toquegirl

[toquegirl]

Now that she's back, it's going to get chaotic again.

[toquegirl]

DO NOT DO THIS!!!

If a website has a paywall, like New York Times, DO NOT use the ctrl+A shortcut then the ctrl+c shortcut as fast as you can because then you may accidentally copy the entire article before the paywall comes up. And definitely don't do ctrl+v into the next google doc or whatever you open because then you will accidentally paste the entire article into a google doc or something!!!! I repeat DO NOT do this because it is piracy which is absolutely totally wrong!!!

[toquegirl]

a comic about fix-it fanfics

[toquegirl]

Hello :) I'll be in Korea for a week in July (7-14) Is there any musical on your radar you'd recommend for that time? I love larger and smaller productions (as long as the plot isn't suuuuuper historically or vocabulary-complicated because my Korean is at a more of a conversational level than academic level). I've been searching on different ticketing sites but having a bit of a hard time. Thank you so much for your help!

Ah! First off, will you have access to a Korean phone number during that time? Foreigners can only really book through the global sites of the main ticket vendors like Interpark and Melon since Korean sites require a Korean phone number to book,,, And the global sites don't have all the shows on there, so a lot of small theatre productions (off broadway size) are kind of closed off,,, It's unfortunate but it is what it is,,,

Right now only two shows are up on the global sites, you will have to check when the ticket open info is released (that's when it'll most likely go live on the site for purchase so some of the recommendations may or may not be listed). The most probable ones are the popular theatre shows (broadway size) so that's what i'll recommend for now.

Chicago (licensed) Jun 7 to Sep 29 - I love the cast that'll be appearing this year, and Chicago is one of my all time fave shows, it's kind of like a cabaret show, there's not a lot of big set pieces but it's got fantastic numbers and choreo. << This one is on the global site.

Frankenstein (Original) Jun 5 to Aug 25 - This is a highly popular original kmusical. It has a really cool double role system where each of the main actors plays two roles that are kind of polar opposites to each other, yknow in theme with the monster and the man dichotomies. It's a fun show but it's also quite depressing and heavy. If you have any interest in the original material would recommend!

Hadestown (licensed) is happening in July but there isn't an opening date that's been released yet. If it opens during your time there, would also really recommend!

영웅 Hero (original) May 29 to Aug 11 - This is also a very popular original show. A movie musical adaption of it was made a couple of years back. It is a bit historical, it tackles this Korean revolutionary that assassinated a Japanese politician set during the Japanese occupation. If you don't mind, you could do a bit of research into it to prepare. << This one is on the global site.

어쩌면 해피엔딩 Maybe Happy Ending (original) is happening in June to September but there's no opening date yet. I would highly recommend this show tho!! It's a one act about two robots trying to figure out relationships and love and the way i bawled,,, It's very gut wrenching and tragic but in a beautiful way.

젠틀맨스 가이드 Gentleman's Guide (licensed) is starting some time in July, no opening date yet, but there's this one song in this show that is absolutely a blast, it makes it so fun. But the rest of the show I think you really have to like this style of musical to get the most out of it.

베르사유의 장미 The Rose of Versailles (original) Jul 12 to Oct 13 - This is its world premiere, it's by the same duo as Elisabeth das musical and based on the manga of the same name. I have no idea how it's going to turn out but it's within your window and I personally am interested in how the show goes.

These are the other shows that will (most likely) be open during your stay but I have not personally watched so I can't recommend wholeheartedly.

무인도 탈출기 (original) May 12 to Jul 21 << small theatre

베어 더 뮤지컬 Bare The Musical (licensed) May 22 to Aug 25

카르밀라 Carmilla (original) June 9 to Sep 8 << small theatre

이블데드 Evil Dead (licensed) planned from June to Sep 1st

에밀 Emil (original) June 11 to Sep 1 << small theatre

머더러 Murderer (original) Jun 18 to Sep 8 << small theatre

버지니아 울프 Virginia Wolf (original) Apr 23 to Jul 14 << small theatre

유진과 유진 Yoo Jin and Yoo Jin (original) planned July to Sep << small theatre (but ive also heard very great things about this show)

살리에르 Salieri (original) planned from July to Sep << small theatre

클럽 드바이 Club Dubai (original) planned June to Sep << small theatre

If you want any more info, feel free to ask!

-Mod Illa

[toquegirl]

Queen of Tears Text posts 2/? (Part 1)

[toquegirl]

You'll cry, right? Cry when there are many people. It's better if there are cameras around. Do you want me to cry? Yes and no. I want you to feel sad. But I don't want you to be too sad.

