#ryfkah

[gargoyleandgremlinpress]

Five Dogs, One Cat by Ryfkah

"If you’ve ever believed me in anything, believe I want what’s best for Jin Ling," the first line of the letter reads. Jiang Cheng has to stop and take a moment before he continues on to the next line: "You must come to Carp Tower as soon as you can and lavish praise on the ugliest dog I’ve ever seen."

I love this fic! It's a funny, touching, post-canon MDZS story about Jin Ling's relationship with Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian, and comes with an inevitable side of Yunmeng bros reconciliation.

This was another Binderary project, and a belated Christmas present. I made one copy for me, and one for the friend who introduced me to both this fic, and The Untamed. The cover is printed on a piece of cotton sheet (temporarily backed with freezer paper) with a home laser printer. The endpapers are Nepalese Lokta paper. The spine is acrylic paint using Cricut stencil vinyl. At under 14k, this fic made a cute little half-sized quarto book, just under a hundred pages.

I did my best to match up the different dogs in each chapter using public domain images. There are a few errors in the chapter opening typesetting I only caught AFTER everything was all glued (of course).

This is probably the lower limit for what I'd want to sew endbands on. The spine was skinny enough that it was decidedly fiddly.

I am a sucker for a classic 5+1 format, and I just love the ending for this one!

[fiercynn]

art raffle for palestine!

folks living in the u.s.! the prison abolition collective in washington state that i'm part of is holding a raffle to support the family of alaa, a local community member, whose family is trying to escape genocide in gaza. here's more information on alaa's family.

the raffle items, all of which were donated by artists, writers (including @ryfkah, who donated a signed copy of their awesome fantasy novel the iron children!), and other creative folks we know, are in four "bundles", and you can buy tickets for separate bundles based on what you're interested in. some of the raffle items are experiences or services rather than physical objects. bundle c includes two items that can only be accessed in seattle, washington, but the rest of the bundles can be redeemed anywhere in the u.s. (meaning we would mail you the physical items). more detailed information on the bundles here.

there are several different ways to enter the raffle, listed below! you can either give directly to alaa's family and send us proof of your donation, or you can send the money to our rep meredith if that's easier. each raffle ticket is $10 USD, and you can buy up to 10 tickets for each bundle. more detailed info here.

please consider entering the raffle if you have the means! because of the ongoing ground invasion and bombardment, over 1.5 million palestinians are being forced to flee their homes in gaza, including alaa's family. families trying to escape have to pay ridiculous extortion fees to get across the border to egypt.

you can also share this thread on twitter or add this instagram post to your story. please spread the word!!!

[door]

de facto tagged by @burins and @ryfkah on account of they both posted theirs: nine books you want to read in the coming year! these are all things i already own/have preordered as i’ve been trying to prioritize reading the books i own….to mixed success. top row is literally my bedside table stack. c’mon door.

tagging @sonictoaster @leenik-geelo @notabuddhist @lambergeier @sleepnoises @bookgeekgrrl and you. yes, you. tell me your books

[sleepnoises]

Following on the book asks, do you have any romance recommendations from this year?

this is a recommendation i originally got off @ryfkah—zen cho's the friend zone experiment. I don't know why it has that title or that cover. it's very human & the mandatory romance miscommunication involves real differences of priorities with a lot at stake (she's in the running to inherit her family's company! he maybe knows someone disappeared for whistleblowing on said company!)

[keshetchai]

#and the writing (mini fics?) also feel true to how a lot of translations of tanakh + talmud/commentaries read

For my addition, i actually did just copy and paste from Sotah translations, and then changed one or two words. The Genesis rabbah is just copied right from sefaria lol. Might've merged word orders from Rashi but it's basically all the same. Hilariously I also actually looked at the usernames above and realized I know ryfkah (I'm fromsidere on my personal/private twitter) and I bow to the superior edit humor of the tanakh that I piggybacked off of lmao. 

