They Say What They Say

Last night was the last new ep of series 3 of The Chelsea Detective *and* the first new ep of series 11 of Brokenwood Mysteries! An excellent evening of TV watching!

Saturday I went to a potluck. I made bean salad, of course, because what else do you take to a potluck? It was the local PokemonGO group's first potluck and it was being held just down the street, so I decided to go. I already new a lot of those people are *way* into PoGO, but wow. I don't think anyone talked about anything else. I left after 2 hours. They'd broken out Mario Kart on the giant screen and I got an alert on my phone that heavy rain was coming soon, so good time to exit. I'd go again, but wow.

Yesterday I got a survey in the mail - a paper survey - about my visit to the ER. *rolls eyes*

This afternoon is another hour of tabling, followed by visiting my friend N at her library and then PoGO Spotlight Hour meetup. I need to remember to put a snack in my bag. I should go do that right now so I don't forget. Done!

Previous poll review
In the vegetables poll, 90.4% of respondents clicked fresh vegetables (bought), 46.2% clicked frozen vegetables, and 44.2% clicked fresh vegetables (homegrown). I was surprised; I thought more people would go frozen for the convenience. (I wonder what that says, if anything, about Dreamwidth demographics.)

In ticky-boxes, hugs came first with 78.8%, followed by a tie between "hanging in there until things settle down and I can sort my life out" and "sunbeams playing in a tree, daring each other to peek around the shadowed side" with 63.5% each. Thank you for your votes!

Reading
Still going on The Horse and His Boy (I am slow and distractable) and the Guardian novel read-along (it's on a schedule). Nothing in audio.

Kdramas
We started Tale of the Nine Tailed, a sweeping epic about a powerful immortal, the reincarnated love of his life, and his bratty younger brother. (Nothing at all like Guardian the novel, why do you ask?) I'm hoping it has enough plot and worldbuilding to hold Andrew's interest; he gets bored during extended romance scenes.

More of Sell Your Haunted House with Pru. And in solo-watching, I started Heesu in Class 2; it's pretty adorable, but also Heesu is the living embodiment of Idiots In Love, and sometimes I have to watch through my fingers.

Other TV
This week's Doctor Who

was very silly and meta, set against a background of ominous racism. Hm. But I did enjoy the jokes, and Belinda is great.

Episode 1 of Sherlock & Daughter. We were just going to try out the first ten minutes to get a sense of it, but we ended up watching the whole episode. I can forgive Holmes for being a grumpy old man when he has a reason for it.

Our Deadloch rewatch-with-a-friend continues, plus Jentry Chau vs the Underworld, about which I still have no opinion.

My sister and I watched Into the Night (1985 film; Michelle Pfeiffer, Jeff Goldblum, and a vast number of film directors as extras, the only one of whom I knew on sight was Jim Henson). The caper was silly, and the romance plotline was very thin, but Goldblum and Pfeiffer are so watchable that it hung together despite the weird pacing when it lingered on random extras we were supposed to recognise. Lovely to see David Bowie in a small (albeit violently psychotic) role.

Guardian/Fandom
I archived my Murderbot flashficlet, and wow, Murderbot fans are generous with their kudosing. *hearts so much* (In my experience, some fandoms are just more kudosy than others.)

Audio entertainment
I listened my way through all of The Setup, a romance audiodrama about Juan, an anxious art museum curator in NYC, and Fernando, the con artist who's trying to steal a painting. It's great! I'm really into it. And then I got to the end of the available episodes and realised it's not finished yet, ahhhhh! I need to check these things before I start!

(Is it just me or are depictions of anxiety becoming more common in romances? I feel like there's some wish fulfilment going on: people longing to meet The One who is hot, super into them, and will also be incredibly kind and patient and give them effective tips for handling their panic attacks. Not that romances aren't all about wish fulfilment, so why not? Add dimensions to your dream partner!)

Writing/making things
My little 4k exchange fic is becoming somewhat tortured by all the writing advice I'm trying to enact on it. Hopefully I'm not engineering the spark out of the thing. Also, hopefully I emerge from this process wiser and more capable. (It could happen!) Note to self: this story still doesn't have an ending, oops.

Other than that, I'm spending a lot of my life rolling around in meta discussions, yay!

Life/health/mental state things
Oh, look, let's not even talk about it. /o\

Note to self: I had a flu jab on Saturday.

Online life
I'm switching ISPs on Friday. Wish me luck! If I disappear off the face of the internet, that will be why.

Food
Today marks my first attempt at baked potatoes in the slow cooker. *fingers crossed* I forgot to prickle them with a fork before I wrapped them in foil, so who knows.

Good things
Fandom. Writing. Lunchtime dumplings on the back deck. Cephalopod plushies. Queer audiodramas. Friends coming over to watch stuff. Guardian. Home-made salsa. Trivia quizzes. Music and kindness and laughter and love.