[toquegirl]

I'm usually pretty diligent about keeping my Kdrama obsession on my sideblog, but everyone, you need to hear about Queen of Tears.

You know the super common trope of mysterious, work-obsessed, emotionally-constipated rich guy falls for a "poor" (usually middle class), spunky, every-girl? (what Pride & Prejudice is commonly mistaken for) Kdramas LOVE that trope. They love it to death. And because their format is almost always 12-16 episode miniseries and then done, you end with a marriage and "happily ever after".

Queen of Tears is set three years later and the Happily Ever After Couple is headed for divorce. Turns out that even true love can't overcome terrible communication and awful families. Maybe acts of service done in secret isn't a great love language. Their Destined, Soul-Mates relationship has crumbled and it's all due to very logical fall-out from trauma and their personalities. It is excellent. It's also gender-swapped for extra fun.

I love it to death and more people need to know it exists.

[toquegirl]

Look at him how happy he is behind her😭✨🤍🌸🥀

[toquegirl]

Mary Oliver, from “Hum Hum”, A Thousand Mornings

[toquegirl]

So apparently the pro-Tetris scene is exploding right now because a 13 year old nerd just reached the game's true killscreen for the first time ever

[toquegirl]

oh! I have to tell you guys a great story one of my professors told me. So he has a friend who is involved in these Shakespeare outreach programs where they try to bring Shakespeare and live theatre to poor and underprivileged groups and teach them about English literature and performing arts and such. On one of their tours they stopped at a young offenders institute for women and they put on a performance of Romeo and Juliet for a group of 16-17 year old girls. It was all going really well and the girls were enjoying and laughing through the first half - because really, the first half is pretty much a comedy - but as the play went on, things started to get quiet. Real quiet. Then it got up to the suicide scene and mutterings broke out and all the girls were nudging each other and looking distressed, and as this teacher observed them, he realised - they didn’t know how the play ended. These girls had never been exposed to the story of Romeo and Juliet before, something which he thought was impossible given how ubiquitous it is in our culture. I mean, the prologue even gives the ending away, but of course it doesn’t specify exactly how the whole “take their life” thing goes down, so these poor girls had no idea what to expect and were sitting there clinging to hope that Romeo would maybe sit down for a damn minute instead of murdering Paris and chugging poison - but BAM he died and they all cried out - and then Juliet WOKE UP and they SCREAMED and by the end of the play they were so upset that a brawl nearly broke out, and that’s the story of how Shakespeare nearly started a riot at a juvenile detention centre

[toquegirl]

Webtoon list

For me to return to when my practicum is done and have have free time to keep up to date!

이번 생은 빌런이다 (39)

Be the actor (68)

I'm being raised by villains (49)

Perfect surgeon (93)

Real man (171)

1st year max level manager (105)

Please don't come to the villainess' stationery store (62)

The villainess flips the script (78)

The world's best engineer (119)

The 31st piece overturns the board (43)

Love class (39)

I'll be the matriarch in this life (132)

Clever cleaning life (60)

The extra is too strong (42)

My villain family is against my independence (18)

Age of arrogance (25)

A master who woke up as a concubine (26)

The abandoned bachelorette enjoys her simple life (29)

Reforming my regretful husband (23)

I married the male lead's dad (104)

Genius of unique lineage (50)

Reincarnation of the suicidal battle god (96)

The time of the terminally ill extra (54)

My daughter is the final boss (96)

I became the wife of the male lead (91)

The gangster baby of the duke's family (35)

The invincible princess is bored again today (62)

I became the wife of the male lead (92)

The villainess is shy in receiving love (45)

Death is the only ending for the villainess (134)

The villainess doesn't need a new husband (20)

True education (125)

I became the villain's mother (93)

My rich husband spoils me rotten (63)

10 ways to get rejected by the tyrant (27)

The reincarnated assassin is a genius swordsman (32)

My family is obsessed with me (63)

That fishery, I'll take it (18)

I'm only a stepmother, but my daughter is just so cute (110)

Father, I don't want to get married (123)

The goal is to become a gold spoon so I need to be completely invulnerable (51)

The villainess is a marionette (80)

The fake saintess wants to leave (15)

The maid with a dictator on a leash (23)

My life as a captive maid (28)

Couple breaker (45)

I thought it a common possession (46)

The main male character's nephew really likes me (43)

I raised a boy kindly but he returned as an obsessed man (37)

How to prey on the master (82)

I became the tyrant's secretary (75)

This life starts as a child actor (23)

The hero went crazy even though I'm the one who died (34)

Tyrant wants a better life (54)

Even though I'm a side character, I'm being adored by an overprotective duke (28)

I adopted a villainess dad (45)