Anyways yes for my addition that is how the translations sound, that's because I'm lazy. 😂 

Joseph's brothers would have sold him to One Direction

[teashoptiramisu]

hello! this blog seems pretty inactive so im sorry if this is annoying, but i dont know who to ask 💀 do you!! have any fic recs? (I really really wanna see more zuko + gaang found family stuff and also anything with an azula redemption arc would be very cool but I dont know how to find good stuff since im very new to the fanbase so.. hope this is ok! (I am literally always late to fandoms it’s so sad)

also, if there’s any place, like a discord server or tumblr community where I can ask for recs, that would be very helpful to know!! the brainworms must be fed

I haven't been maintaining my queue but I'm around (well, sometimes)! And no worries, if I found asks annoying I would turn them off.

As I said last time, it's been a while since I read a lot of ATLA fic -- but I still have my old favorites! That post also has advice for finding fic recs (particularly geared towards fans of muffinlance but I think it's solid advice in general) -- unfortunately I don't know of any dedicated fic reccing community, just specific people you can follow such as @/captainkirkk and @/royaltealovingkookiness

But yeah look through my bookmarks, look through muffinlance's bookmarks, look through the bookmarks of authors whose fics you like!

Some specific recs:

[my eternal faves are all works by muffinlance and The Dragon-King's Temple -- but you probably already know about those]

The Best Path by EudociaCovert -- I know you said Zuko+gaang but my favorite found family fic is this one, which is Zuko, Jet, and Smellerbee canon divergence from "Zuko Alone". I think it's a little off the beaten path (heh) these days so I wanted to give it a shout.

close your eyes, make a wish by atleastwestoletheshow (Silverwolf329) -- canon universe gaang-bonding-with-zuko-while-fighting-together fic

definitely not suspicious at all in the least by presumenothing (justjoy) -- kinda similar to the above, more of a heist maybe

Big Damn Heroes by Damkianna -- the GAANG in SPACE!! very fun AU, good Zuko content

How It's Done by ryfkah -- the gaang forms a pro-bending team (like in LoK season 1, but you can probably read this even if you haven't seen Legend of Korra)

Tea? by thesometimeswarrior -- Iroh and Azula post-canon, start to an Azula healing arc

and it's my whole heart (weighed and measured) by agentcalliope -- another Azula post-canon fic I found interesting

[bookyeahqueerlit]

Endless List of Queer Book Recs Part 4: Lady Eve's Last Con by @ryfkah

I knew I was getting gays doing crimes going into this but I wasn't expecting that it was JEWISH gays doing crimes and I was absolutely delighted when I found out. Ruth, the protagonist, describes someone as having a face like an etrog which is a) a very sold burn b) not something a goy would ever think to include. Also features a romantic interest that wears suits and capes and possibly one of the few times the phrase "infuriatingly handsome" can be used to describe the sapphic love interest with perfect accuracy.

[aquamirage]

Rules: tagger gives a word, then for each letter of that word you share a sentence/excerpt from your wip(s) that starts with that letter.

@ryfkah gave the word WRING.

W - "Well," said Abbie, "Well, no, it was at Gideon's Bakery when I was picking up the challah."

"I imagine you did not trip on one of the exhibits on purpose and twist your weak ankle, thus forcing her to come to your rescue, supporting you all the way home while you traced the line of her alabaster jaw and her topaz eyes with your gaze?"

Abbie sighed, in bliss. "Oh, I don't know anyone else who remembers all the details of those stories as well as me. It's wonderful. I really could talk over them all day." [what if your invalid victorian aunt had a cool secret job short story]

R - "Right, honesty is good bedside manner."

"That hasn't been my feedback," said Isaac.

"You can be honest without being a dick about it." [wild swanovella]

I - It was separate entirely from love. Whatever it was was nothing she could conceptualize - she wasn't a poet. But it was what she felt in the center of herself when the bridge lights came on every evening and when the sun's rise illuminated it each morning. [emily and wash roebling sf story]

N - "Nicholas, listen, I swear, your secret is safe with me.”

“I’m not worried about that,” I said. I felt suddenly lightheaded. What was I worried about? Quite a few things maybe unprecedented in somewhat human slash part-avian history. [wild swanovella]

G - Gerda suspected that like many things Amaryllis told her about life there, a few softening details has been omitted for impact, but she rolled her eyes internally this time and bit back an: "I bet you also just didn't want to go." [snow queen]

I tag whoever wants to do it with ORANGE

[tenillypo]

Tagged by @incandescentflower.

rules: without naming them, post a gif from ten of your favourite films, then tag ten people to do the same!

