure out what it was and how to not do it.

Three weeks? Two and a half. Whatever. I spent another week or so recovering from covid. I honestly don't know if I'm fully recovered even yet: Shortness Of Breath is still a thing. As is Tires Easily, but, well. I spent the entirety of last week and probably a little more in a depressive episode. Bit of chicken and egg there, or vicious cycle maybe. Lots of sitting on the couch not doing anything, including classwork (finished the assignment by yelling at myself a lot, and I'm not particularly happy with it but at least it's done).

Putting Myself Out There is, it turns out, a reliable depression trigger. Dating, brand-new social situations, writing submissions... and jobhunting is perhaps the worst case for this. Against my best efforts I absorbed a lot of "if you don't support yourself then no one will ever love you" messages growning up. So jobhunting is just a desperate quest for external validation with extra steps. Jobhunting while not having a job, and in a brand-new-to-me field while the economy circles the drain, is just depression-fuel icing on the depression-fuel cake.

I try the normal things and mostly they're just more difficult and less fulfilling. Got a little sun, until it started clouding and raining in the middle of the week. Staying on top of ishes / apartment-tidying was more or less a lost cause. I went out to role-playing on Saturday but that didn't shake it either. It lifted, more or less, Saturday night or Sunday, and on Sunday I went over to Noel's for a full day of boardgaming and that was actually quite good.

My depression is very clearly situational and triggered, so I keep thinking I can manage it by managing my situations. That's of course not possible, not fully. And when it hits me it knocks me out -so- hard. Once job etc is sorted I am gonna have to look into pharmaceutical intervention.

Need to take my last midterm tomorrow; been reviewing notes etc today EDIT or I could just knock it out right now, that was not too terrible /EDIT. Need to wrap up the practicum stuff as well but there's no huge rush on that. Maybe this coming week.

Bah.
shadaras: A phoenix with wings fully outspread, holidng a rose and an arrow in its talons. (Default)
shadaras ([personal profile] shadaras) wrote2025-05-19 03:48 pm

(no subject)

I think like half the reason I'm posting because I'm like "oh good I don't need to write a real post about first two episodes of the Murderbot show, I can just point at [personal profile] hafnia's post and go: yes! that!"

(The show's good, I'm delighted by the vibe of it, the overall aesthetic is excellent and I love all the characters. Looking forward to seeing more <3)

Other things:

[community profile] auctionsasthreatened is a fandom event (technically a multifandom fanwork exchange) that is taking all the mental/social energy I have to spare and I'm not even doing much for it. xD But it's fun! Love to see everyone get enthusiastic about making things for people! Love the lack of anonymity that means potential creators can squee about a creator's requests with the creator! Love the general atmosphere of "here is an excuse to make friends"!

It's starting to get warm enough that I'm like "curses I must debate the merits of blankets (weight/pressure) versus the drawbacks of blankets (overheating)". This is simply the way spring-into-summer works, I have solutions, I will also whine dramatically about it for like a month until my body adjusts.

Yesterday at aikido, during test prep class, I was challenged to actually remember all five of the koshinage we learn. (which, like: often people only learn one or two! but I was taught five, so!) Two of them are easy (in that we practice them ever), but three of them like... never come up without someone specifically asking about them. (I remembered one and half-remembered the other two, which is about what I expected.)

The thing about one of them (ko-goshi) is that it's exactly like o-goshi except that instead of doing it around the waist you do it around the neck. (This means that it's really easy to do if you know o-goshi? Because there's a basic throw, iriminage, that gets you basically into position; you just gotta move where your body is so that uke goes over your hips instead of taking a straight fall back.) I remember learning this and whining about it because I do not like throws that care about the neck like that! I also did it in my shodan test because I ended up in the right position and was like "well, I do know this, and I know my uke will gleefully take the ukemi". And then I haven't really done it since? But it's right there in my body still, so easy to do, and the thing I'm like "huh" about is that apparently doing it no longer makes my brain make sad stressed whiny noises? Which is nice! But idk when or why that changed/happened.