I raised Cinderella preciously (106)

I created a harem to avoid the male lead (19)

I tamed a tyrant and ran away (97)

I'm in trouble because my husband is so cute (70)

The gangster baby of the duke's family (24)

I plan to divorce my villain husband but we have a child (76)

Divorce plan with husband failed (66)

Archduke's gorgeous wedding was a fraud (33)

I've become a true villainess (52)

For the happy ending of the tragic novel (39)

1st year max level manager

Starting from today, I'm a princess? (101)

Everything was a mistake (118)

Trophy husband (43)

I saw the future with the killer grand duke (25)

The male lead monster lives under my bed (37)

The duke's daughter is going on strike (28)

I became the tyrants servant (25)

Your majesty, please stop now (14)

The villainess debuts gorgeously (41)

Why are you obsessed with your fake wife? (17)

I raised my younger sister beautifully (43)

A tipsy marriage proposal for the emperor (33)

How to get my husband on my side (91)

I tamed the male lead who tried to kill me (42)

He's now healthy - perhaps too much (29)

The most powerful characters in the world as crazy about me (93)

becoming the villain's family (46)

[toquegirl]

“someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again”

— C.S Lewis

[toquegirl]

My dear husband. It is I, Gil Chae.

[toquegirl]

Map of Shakespeare’s Plays

[toquegirl]

So You Need To Buy A Computer But You Don't Know What Specs Are Good These Days

Hi.

This is literally my job.

Lots of people are buying computers for school right now or are replacing computers as their five-year-old college laptop craps out so here's the standard specs you should be looking for in a (windows) computer purchase in August 2023.

PROCESSOR

Intel i5 (no older than 10th Gen)

Ryzen 7

You can get away with a Ryzen 5 but an intel i3 should be an absolute last resort. You want at least an intel i5 or a Ryzen 7 processor. The current generation of intel processors is 13, but anything 10 or newer is perfectly fine. DO NOT get a higher performance line with an older generation; a 13th gen i5 is better than an 8th gen i7. (Unfortunately I don't know enough about ryzens to tell you which generation is the earliest you should get, but staying within 3 generations is a good rule of thumb)

RAM

8GB absolute minimum

If you don't have at least 8GB RAM on a modern computer it's going to be very, very slow. Ideally you want a computer with at least 16GB, and it's a good idea to get a computer that will let you add or swap RAM down the line (nearly all desktops will let you do this, for laptops you need to check the specs for Memory and see how many slots there are and how many slots are available; laptops with soldered RAM cannot have the memory upgraded - this is common in very slim laptops)

STORAGE

256GB SSD

Computers mostly come with SSDs these days; SSDs are faster than HDDs but typically have lower storage for the same price. That being said: SSDs are coming down in price and if you're installing your own drive you can easily upgrade the size for a low cost. Unfortunately that doesn't do anything for you for the initial purchase.

A lot of cheaper laptops will have a 128GB SSD and, because a lot of stuff is stored in the cloud these days, that can be functional. I still recommend getting a bit more storage than that because it's nice if you can store your music and documents and photos on your device instead of on the cloud. You want to be able to access your files even if you don't have internet access.

But don't get a computer with a big HDD instead of getting a computer with a small SSD. The difference in speed is noticeable.

SCREEN (laptop specific)

Personally I find that touchscreens have a negative impact on battery life and are easier to fuck up than standard screens. They are also harder to replace if they get broken. I do not recommend getting a touch screen unless you absolutely have to.

A lot of college students especially tend to look for the biggest laptop screen possible; don't do that. It's a pain in the ass to carry a 17" laptop around campus and with the way that everything is so thin these days it's easier to damage a 17" screen than a 14" screen.

On the other end of that: laptops with 13" screens tend to be very slim devices that are glued shut and impossible to work on or upgrade.

Your best bet (for both functionality and price) is either a 14" or a 15.6" screen. If you absolutely positively need to have a 10-key keyboard on your laptop, get the 15.6". If you need something portable more than you need 10-key, get a 14"

FORM FACTOR (desktop specific)

If you purchase an all-in-one desktop computer I will begin manifesting in your house physically. All-in-ones take away every advantage desktops have in terms of upgradeability and maintenance; they are expensive and difficult to repair and usually not worth the cost of disassembling to upgrade.

There are about four standard sizes of desktop PC: All-in-One (the size of a monitor with no other footprint), Tower (Big! probably at least two feet long in two directions), Small Form Factor Tower (Very moderate - about the size of a large shoebox), and Mini/Micro/Tiny (Small! about the size of a small hardcover book).

