handful_ofdust | Reading

Legend of the Magnate is the first historical cdrama I've watched that's interested in the middle class, and for this alone tbh I'd recommend it. The Qing Emperor dies pretty early on and nobody cares except inasmuch as it leads to some national policy changes, because not a single one of our main characters knew him personally!

The year is 1860; the Qing Empire is struggling with the aftermath of the Opium Wars and the ongoing Taiping Heavenly Kingdom rebellion; and our protagonist, Gu Pingyuan, a nice young man with scholarly ambitions from a family of tea farmers, has unfortunately spent his twenties in prison-exile in the frozen north after getting sabotaged by an Unknown Enemy into making criminal amounts of noise at the big civil service exams in the capitol. During his years in exile he has learned various survival skills and at the start of the show he makes his escape so he figure out who sabotaged him, as well as what happened to the long-disappeared father he went to the capitol to seek information about the first place.

Given this setup -- and the fact that the show is a high-budget historical drama that shares several cast members with Nirvana in Fire -- we were kind of expecting Gu Pingyuan to be a master schemer and puppeteer with martial skills and elaborate plans. Not so! It turns out the survival skills that Pingyuan learned in prison mostly included Wheeling, Dealing, Bullshitting, and Occasionally Falling On His Face And Begging. Very refreshing also tbh to see a clever protagonist who has no pride whatsoever. Many times Pingyuan's brilliant schemes to manipulate the market forces around him do succeed! (Often I didn't understand why, because I'm not a financial genius, but I was willing to nod sagely along and agree that they probably were brilliant.) And many other times they result in heavily armed men throwing him in prison because his bullshit immediately backfired on him and he has to wait for someone else to come and rescue him, because he did not in fact acquire any martial arts skills in prison, he leaves that to his love interest.

I should probably at this point talk about the other main characters of the drama. They are:

- his love interest, a nice young woman whose family runs a horse caravan for long-distance deliveries; as this often takes her into somewhat dangerous situations, she's picked up some martial arts skills and low-key considers herself part of the jianghu but in like a normal person way. She's lovely. So is her dad, who loves Gu Pingyuan almost as much as she does. Unfortunately Gu Pingyuan has a pre-prison-exile fiancee that he thinks he's duty-bound to be getting back to and as a result he fumbles her so many times
- his foil, the son of very wealthy merchant, Li Million who owns a massive chain of pharmacies; as a result before we learned his name we spent several episodes calling him the Heir to CVS. The lonely CVS Junior has a deep and powerful attachment to Gu Pingyuan, and the plot keeps briefly letting them get into joyous financial cahoots and then immediately putting them into rivals situations; numerous scenes where Li Million (a major ominously antagonistic figure, played by the Emperor from Nirvana in Fire) is like "I have told you Many times you are Forbidden to associate with that Convict" and CVS Junior stares up at him with big sad eyes and goes "but daddy ... ~~I love him~~ he's my only friend ...."
- his ex-fiancee, who unfortunately for Gu Pingyuan is busy having her own plot, ( which is spoilery )
- his ... hmm I don't really know how to describe Ms. Su in context of Gu Pingyuan as she doesn't actually care that much about him; she's obviously the main character of her own drama that occasionally intersects with this one in which she is a ruthless master puppeteer engaged on her own mysterious business. She appears in the plot every few episodes, often cross-dressed, often waving large amounts of money, occasionally trying to assassinate somebody, and half the time it's like "thank God she's here to help our friend out of prison, we couldn't have done it without her" and the other half the time it's like "well, five men are now dead." You never can tell with Ms. Su!

The show is somewhat interested in politics, but much more interested in how things are made, who makes them, who sells them, and how they get from place to place. At one point some East India Company white guys show up with something ominous under a cloth, and

genarti was like "is it a Spinning Jenny?" and the cloth came off and INDEED IT WAS A SPINNING JENNY and we all screamed. The real villain of the story has appeared!

