ebaths | Network

(Crossposted from my journal.)

A bit late for first impressions, but I still feel the urge to get my thoughts out there.

Dekin no Mogura: The Earthbound Mole has ugly character designs and a ton of talking, and yet is a joy and a treasure and I can hardly wait for the next episode from week to week. This is an adaptation of a manga by Eguchi Natsumi, the author of Hozuki's Coolheadedness, and starts off with a similar mix of comedy and folklore geekery. But then it adds a lot more layers. First there's the giant supernatural cat antics, and then it turns out that Eguchi has been storing up a lot of thoughts about how girls and women are socialized to behave in contemporary society, and then there's the matter of the ongoing flashbacks to World War II.

Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show is great if you are well-versed in both the Cthulhu mythos and the anime death game genre, an overlap not likely to occur much outside Japan. The little problem with the subtitles in episode 1 has been ironed out and now my only complaint is that the new translator doesn't know how to spell Ticktockman. Because the show has borrowed him too, for some reason.

Sword of the Demon Hunter is getting into the big events of the late 1860s while shifting its tone ever further away from grimdark. It may be trying a little too hard at this point, particularly with a recent episode where it is implied that someone eventually reforms but we miss the most interesting part of their story.

Hanako-kun season 2 part 2 is still gorgeous to look at, but suffering badly from being watched the same day as Dekin no Mogura. It isn't dragging as badly as the previous cour, but it feels like it is ambling with unnecessary slowness toward an ending that can be seen a mile away.

I was all set to hate Ruri Rocks for the same reason the geology displays at some science museums annoy me. I hate when the exhibit is basically just "look at the pretty rocks" with no context for them. But this show actually wants to provide the geological context, so great! Plus it has really excellent character animation! Instead, it annoyed me by spending way too much time pointing at the camera at the chest and bottom of the adult lead, so I'm still not planning to watch a second episode.

Bullet/Bullet and Onmyo Kaiten Re: Birth Verse were okay for as far as I watched them (1 episode and 2 episodes respectively), I don't think I'd mind watching more, but I haven't gotten around to it, so clearly I didn't like them that much.

And nobody picked up the latest Cute High for streaming, so I don't know what I think of it.

hebethen posting in

fffriday

Just popping in to mention that the latest Rivers of London entry, Stone & Sky, features our talented young apprentice Abigail as a co-narrator, and she meets a very intriguing huntress while she's tagged along on a Scottish investigation. It's a very "ah, youth" kind of summer romance for sure, but I enjoyed Abigail's POV on it a great deal, not to mention the particular ways that it was tinged by their involvements in the demimonde!

bluapapilio

Spoilers for post Forgotten Battlefield camp scenes to Yellow Glade to Monoco's Station

The Bond system is interesting, what's the point of it?

The 'check on the others' camp conversation between Lune and Sciel ahhhh. Lune's parents were Expeditioners?? What number? And Maelle was able to write in the journal. Will the apprentices ever see it? Maelle is wearing Gustave's arm band, she gave hers to Verso. 😭

Alright I went back, leveled up more Pictos and decided to brave the Yellow Glade. It's so big! And there's that Lost Wood place with the record?? I can't believe there was yet another group that died by mushrooms. 😭 And the two Expeditioners who gave up, and the group who tried WEARING Nevrons and failed utterly...... I couldn't beat the Mime here. Oh yeah, and another giant Nevron in the background. Somehow that seems the least of everything else going on;; What is the point of the Auto Death Pictos?! I need higher tier weapon items already so I can level weapons to 10.

Oh! I found out that the first record we receive is a reversed version of a real song, Mask of Joy, and it's basically the Mask of Sorrow now.

I dipped into camp and had a check in, it was a conversation between Maelle and Lune where Maelle apologized for accusing the others of not caring. 😢 It was a really lovely and sad conversation, Lune said she could feel the ones they've lost through Chroma and encouraged Maelle to try feeling Gustave.

I have zero interest in challenges that are near impossible to win without hours of patience and practice so I'm skipping the Painting Worship challenges.

Monoco is so interesting! Of course Noco is his son... Verso's way of getting Monoco to go with them. 🤣

Ughh the game crashes when my PC gets really hot, which happened during the Monoco tutorial.