Tagging @banjoandthepork, @attractivegkry, @ryfkah, @artificialities, and @bbcphile but with no pressure!

[hatnhousejacket]

-Who? Not little old me surely 🥺👉👈

My doodled impression of Ruthi Johnson “Evelyn Ojukwu” anytime Sol looks at her sideways

Inspired by @ryfkah’s lovely new novel Lady Eve’s Last Con

[brella]

i saw @ryfkah doing this one :)

rules: without naming them, post a gif from ten of your favourite films, then tag ten people to do the same!

if you post yours, tag me!

[sophia-sol]

Rules: tagger gives a word, then for each letter of that word you share a sentence/excerpt from your wip(s) that starts with that letter.

I was tagged by @peerlessbellbird, who gave the word PAINT.

P - Partway through, proceedings were interrupted by the [species], (pidw mobing wip)

A - “Amazing that you're shameless enough to show your face after everything. I can't believe it.” Her words were quick-paced and loud. Directly in Mo Xuanyu’s face. He shrank back. (mxy wip)

I - In marketplaces and street corners, over dinner tables and into the soft dark privacy of quiet bedrooms, northerners asserted approvingly that Mobei-Jun knew how it was done. Mobei-Jun was the child of a northern king, anyone could see. (pidw mobing wip)

N - "Nobody else could come up with the kinds of ideas you did. What would you suggest that I do?” But of course the Yiling Laozu couldn't respond. (mxy wip)

T - “Thank you. I appreciate you coming to find me.” Lan Xichen, when Lan Jingyi glanced sideways at him, had his usual placid smile on his face – but it didn’t reach his eyes. It never did, these days. (jingyi wip)

My entry for P is a half-sentence because it's genuinely the only sentence in all my wips that begins with a P, somehow! and it's the sentence I was partway into when I lost momentum on that wip for the time being. Oh well. I will come back to it eventually!

The new word is CURSE.

I am tagging: @ryfkah, @zeiat, and @ceruleanvulpine as well as anyone else who wants to do it!

[fiercynn]

too wise to woo peaceably (bad buddy + much ado about nothing)

i was talking recently with @ranchthoughts about our feelings about bad buddy and theatre, and i was reminded of how the wonderful @ryfkah once wrote on dreamwidth about the parallels between patpran and beatrice & benedick from much ado about nothing! much ado is absolutely my favorite shakespeare play, so ryfkah’s comparisons have lived in my head rent-free since they made their post a year and a half ago:

I actually want to switch gears from Romeo & Juliet and talk a little instead about Beatrice and Benedick. Pat & Pran do not have the exact energy but are definitely B&B-adjacent -- first of all, in that all the habitual patterns of their interactions are set firmly to Bickering and Bravado, but second and more important in that the bickering and bravado already have a huge weight of feeling and history behind them at the time that we enter the narrative. This is the thing, I think, that a lot of other variants on this style of snappy, outwardly antagonistic God I Hate That Person [I Do Not Hate That Person] miss: what makes Beatrice & Benedick work is that we have enough glimpses of context from the dialogue to know that they know each other extremely well, they've cared about each other in the past, and no matter how much they argue they do in fact still care about each other enormously in the present. Likewise, the thing that makes Bad Buddy really fun, for me, is that the events of the show absolutely do not depict not the first time that Pat and Pran have gone from rivalry through cahootship to the realization that they are not only required by circumstance to be obsessed with each other but actually genuinely like each other as people -- this has all happened before, and ended badly. The show begins right after the only period of their life that they've spent not defining themselves against each other, so when they meet once again in a position of nonsense forced rivalship the tension between them has a really different weight to it: Pat is like 'hey, we missed our shot last time but we can do a speedrun! we have a chance to do this again! :D' while Pran, significantly more self-aware about the fact that what they achieved on the last go-round was not just Unfortunately Thwarted Friendship but Powerful Homoerotic Tension with a side of Miserable Romantic Pining, is like 'god I cannot believe that we are here again, constructing intricate rituals AGAIN.' [x]

which gave me a lot of thoughts as well! putting below the cut since it gets a little long.