-- though the villain of the story, I want to be clear, is not capitalism. The show wants to be very clear on that. About every three or four episodes it's clearly been mandated by Someone that Gu Pingyuan have a conversation with somebody to reiterate his Ethical Vision for Ethical Business That Truly Serves the People. And when that doesn't happen and when businessmen act badly? That is the fault of the FAILING QING DYNASTY, or possibly the BRITISH, but it is Not the fault of Business, which is Good, and Ethical, and also Patriotic. The last scene of the drama -- this isn't a spoiler, it has nothing to do with the plot of the show in any way -- is a brief post-show epilogue set fifty years in the future where we learn that Gu Pingyuan's business wealth acquired through years of ardent dedication to the free market is of course funding the Communist Revolution.

But the flip side of this dedicated Business Propaganda is that the rest of the show is free to be nuanced, messy, and politically ambivalent. The show doesn't particularly support either the rebels or the Empire; the show just thinks that the civil war sucks for everyone who's caught up in it and makes tea production very difficult. When aristocrats and officials appear in the plot, they're small disruptive typhoons oversetting everything in their wake for the merchant- and working-class people whose lives we're following. Upward mobility is possible, but also perilous; Gu Pingyuan is constantly getting put into glass cliff situations by more powerful people who need a scapegoat, because the Empire is a powder keg and fundamentally our protagonist is just an ex-convict from a tea farming family.

( big major show spoilers )

All this is to say that I enjoyed the show very much, but I do have one -- well, two major complaints. The first is that Gu Pingyuan has a younger brother and in a show where most people broadly do get interesting characterization and growth this brother never once transcends Comedy Status. Earth-shaking revelations are destabilizing the rest of his family to their core and nobody ever bothers to tell him! What is even the POINT of a Comedy Brother if you don't get a moment of shocking and unexpected poignance! Absolute waste.

The second is that there is an arc with Wolves, all of whom seem to have been imported straight into China by way of Hammer Horror. RIP to those many, many monster movie wolves.

aurumcalendula

The irises in one flower bed have decided to bloom a full month early!

I love the color these ones are (the photo doesn't quite capture how they look - the top petals are an intense almost electric purple in person - similar to HEX #8400E0) and how fragrant they are!

conuly

After this week. Because after this week, we should have paid off the gas and electric bills, yay!

But yeah, one or two weeks of crunch is one thing, a string of them is something very different.

****************

( Read more... )

rachelmanija

A modern take on La Ronde: a novel in the form of twelve short stories linked by airplane trips. Each has a main character who meets the main character of the next story. A pilot has a brief fling with a journalist in Brazil; the journalist flies to Toronto to interview a writer; the writer flies to Seattle where she meets two of her fans; one of the fans flies to Hong Kong, and so forth.

The blurb says each meeting causes a ripple effect as they change each other's lives, but that's not actually what happens in many of them. Some are minor chance encounters, some are present at a crucial moment in someone else's life but don't directly affect it, and some are important encounters but those are the ones where the people have pre-existing relationships. Most of the characters are disconnected, discontented, and lonely, despite the literal connections they have in a six degrees of separation way; the only character who seems happy and is focused on the people they love is about to get hit with a terrible tragedy that's someone else's traffic delay.

As we go from person to person, we get to see the characters from different angles, and understand things about them that others don't. The pilot, who in his story was wondering what would have happened if his younger sister hadn't died in a childhood accent, asks his one night stand how old she is. She says 33, which is the age his sister would have been. But she has no idea of any of this, and when he doesn't reply she thinks he's fallen asleep.

There's an impressively diverse set of locales and characters, sketched-in but real-feeling; I knew we were in Delhi before it was stated just from the description of the air. The emotional tenor is a bit distanced and chilly. Overall it reminded me of Raymond Carver, but with less striking prose.

Szalay won last year's Booker Prize for Flesh, a novel which sounds really unappealing.

sovay

Rabbit, rabbit! For May Day, I made a garland and

spatch photographed me. The inspiration was

nineweaving.