If you are concerned about space you are much better off getting a MicroPC and a bracket to put it on your monitor than you are getting an all-in-one. This will be about a million percent easier to work on than an all-in-one and this way if your monitor dies your computer is still functional.

Small form factor towers and towers are the easiest to work on and upgrade; if you need a burly graphics card you need to get a full size tower, but for everything else a small form factor tower will be fine. Most of our business sales are SFF towers and MicroPCs, the only time we get something larger is if we have to put a $700 graphics card in it. SFF towers will accept small graphics cards and can handle upgrades to the power supply; MicroPCs can only have the RAM and SSD upgraded and don't have room for any other components or their own internal power supply.

WARRANTY

Most desktops come with either a 1 or 3 year warranty; either of these is fine and if you want to upgrade a 1 year to a 3 year that is also fine. I've generally found that if something is going to do a warranty failure on desktop it's going to do it the first year, so you don't get a hell of a lot of added mileage out of an extended warranty but it doesn't hurt and sometimes pays off to do a 3-year.

Laptops are a different story. Laptops mostly come with a 1-year warranty and what I recommend everyone does for every laptop that will allow it is to upgrade that to the longest warranty you can get with added drop/damage protection. The most common question our customers have about laptops is if we can replace a screen and the answer is usually "yes, but it's going to be expensive." If you're purchasing a low-end laptop, the parts and labor for replacing a screen can easily cost more than half the price of a new laptop. HOWEVER, the way that most screens get broken is by getting dropped. So if you have a warranty with drop protection, you just send that sucker back to the factory and they fix it for you.

So, if it is at all possible, check if the manufacturer of a laptop you're looking at has a warranty option with drop protection. Then, within 30 days (though ideally on the first day you get it) of owning your laptop, go to the manufacturer site, register your serial number, and upgrade the warranty. If you can't afford a 3-year upgrade at once set a reminder for yourself to annually renew. But get that drop protection, especially if you are a college student or if you've got kids.

And never, ever put pens or pencils on your laptop keyboard. I've seen people ruin thousand dollar, brand-new laptops that they can't afford to fix because they closed the screen on a ten cent pencil. Keep liquids away from them too.

LIFESPAN

There's a reasonable chance that any computer you buy today will still be able to turn on and run a program or two in ten years. That does not mean that it is "functional."

At my office we estimate that the functional lifespan of desktops is 5-7 years and the functional lifespan of laptops is 3-5 years. Laptops get more wear and tear than desktops and desktops are easier to upgrade to keep them running. At 5 years for desktops and 3 years for laptops you should look at upgrading the RAM in the device and possibly consider replacing the SSD with a new (possibly larger) model, because SSDs and HDDs don't last forever.

COST

This means that you should think of your computers as an annual investment rather than as a one-time purchase. It is more worthwhile to pay $700 for a laptop that will work well for five years than it is to pay $300 for a laptop that will be outdated and slow in one year (which is what will happen if you get an 8th gen i3 with 8GB RAM). If you are going to get a $300 laptop try to get specs as close as possible to the minimums I've laid out here.

If you have to compromise on these specs, the one that is least fixable is the processor. If you get a laptop with an i3 processor you aren't going to be able to upgrade it even if you can add more RAM or a bigger SSD. If you have to get lower specs in order to afford the device put your money into the processor and make sure that the computer has available slots for upgrade and that neither the RAM nor the SSD is soldered to the motherboard. (one easy way to check this is to search "[computer model] RAM upgrade" on youtube and see if anyone has made a video showing what the inside of the laptop looks like and how much effort it takes to replace parts)

Computers are expensive right now. This is frustrating, because historically consumer computer prices have been on a downward trend but since 2020 that trend has been all over the place. Desktop computers are quite expensive at the moment (August 2023) and decent laptops are extremely variably priced.

If you are looking for a decent, upgradeable laptop that will last you a few years, here are a couple of options that you can purchase in August 2023 that have good prices for their specs:

14" Lenovo - $670 - 11th-gen i5, 16GB RAM, and 512GB SSD

15.6" HP - $540 - 11th-gen i5, 16GB RAM, and 256GB SSD

14" Dell - $710 - 12th-gen i5, 16GB RAM, and 256GB SSD

If you are looking for a decent, affordable desktop that will last you a few years, here are a couple of options that you can purchase in August 2023 that have good prices for their specs:

SFF HP - $620 - 10th-gen i5, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD

SFF Lenovo - $560 - Ryzen 7 5000 series, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD

Dell Tower - $800 - 10th-gen i7, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD

If I were going to buy any of these I'd probably get the HP laptop or the Dell Tower. The HP Laptop is actually a really good price for what it is.

Anyway happy computering.

[toquegirl]