The Writing Excuses podcast is doing a series on voice (first, third limited, third omniscient), and mostly their discussions have been great. I've enjoyed them a lot. But I found today's episode on second person (2ndPOV) unsatisfying. They got distracted talking about video games, TTRPG, online recipe essays, and Youtube influencers, and when they did discuss fictional prose, they seemed to think the "you" character had to be a reader stand-in. (Or maybe I misunderstood? Quite possible!) Anyway, now I'm itching to procrastinate on my story talk with like-minded souls about the joys of second person.

Note: If you not into 2ndPOV, that's totally cool. Each to their own! But please don't chime in to tell me or explain why; I'm not interested in defending it today.

( Rambling, so much rambling. )

ION, Andrew sent me a link to Secrets of Writing Snappy Dialogue (Banter) (Youtube video). At first I was resistant, but then I watched it and now I'm overhauling my 4k fic AGAIN. This is killing me, lol.

I made it to bed around 3am. Much better than 5am. I have a doctor's appointment at 8am, so I'm going to try for 2am tonight; I won't even try for 1am because that's laughable.

Watched the 2nd episode of Towards Zero tonight. Looking forward to the final one tomorrow! Then I watched the first 3 eps of The Cleaner. I'm not sure how I feel about that one, but they're only a half-hour so it's not a huge time commitment. I didn't get back to Ludwig; maybe tomorrow.

Last year, I made a birthday trip to Ikea (and Jordan's Furniture). I still have one bookcase that I haven't put together, mostly because it's tall and it will be a bigger pain than usual. My therapist was asking about it this afternoon and something she said made me go, "oh, I could hire someone to put it together as a birthday present!" So I'm seriously considering that. Task Rabbit isn't super cheap but it would be really nice to have that bookcase up...

I didn't go to bed until after 5am. ooops. Luckily I didn't need to get up early this morning.

Tonight I watched the first episode of Toward Zero. Can't wait for the next one. Then I went over to PBS and watched 3 episodes of NOVA. I only meant to watch the one about Revolutionary War weapons - there was a submarine??!! - but you know how it goes.

I had hand therapy this afternoon for the first time, for my wrist. She thinks it's the ligament rather than the tendon. But it's all in the same area so it's pretty much the same treatment. The exercises I need to do are so much better than any knee, back, or shoulder exercises I've ever gotten. Will that actually make me do them? We'll see. Unlike the bus routes I take to the audiologist, this bus route is apparently never on time. None of the 3 different transit apps I used - one of them the official app - had accurate "real time" tracking. I spent a lot of time standing around at bus stops. Luckily it was sunny, only a little windy, and not too chilly. And I did get a lot of PokemonGO research tasks done.

( US political shitshow behind the cut (Youtube video & news link) )

And while I'm at it, ( shitty news from the UK, too )

Previous poll review
In the Lists poll, 59.3% of respondents make to-do lists on their phone/computer/device, 40.7% use scraps of paper, and 18.5% have a planner or other organisational system. (These options are obviously not mutually exclusive.) "I park items on my to-do list so I don't have to worry about forgetting them" was the most popular purpose of to-do lists, with 61.1%, followed by 44.4% who refer to their to-do lists and try to complete the items thereon, and 24.1% who agree with me that "putting an item on the list is sort of the same as doing the thing."

In ticky-boxes, hugs came first with 75.9%, followed by a near-four-way tie. Thank you for your votes! <3

Reading
Am I reading anything except Guardian? Doesn't seem like it. ETA: Just started A Horse and his Boy by C.S. Lewis.

Kdramas Asian dramas
I'm watching my first Japanese drama, Aoshima-kun is a Bully!, on VIKI. It's a sweet m/f office romance with a 9-year age gap. The production values aren't super-shiny, but it hangs together fine. I like older woman/younger man stories for a number of reasons; it might be the first drama I've seen where the woman is like, yes, I do like you, and it's nice when you stay over, but also I really miss having tons of alone time. And I like that the male lead keeps turning to his two step-mothers for relationship advice, aw. Non-standard family relationships for the win!

More of the Sell Your Haunted House rewatch.

Other TV
Finished The Pitt, which was as excellent as everyone's been saying. The ending felt earned, and I'm glad they gave it space to breathe. Now Andrew and I are floundering a bit, unsure what to watch next. (We've spent the last couple of evenings listening to Youtube writing lectures, see below.) We're up to episode 3 of Doc, which is fine but by-the-numbers, and suffers greatly in comparison to The Pitt.

Still watching Krapopolis. Losing interest in Ghosts (UK), though it's interesting discussing why it isn't working for us. Started The Dope Thief, but I was finding the bad decisions and impending disaster too stressful and couldn't finish episode 1. The new Doctor Who, which, the main characters were great, and everything else feels messy to me.

A friend came over, and we watched the first episodes of Deadloch (a rewatch for me) and Jentry Chau vs the Underworld which I was too tired to judge.

Also: Frankie and Johnny (1985) starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino, a romance in which the female lead should have taken out a restraining order (interesting comparing it to Aoshima-kun, in which "mature woman stays single" is presented as a viable choice, not a death sentence), and Dead Again (1991) a "neo-noir romantic thriller" starring Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh as reincarnated lovers who look identical to their past-life selves (so I couldn't help connecting the dots to Guardian in that regard). Neither film has aged well.