( And every hair all on your head shines like a silver wire )

And on the porch was sitting the copy of Vivien Alcock's A Kind of Thief (1991) that

osprey_archer had offered a week ago and Hestia had run across my computer to claim, so she will sit on it and I will read it and we will welcome in the spring.

Current Music: The Watersons, "Swinton May Song"

aurumcalendula

The illustrator for the late 90s/early 2000s US Random House covers for Tamora Pierce's Tortall quartets has prints available for most* of her covers!

*(The original painting First Test's cover was sold years ago and she hasn't had luck tracking it down to scan, but she might try to reproduce it at some point)

aurumcalendula

Ballad of Sword and Wine, vol. 7 by Tang Jiu Qing (translated by XiA, Jia, and amixy):

( Read more... )

I've also just started Desmond by Ulysses Grant Dietz and I'm liking it so far.

moon_custafer

Amazingly, found the morris dancers before they started. One of these years I’ll wise up and take the subway instead of hiking up from the south end of the park. Spent several minutes homing in on what I thought was faint music in the distance and turned out to be the Grenadier Restaurant’s generator.

Above-average number of people in cloaks here. Props to the person in the Metallica Pushead Sun hoodie.

We’ve been informed it’s five minutes to sunrise. Someone is tootling a while concerto in their car horn.

They’ve blocked off the road this year so we won’t have to yell CAR like it’s a street-hockey game.

Man in Charge: *bellows something*
Man with glasses drawn on his face, carrying a small broom: “He’s saying the next dance is called ‘The Bells of York.’”

man accompanying morris dancers

The man with glasses drawn on his face has offered somebody a dry leaf. Am beginning to suspect him of being one of the Fair Folk.

"This is going to go on for a bit, so if you want to step away and go for a coffee, or a meal, or to put a child through university, that’s all right. It’ll all look just the same when you come back.”

conuly

All my responses were silent because they really weren't appropriate for the context, which is that somebody in the thread has a seriously ill relative.

Supportive poster: It's so great that so many of us will come out to support each other with prayer, we're so blessed that this team is so kind, I shall natter on religiously for a really inordinately long comment.

Me: She's being kind and supportive. This is not the time. Don't make it awkward, Connie!

Same supportive poster: Uh, I mean, of course, there are plenty of non-religious people and even atheists who are also really good and kind people too!

Me: God damn it, lady, you just made it awkward! Fuck you so much! Think before you post the first thing, then you won't find yourself making it awkward later!

sovay

tl;dr my body is chewed up by medical conditions and their treatment and I have not slept more than two or three hours in five nights, but this afternoon I had to walk into Davis for a prescription and I photographed some flowering things along the way. The cherries are still blooming.

( One step over the line. )

I am still watching almost nothing in the way of movies, but

spatch and I are enjoying the introductory riffs on weird New England in Widow's Bay (2026–). The series so far feels more like a collection of strange stories than a puzzle-box, off-kilter without tipping as far as spoof. I hope it can hold. I'd had no idea I should have been following Matthew Rhys for his powers of +10 mortal fear. In other art, I had missed the gloriously angular revival of the Pylon Reenactment Society's Magnet Factory (2024). I believe

moon_custafer that this musician is doing his impressive best in the absence of his natural frog form. The doom-folk of Jim Ghedi's "Wasteland" (2025) once again suggests a Cloudish cinema.

Current Music: Pylon Reenactment Society, "Fix It (feat. Kate Pierson)"

aurumcalendula

NCIS: Hawai'i season 3:

( Read more... )

asakiyume

I've adored the two volumes in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series (and fully intend to read the other two), but I've been daunted in trying to branch out because the guy is SO prolific. But thanks to the recommendation of someone on here, I landed on Elder Race. It's a novella--handy! I read it in airports on my way to and from Leticia, and it was absolutely right for me, because putting aside the plot, what it's about is communication across a chasm of cultural difference, when you're not sure how what you're saying is being received, and you're also not sure if what you're understanding of what you hear is what the speaker intends. And on top of that, you're dealing with vast differentials in resources and--so you arrogantly assume (you're right in some respects, but very wrong in others)--knowledge.

