#I'm super excited bc I didn't finish the previous season

[kawaiisimp]

Pirate season in afk journey?

PIRATE SEASON IN AFK JOURNEY!!!!

[blysse-and-blunder]

in lieu of a commonplace book

saturday, jan 15, 2022, 5pm pst — sunday, jan 16, 2022, 10 pm pst

what is a week, a month, a new year? a silly little series of days

head full, many thoughts, most of them about television! spoilers for star trek : discovery’s season 1

reading not a ton to report, on the book side of things. i'm trying to reduce the number of ao3 tabs open on my phone by deliberately finishing and closing things, which has meant some trips down memory lane (81 chapter yuri on ice fic from 2018, we meet again), and in so doing have been neglecting the vacation reads i packed for myself. on the brighter side, i've joined a couple of storygraph reading challenges for 2022 and am looking forward to the exploration these will require-- the one book i have started and been making progress on so far this year is olivia waite's the care and feeding of waspish widows, which i would highly recommend so far!

(can't say a whole lot for the cover design, though.)

waite's previous wlw historical romance, the lady's guide to celestial mechanics, established a pattern which she follows again here, so both protagonists have a distinctive hobby/occupation/craft, in this case 19th century printing and bee-keeping, and this gives a lot of rich detail to the books themselves before you even get to the steamier dimensions. also liking waspish widows for the fact that both of our leads are in their forties!! and are a certain amount of jaded and/or world-weary! i'll say this for it, though, that while i totally buy the budding tenderness between the two protagonists, and while i'm excited to have the discussions of law, politics, art, beekeeping, etc., we're like 40% into the book and so far it is...not especially erotic. the introduction of 'oh these characters are attracted to each other' has felt...sort of arbitrary? i feel like i had this problem with celestial mechanics too? have i just been spoiled for published romances by the better slow-burn fan works i've been lucky enough to find? will definitely keep reading, however.

watching more thoughts on star trek: discovery, **spoilers for discovery season 1 ** one of the lessons i've had to learn watching picard and discovery this past month, is that i didn't keep up with star trek especially well post-voyager. or to put it another way, i was raised on next generation and there's just no escaping the fact that it shapes my tastes to this day. so it's been a strange revelation (though it probably shouldn't be) that...each decade or so makes the star trek of it's own tastes and sensibilities. and these are not the same, today, as they were when tng or ds9 were being released. these newer star trek series (so far; in the early eps of disco season 2 there has already been a palpable shift that gives me a lot of hope) feel like they want so badly to be star wars, to have galactic-level conflict (literally the Klingon war… a literal star war) and the highest of stakes in addition to gleaming surfaces and acrobatic fight scenes, and it's just...i stop caring when the scale is too big, because it feels (ironically!) cheaper than if we were fighting over 100 lives, or ten. i miss the philosophizing, i miss the holodeck, i miss the various characters' personal logs as a story-telling device— I miss planet-or-weird-nebula-of-the-week.

(god she's incredible. what can't she do. i'm living for her hair journey. i'm living for her eyes.)

they're s l o w l y reintroducing some of these things, in the midst of the lens flares and occasionally super clunky dialogue (disco writers may i introduce you to...the subjunctive? or like, dialogue that isn't largely exposition?). maybe it's the delivery, i feel like almost everyone is unnaturally stilted and it only works for sonequa martin-green bc a) michael's vulcan upbringing and b) she's a motherfucking artist and steals every single scene. (something i noticed in Picard, too, was a different level of, dare I say, naturalism in some of the deliveries: people with stage training, Michelle Hurd and Anthony rapp and even Patrick stewart sometimes, bless him, are just…the reads are different, and it’s enough that I was able to say to myself ‘hmm I bet MH has a theatre background’ and then check imdb and be correct). but like, i was pretty skeptical of a lot of choices made in the conception of this klingon war story line, i found the tardigrade / spore drive slightly ridiculous while appreciating that they were introduced for Plot Reasons. I got very heavy doctor who vibes from the alternate universe stuff and was seriously debating whether they'd jumped the shark with the introduction of nega!georgiou (as good as michelle yeoh is), before the reveal that lorca had been nega!lorca the whole time, which was kind of beautiful— it made every objection i'd had to lorca and his jingoism/willingness to sacrifice personnel and longterm success 'for the war' fall into place (though a lot of the ‘for the war’ attitude from other characters, cough ash tyler cough, remained a bit grating). also michael's whole speech in the last episode about holding to starfleet's principles made me stop and consider whether i was wrong and the show had actually had me right where it wanted me the whole time. ugh. ** end of spoilers**

i also have now watched episodes 1-7 or so of the cdrama the wolf/ lang dianxia (2020), and while obviously i began watching and have continued to hold out for xiao zhan's appearance (according to imdb he was in ep 1 somewhere, but i missed it and won't be going back to rewatch any time soon in an effort to get to his proper introduction faster), it is a valuable experience in other ways. i'm really loving li qin as the main female character, she is not only extremely beautiful but has the same command of all her incremental facial movements that i admired xiao zhan for in cql, so ma zhaixing as a character is obviously built of several tropes, but lq is imbuing her with this humanity at the same time... also this show like. passes the bechdel test. also i like how it has evolved its own concept a few times already? i thought it was going to be A Certain Way at the beginning, and then it time-skipped, and now we're doing 'arranged marriage' trope stuff, and...yeah, it's something i'll keep watching. xz better hurry up and get here though. also i looked this show up on Wikipedia and was immediately spoiled for something so rip me i guess, never actually investigate these things you should know better. 😔 poster slaps, though.

listening one of the drains on my mental health while visiting family is that i don't have control of the aux cord as much, so to speak. when i realize this, and start carving out time to listen to my own tunes (volunteering to cook solo, going on long walks and not inviting others, etc.), things inevitably improve. but the song of the post is still a moody one, i love the instrumentation's build and energy and i also love the fact that it's written from the pov of a real character. I had the refrain ‘cause I’m not in the right state of mind’ playing in my head on repeat for a lot longer than is probably healthy back in dec; it was relatable at the time.

playing conversely, one of the real joys of being with my folks is the chance to continue our epic, decades-long scrabble clash of the titans. last night my dad played ‘zoomer’ on a double word score that garnered a tidy 50+ points, a personal best of his and the high score of the game…until I put ‘quiz’ off of his ‘z’ tile with that ‘q’ on a triple. 66 points. still feeling untouchable. /hairflip

making got some oil pastels (but like, the kids version) for Christmas and have begun playing around with them, which is fun. the texture is very pleasant, even if the actual consistency isn’t probably that high. making my bff a little portrait of her dog (rough sketch below), which I may post if it turns out to be anything.

working on I got an offer to do a guest-lecture in a course at my institution called ‘the Celtic book’ and, meeting with the instructor on Friday, I got all excited about topics I could cover and maaaaaay have seriously over-promised. The lecture’s on Tuesday and I played hooky all weekend so tomorrow is about prepping some slides and prioritizing what I actually need to say, versus getting sucked into rabbit holes and wasting time on trying to decide if the white book has been quietly rebound?? since the 2018 digitization?? (celticists please @ me it’s bananas)