Guardian/Fandom
Working on my 520 Day Guardian fic. Having some lovely discussions on sid_guardian. Didn't sign up for bitesizedfandomsex in the end, because the sign-up summary didn't look promising. That's okay.

Audio entertainment
Writing Excuses this week was about 3rd person omniscient, and it made me go back and start to re-read this week's Guardian chapters with voice in mind. Wow, priest is so good at this. It feels very natural, even to me who mostly reads 3rd limited. The example that came to mind most when I was listening to the podcast was actually The Spear Cuts Through Water, where a lot of the omniscient/non-main-character voices are there to support the worldbuilding and theme; that works so well. But in Guardian, it's not a theme thing; priest is just telling the story.

The Daily Stoic on Virtue Ethics, which wasn't as explanatory as I was hoping.

And a bunch of Brandon Sanderson's Youtube lectures on plotting which, as I've mentioned previously, I'm trying to apply to a 4k fic. (I broke it into segments and reassembled them, theoretically with more build/progression; now let's see if this thing will fly.)

Writing/making things
My writing energy is pretty good. I'm getting things done and having a good time doing so. I have two things I want to finish this week (one is most of the way there; the other, I'd be happy if I could get a complete draft), and if I have time after that, I'll write another flashfic for the Pink round on fan_flashworks. I'm thinking of doing something with P!nk song titles or lyrics.

Life/health/mental state things
I seem to be permanently not on top of things, ahhhhh! How is it mid-April already?? Every so often I look at my consolidated to-do list and go, "Okay, okay, I did a couple of these by accident, I can cross them off." I don't think that's how to-do lists are supposed to work.

I did manage to get my four-year term submission in yesterday, so that's something. (It was very cranky.)

Cats
Halle's on 3x daily medication for the next 5-7 days. She is so good about it. I can't get over how chill and compliant she is, especially compared to our previous demon siblings.

Korean
I got a bilingual children's picture book out of the library, and yeah, it's above my (very low) reading level. But I've also printed out the Korean subs for episode 8 of Guardian, and that's a bit more successful, since I know pretty well how it goes. I just need to make some more time.

Good things
Biking weather. Library books. Writing. Guardian. Guardian fanart. Cooking experiments. Podcasts and Youtube. Polls. Movie night with my sister. Figuring out I can play file types that aren't supported by my TV through my Blueray player. Flowering hibiscus and fruiting lemon tree. Boy and cat.

I did not get out for a walk in the sun yesterday. In fact, I didn't get out until 9pm. A little after 8, I was getting ready to go out but my mother called. This won't take long, she says. We solved her Kindle problem in about 5 minutes. She hung up after 36 minutes and only because it was perilously close to dinner time there and my father gets grumpy if dinner is ready on time. *rolls eyes*

I watched the latest ep of The Chelsea Detective while eating dinner. After my walk, I switched over to BritBox and watched the first ep of Ludwig, which conference!roomie had recommended. I wasn't sure I was going to get through the episode, but then it started to get really interesting. So I'll definitely be watching the next one and probably the rest.

New Agatha Christie rendition, Towards Zero, drops tomorrow on BritBox.

Long day today. I started chat at 10am (still on chat...). I've got a webinar at 2pm, then I need to go in to campus to pick up those books and I'm doing tabling at 4. After that, I'm going to go see my friend that I used to work with at a different library. Then there's a PokemonGO meetup. I'd probably not go to the meetup except that it's right there, one building over from my friend's library. I probably won't get home until 7:30pm. I need to remember to take a protein bar of some sort.

I had a dream last night. I was in some sort of bar/club playing some sort of card game. There were multiple small rectangular table that could seat 3 or 4 people on one side with a dealer/bartender on the other side. Anyway I was playing the card game and told the bartender I wanted water not another cocktail. The next thing I know CKR comes up beside me and gives me a hug. And I said to him "You just made my day." He gave me that blinding smile of his and a little peck on the lips. Then he sat down and played cards with me.

What the actual hell subconscious?! That was just so random.

Still not 100% but pretty damned close. If only the terrible tinnitus would just go away. At least my head is feeling more normal.

I watched the latest episode of The Chelsea Detective, though I believe the next one is available today. Then watched Ellis, which was a great series and I hope there's a second one. And last night I watched a new(er?) version of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None. Which I don't think I'd ever seen or read before because I'm quite sure I'd remember just how fucked up that story is; not exactly Poirot or Miss Marple. Perhaps not the greatest choice for before bed viewing, though I don't think I dreamed about it.

The weather has once again warmed up and the sun it out, so I'm going to try to get out for a walk before dark. Lately I've been going out around 8pm, which is still dark at this point. I did go out during the day yesterday, but it was cold and cloudy and the rain was coming.

I do have some books to pick up at the library, but I'm going to campus tomorrow, so I'll probably do that then.