It's also about what's wrong with the Prime Directive, namely, that once you're watching a thing, observing a thing, you're party to it, part of it. Your act of watching changes reality. Like with photons, or whatever. Schrödinger Heisenberg etc. If you weren't there, then yes, things would just unfold however they were going to unfold, but you are there, and so if you decide not to get involved, then it means you're permitting whatever bad things might happen that you might be capable of stopping.

Don't get me wrong: messing around and getting involved can be equally bad. All I'm saying is that once you're there, you ARE involved, and doing nothing is as much of a game changer as doing something.

Nyr is the resource-having character, assailed by depression because he's realized, upon being wakened from his most recent cryo-sleep, that his society back on Earth has likely died off, that he is the last of his people. He's woken by Lynesse Fourth Daughter, to whose lineage he made a promise some great grandmothers ago, when he last woke up and broke the Prime Directive by helping out said great-great (etc.) grandmother. This time, there's a demon to fight...

And the story unfolds. It was very fun to see Nyr from Lynesse (and her ally Esha)'s point of view, and to see them from his. The demon (it can't be a demon, Nyr thinks to himself, but in fact for all intents and purposes it IS a demon, very Stranger Things-ish) is suitably awful and scary.

There were two ways (to my mind) that the story could have ended for Nyr, and I definitely preferred the ending that Tchaikovsky chose, which goes along with his general outlook as I know it from the Children of Time books. About the only niggle I have with the story is that I'm not very satisfied with the finality of the demon vanquishing. I was kind of expecting more exploration/explanation of what it was, which would then let me believe in the permanence of its defeat, but as it's an eldritch horror from the Upside Down, pretty much, ehhhhnnnn, I feel like it might find its way back? But it's gone for now, and that'll have to do.

rachelmanija

I'm still going through books and discarding ones that don't grab me after a chapter or so. (Lots grab me within one paragraph).

Stir it Up! Ramin Ganeshram

A Trinidadian-American girl wants to be a celebrity chef. It begins with a recipe for "two cups of love, a pinch of sharing," etc. BARF.

Before the Fall, by Noah Hawley

Hawley is a TV writer/creator who did a show I loved (Legion) and a show I liked (Fargo). The premise of this book - a man who, along with the young boy he saves, is the sole survivor of a plane wreck and starts investigating the victims to find out if it wasn't an accident - really appeals to me. Unfortunately, it's written in a style I can only describe as "Middle-aged white dude writes New Yorker fiction." Not for me.

Guns in the Heather, by Lockhart Amerman

In a fast-moving tale of international espionage, Jonathan Flower is lured by a false telegram from the school he is attending in Edinburgh. With his father, he is involved in a grim hunt in which they are stalked by a ruthless band of foreign agents.

The plot sounded fun but was actually kind of tedious. The best part was the author amusing himself with the dialogue. I am recording some for posterity:

Tommy is a fat, jolly sort of character who likes to talk jive with a Glasgow accent. This is purely so he can say stuff like "We dig it, mon, but good."

Her voice and her person both reminded me of the Scots adjective "soncy." This is purely so she can say stuff like "There's a bit sandwich forby - under yon cover."

"Wullie's awee the dee?" (His accent was what we call in school "pure Morningsayde.")

"We're teddibly soddy, of course. It's so fearfully dismal to be doodly with a gun."

My new band name is Doodly With A Gun.

aurumcalendula

I just saw that Rise plushies are now available on NASA Exchange's website!

sovay

The Leon Garfield novel that I read last week as The Stolen Watch (1988) was first published as Blewcoat Boy and I may have read it originally under its American title of Young Nick and Jubilee, which I am taking as an excuse for its absence from any kind of mental index even after various turns of its plot had gone into long-term storage. I loved it peculiarly in elementary school, right around the age of its pair of orphans introduced living like foxes in a den of hawthorn on the wild side of St James's Park. I may always have been more at home to found family when it is discovered through crime.