building off ryfkah's post: one of the things people either seem to love or hate about much ado is its massive tonal shift in the middle. the play starts off with pure shenanigans – battle-of-the-wits banter, using a masquerade ball to pretend to be other people, “let’s try and match-make our friends who hate each other by having them ‘overhear’ conversations about how the other is in love with them!” – classic comedy stuff. and then you get to claudio and hero’s wedding and everything goes to shit.

the interesting thing is that the impact of the shenanigans isn’t negated by the dramatic shift – beatrice and benedick are still, technically, “tricked” into confessing to each other, because each of them goes into their confession thinking the other is already pining away for them. but their confessions happen in a scene where the stakes have been raised already: beatrice is furious about at the defamation of her cousin by claudio and hero’s subsequent heartbreak. beatrice and benedick’s banter falls away, not only into expressing their love, but with beatrice’s conviction, stated plainly, that benedick should kill his best friend. and benedick, though conflicted, agrees to challenge claudio unless he recants the insult he’s done to hero, because beatrice has asked it of him. when performed well, it’s an incredibly raw and impactful scene, and one that always sticks with me. and there's a sense that the trickery by their friends operates mostly as a cover for them to say out loud what they've already been feeling – both the good and bad parts of that, the love and the pain, the confessions and the demands. people who were truly tricked into loving each other by shenanigans wouldn't be this honest with each other at this point, and wouldn't go this far.

i'm not going to claim that there are super direct plot parallels between bad buddy and much ado, and obviously the stakes and level of gravity are very different, but i do get some similar feelings watching both? especially when rewatching the beginning and remembering how silly it is, which i think is absolutely intentional just as it is in much ado. because then, when bad buddy allows pat and pran to reveal their deep connection by letting the banter fall away – when things get serious enough between them that they’re taken out of their “nonsense forced rivalship”, as ryfkah says – it hits even harder.

i'm thinking of pat saying, “i don’t like it. i hate to see you play [the song] with someone else,” on the rooftop, and the way that pran’s been playing their usual game in that conversation thus far, using sarcasm and indifference as his defense, until pat’s honesty makes his expression shift into pain, before he responds in kind with, “pat, you’ve got to stop doing to me.” (@ranchthoughts and @dudeyuri talk beautifully and in-depth about those two lines here.) and again, in episode 6, on the first night of the architecture volunteer trip: pat’s been playing all day, trying to goad pran into talking to him, but when it’s just the two of them on the beach in the dark, pat says, “we’re talking now?”, the hurt clear in his voice, and pran’s face changes again, because he gets out serious pat is now.

and then, of course, we get back to shenanigans soon enough, because those intricate rituals that they build together are important to them: that’s how they talk to each other, and how they have fun together, and the fun is just as crucial to their relationship as the heartfelt moments when they can be there for each other. the second half of bad buddy is so enjoyable to watch because we get to see how their dynamic doesn’t change after they get together, which is a confirmation that they always had a deep and meaningful relationship, even when it was mostly expressed through banter: they just get to say more of it out loud now, when they need to. extremely beatrice and benedick-coded tbh.

[door]

de facto tagged by @ryfkah gifs from 10 of my favourite films

you should also do this i want to see

[chadlesbianjasontodd]

tagged by @heraclitizer, 9 books i want to read in the coming year; i limited myself to books i want to read not (mainly) for work reasons, which was unexpectedly difficult. non-english titles: sagisawa megumu's kimi wa kono kuni ga suki ka? (do you like this country?), ning yuan's fen qing (to embers we return), yumeno kyuusaku's dogura magura, and a chinese translation of maurice leblanc's arsene lupin: gentleman cambrioleur. tagging @hardisonparker @ryfkah @olive-the-olive and, in spirit, anyone else so inclined.

[runonthewater]

Hey where are my Gentleman Bastard folks? I know some of my old online friends were into this and I'm just now consuming some of it on the recommendation of my new boss. Was it @ryfkah ? Or @fahye ? Anyway it's delightful!