It was soon after nine o'clock, and the dazed air was staggering under the booming and banging of the bells of Westminster Abbey; for Devil's Acre was right next door to God's front yard. In fact, you could have heaved a brick out of the Abbey and hit the Devil right in the eye—if he'd happened to be on his property at the time instead of sitting in Parliament and making the laws.

As a novel, it's short, sweet, and satirically edged, a fairy tale of Victorian London in the right key of droll color to social rage. In need of a dad to sponsor them into the charitable advantages of the Blewcoat School and the genuine article no closer than a child's dream of Kilkenny, the raggedly resourceful Young Nick and his sister Jubilee locate an expedient substitute in the amiable, if not precisely upstanding person of Mr Christmas Owen and share his horror when it develops that he will have to stand as their father for more than the morning if all three of them want to keep out of trouble with the law. It is all but inevitable from this set-up that their inconvenient imposture should convert with time and responsibility into the real thing, but it happens by awkward, inadvertent degrees, without much in the way of schmaltz or saccharine, and without losing hold of the social thread. The win conditions of a reformation are not riches or even middle-class respectability. Gainfully employed and integrated into a community, Mr Owen and his chicks still belong to the rookeries of London, living half in the pockets of their downstairs neighbors and busking for their suppers the rest of the time and because it matters that children are cared for and adults act like it for once in their aimless lives, it feels like a triumph rather than a concession that the narrative concludes, modestly but meaningfully, in the none more Dickensian unity of carols at Christmastime. On the slant of a punch line or a prophecy, Young Nick's wishful, signature boast even comes true: "Our dad's a big feller, big as a church!"

When you go shopping for a dad, you got to be careful. You don't want any old rubbish . . . You got to try the bottom end of the market, where there's always a chance of picking up a bargain among the damaged goods.

As a re-read, it was one of those dual-layered experiences because the title meant nothing to me, I recognized the text from the second page, and not having read it in at least thirty-five years kept remembering the events of future chapters while simultaneously discovering all the details in the story that I had not originally been able to appreciate or even recognize. Please not to look surprised that at any age I was gone for quirky, rackety Mr Owen with his absentminded snapping-up of trifles and his rueful habit of sighing, "Sharp as pickles!" whenever the children catch him out in a cheat, as unprepossessing a father-figure as ever rocked up half-lit to an admissions interview. He looks half the size of his voice that can soothe a wakeful tenement and gets himself epically pasted in a barroom brawl. The text which slips conversationally between the wry omniscience of a nineteenth-century narrator and the near stream-of-consciousness of the children has him tagged with the antiheroic epithet of "old parrot-face." Watching his makeshift kindness deepen into real concern would have won me over as much as his fallibility, but then I did not have, like Young Nick, the dog-eared, partly fantasized memory of an ideal parent to interfere with accepting the imperfect reality of one, an embarrassing and surprising adult with their own charms and crotchets and fears who may need rescuing from the locked wilderness of a park one night and risk their freedom for the sake of one of their formerly burdensome charges the next. "Our dad!" Jubilee names him more readily, captivated by his ballads and thrilled that he started a fight he couldn't finish over her very first handkerchief. She herself could go toe-to-toe with any feral heroine out of Aiken or Hardinge when she beats up a bigger boy with a fish; it pairs her classically with the more anxiously adult Young Nick, who after all landed them with a new dad through fretting over a dowry for his sister at the age of ten. It may occur to the grown reader that the sooner he can let go of the expectation of heading the family, the healthier. Mutual rescue need not be confined to romances and I like its involvement in the bonding of the eventual Owens. It will still probably never be a good idea to lend anything to the dad if six months later you don't want to have to ask for it back.

Then he give Jubilee the violin and the bow and, after a scrape or two, she starts rendering The Ash Grove all over again; and it were very queer, what with her being only nine, and the fiddle being a hundred and fifty, how well they got on together!

It were different from them other fiddles. It were very sweet and strong; and, as Jubilee stood in the middle of the room, with her fingers fluttering and trembling like white butterflies, and her face nestled into the golden brown of the old fiddle, like a flower asleep, nobody moved nor said a word.

It were something wonderful, you had to admit it. If she'd gone fishing for a husband, she wouldn't have needed no more dowry than her earrings and the old violin. She'd have caught a king!

Language-level, it's a pleasure, careering from sentence to ironic, high-flown, argumentative sentence as if the story is tumbling out through a visit to a long-razed slum. Garfield has the historical knack of pinpointing his time without obvious references like battles or coronations: the smattering of cant in the richly demotic narration helps, but so does the slight distance in habits of mind as well as the plot winding through charity schools and one-man bands, marginalizations of class and nationality and a baby named Parliament Smudgeon. Jubilee's own appellation is the result of "the Pope having done something wonderful in the year she was born," while her brother's diminutive distinguishes him from the Devil. I take Mr Owen's uncommonly Christian name as a seasonal consequence à la Christmas Evans, but the fact that he's a pickpocket—a popular trade around Onion Court—is not an encouragement to the reader to follow the casual bigotry of the police who treat Taffy was a Welshman like forensic gospel. The law in this children's novel is a primer in ACAB, an unappetizing mass of "bluebottles" buzzing fawningly round their social betters with their truncheons at the ready for anyone below. "Real life ain't like a beanstalk, lad! Climb up out of your proper station, and you'll just get knocked down again!" Whereas Mr Owen may need a stiff belt of gin to face a schoolmaster, but as soon as he learns that Young Nick has a head for figures and Jubilee's as musical as his own child, he's determined to support them in their talents. I had a better ear for his own this time around: in the seven-to-ten range I knew a different set of English lyrics to "All Through the Night," but I wouldn't hear "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" until high school or "The Ash Grove" until college and I still couldn't render you "The Bluebells of Scotland" without listening to the Corries first. As I kept hearing the folk songs arranged by Stephen Oliver, however, I have ended up showing the 1982 RSC The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby to

spatch. The double bill works. I hadn't read enough Dickens in elementary school to know.

But it turned out to be a dirty lie as it wasn't the little 'un in the story what got thumped and had to be helped out of the boozer with a nose like a bee-cluster that didn't go down for a week!

Current Music: Peter Bellamy, "Rigs of the Time"

conuly

Anybody able to recommend a library or ten that allows for nonresident digital cards?

There’s a series I was reading, and the three libraries in NYC have books 1 - 4 and then 9 - 11. I don’t like it enough to pay for just the missing books. I still want to read them. More library systems, that I would pay for. (And hopefully get these books.)

asakiyume

In spite of near crippling pre-trip nerves, my visit in Leticia was wonderful!
--I was a passenger on a motorbike multiple times!
--I swam in a river! (Not The river, but a river)
-- I saw a pink river dolphin and many gray ones!
--I made asaí juice!
--I did a craft project with the kids of one of my friends and played chase games with them!
--I made the acquaintance of a truly grandísima ceiba!
--I visited a shelter for stray dogs run by a friend of one of my friends!
--I saw a parade for the 159th anniversary of Leticia's founding!

But probably the thing that people would most enjoy seeing at this point in time is... an encounter with a pet capybara. He was a sweetie ^_^

Watch on YouTube

Current Music: Amira Syahira: No Toques Mi Corazón

rachelmanija

This was Robinson's first novel, one of a set of three set in future Orange County, Californias, exploring three different futures for America. The second one is about a future much like the present day, hyper-capitalist and dystopian. The third is set in an ecotopia which apparently involves lots of softball. (I've only read The Wild Shore, and gleaned this information from reviews of the others.) After reading The Ministry of the Future, I thought I'd give Robinson another try, and this book sounded most relevant to my personal interests. (I've attempted Years of Rice and Salt multiple times and never gotten very far in. It sounds so interesting!)

The Wild Shore is set about sixty years after the US was shattered by multiple neutron bombs, then quarantined by the rest of the world. It's now a bunch of extremely small, struggling towns which are kept separated from each other as the rest of the world uses satellite imagery to bomb them any time they attempt to do something like build railroad tracks. The California coast is patrolled by Japanese vessels who prevent them from sailing too far out. No one in the book has any idea who bombed the US or why, but given the quarantine I assume the US started the war and someone else finished it.

The book is narrated by Henry, who is 17 and lives in a village of 60. He hangs out with a bunch of mostly-indistinguishable other teenage boys. (I spent three-quarters of the book thinking Steve and Nicolin were two different boys. They are not. I wish writers wouldn't randomly call characters by their first or last name.) They fish and farm and trade with scavengers. Henry is the prize student of Tom, one of four elders who recall the pre-catastrophe days. It is immediately obvious that Tom's teachings are a mix of real and complete bullshit, but as the younger generation has no context or means of fact-checking, they tend to think it's either all true or all bullshit.

The village gets contacted by the remnants of San Diego, which wants to build a rail line and fight back against the quarantine. Henry gets sucked into this, with disastrous results.

This book is SLOW. I often like books that are mostly about daily life, but Henry's daily life was not that interesting - he spends a lot of time hanging out with boys and talking and thinking about girls and daddy issues, and you can get that in any contemporary novel about teenage boys. The only real character is Tom - everyone else is lightly sketched in at best. Girls and women are only present as girlfriends, potential girlfriends, and moms. (There's one girl who's the leader of the farmers, who are mostly women - the men are mostly fishers - but she doesn't get much to do.) The book was just barely interesting enough that I finished it, but it didn't end anywhere more interesting than the rest of it.

( Read more... )

Content note: Characters use racial slurs for Japanese people.

aurumcalendula

Since I've recently fallen into Wiseguy, I figured I'd start there with my fanvid recs:

Nights in White Satin by Lynn C and Tashery S (1993)

(You Don't Have To) Play Me Backwards by Gayle F &

morgandawn (1997)

Only the Good Die Young by

killabeez & Merricat (2001)

Take Me Out by

barkley &

destina (2006)

(inspired by

colls' post in

vid_bingo, I'm going to make an effort to post vid-related stuff over the next few weeks)

aurumcalendula

I'm kinda annoyed that NCIS: Hawai'i only has season 1 on Blu-Ray (season 2 and 3 are only available on DVD for some reason).

I'm almost halfway through season three as of the other day. Unfortunately, I'm not invested in Sam's subplot and I'm annoyed that a bunch of recurring characters aren't going to get any screentime this season, going by imdb (Jane's daughter Julie, Jane's ex-husband Daniel, Jane's love interest Joe, Kai's father Wally, and Kai's friend Hina) and that Jane's son Alex only gets one scene this season.

I have a vague idea for a couple vids, but haven't gotten very far in brainstorming songs for them yet. I might end up making icons for it at some point too.

Profile

handful_ofdust

June 2022

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
			1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30

Page Summary

skygiants - (no subject)
aurumcalendula - Irises!
conuly - Never agreeing to do totally insane hours again
rachelmanija - Turbulence, by David Szalay
sovay - We'll tell you of a blossom and of buds on every tree
aurumcalendula - Tortall art
aurumcalendula - Some books
moon_custafer - May Day 2026 (edited down from my tumblr posts of early this morning)
conuly - Paraphrased comments in the phone game team chat
sovay - You showed me how to not throw my troubles away
aurumcalendula - (no subject)
asakiyume - Wednesday Reading: Elder Race, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
rachelmanija - Book Culls
aurumcalendula - (no subject)
sovay - And the biggest old rascal come tumbling down first
conuly - (no subject)
asakiyume - Back from the Amazon!
rachelmanija - The Wild Shore, by Kim Stanley Robinson
aurumcalendula - fanvid recs - Wiseguy
aurumcalendula - more NCIS: Hawai'i

Style Credit

Base style: Crisped by timeasmymeasure
Theme: Argyle by krja

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated May. 2nd, 2026 11:47 am