Current Mood: tired

osprey_archer

littlerhymes and I have for years tossed around the possibility of a buddy reread of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, which I have resisted because I hated The Amber Spyglass so much. However, I finally cracked and we reread The Golden Compass, and it turns out that it’s just as flawless as I remembered it. How? How is it so good? Nothing should be ALLOWED to be this good, particularly not something that is going to go on to have disappointing sequels.

First of all, the worldbuilding is just so good. The daemons are a stroke of genius: what child DOESN’T want to have an adorable companion animal who is with you at all times and adores you and also changes shape until you reach puberty, at which point it will assume a shape that reveals your True Nature? And of course we all imagine having cool daemons who are cats or foxes or hawks or whatnot, not boring dog daemons like servants have.

(Pullman: not a dog person.)

But the daemons are only one part of Pullman’s deliciously crafted world. Over the course of the story Lyra moves through a variety of different environments, the stately masculine luxury of Jordan College in Oxford and the homey gyptians boats and the wildness of the North, and they all feel real and well-developed and lived in, with little hints thrown in about life in other parts of the world (like Lee Scoresby’s Texas) that make you feel that here indeed there is a whole world that extends in all directions, and Lyra is just moving through a small part of it.

Also, the plot moves along at a good clip. Pullman accomplishes all this rich, lush worldbuilding so economically, because we’re only ever spending a few chapters in one place before we rush on. I remember the Jordan College section going on forever! But it’s just the first four chapters or so, and then Mrs. Coulter whisks Lyra off into high society, another section that I remember lasting forever (in a good way, I should add; I remember these sections lasting forever because I never wanted them to end), but it’s only a couple of chapters before Lyra’s on the run, having realized that Mrs. Coulter is the head of the dreaded Gobblers who have been kidnapping children for who knows what nefarious end?

And from that point on, the action never lets up. She’s on the gyptian boats, she’s going north with the gyptians to save the kidnapped children, she becomes lifelong friends with an armored bear by telling him where to find his stolen armor, and and and one event after another, yet the pace is not breathless, each event gets just enough time to develop its full impact (the scene where Lyra learns what the Gobblers are doing!) and then we move on.

Excellent worldbuilding, excellent plotting, and amazing characterization, too. Lyra is such a fantastic heroine: lively, cunning, a natural leader, rough around the edges and yet with a great compassion underneath. Her daemon Pantalaimon is a perfect foil, cautious if Lyra is taking needless risks, but indomitably brave in the face of struggles that daunt even the usually fearless Lyra.

But it’s not just Lyra. The secondary characters are so well-drawn too, and as with Jordan College and Mrs. Coulter’s flat, I was often surprised how swiftly their sections passed. For instance, Serafina Pekkala only shows up in one chapter! (Of course, she’s talked about far earlier than that.) She’s so vivid in my memory that I was sure it was more than that. Farder Coram, Mrs. Coulter, Lord Asriel: the book is packed with startlingly vivid characters who have stuck with me for years.

I was, I must confess, hoping just a little to see signs of the flaws that would become so apparent in the later books in the trilogy. But no, whatever went wrong went wrong later on. The Golden Compass is pretty close to flawless. Perhaps its only error lies in ending on a sentence that any sequel would be hard-pressed to live up to. What book could possibly capture the possibility inherent in “she walked into the sky”?

vriddy

This is mostly silly. A problem with one of the early chapters is that nearly everyone noted it "feels" long even though it's not that much longer than the others. There are a number of issues: the sentences are too long for what should be a quick and fast-paced scene (bandits attack the village!), the descriptions feel quite remote as if the main character was only observing instead of being part of the action. It's vague in too many places instead of zooming on specific, vivid events and characters.

I've been editing this story for a lifetime (untrue) (but apparently still 179h41 over 141 days in the last 18 months, so CLOSE ENOUGH! XD), and because this is an early chapter it's one of those I've reread the most. So to shake things up a bit and try to experience it and its outline differently, I decided to storyboard it. It turned out surprisingly effective! It helped me narrow down on the key moments, and also give more agency to the bandits. Also it was fun.

At first, I drew two sides: one for the bandits, and one for the village, to show the preparations/lack thereof.

Then once the two collide, I started narrowing down on the key battle moments. By the 4th moment, I realised this was already a lot and stopped there. I removed a couple of unnecessary minor plot threads, like worries about a spell failing, and more magic stuff that's interesting but not particularly relevant to the scene or story. And I buffed up the 4 selected moments to make them more vivid.

( You don't need to be good at drawing. Are the bandits bringing torches to burn down the houses, or flower bouquets to secretly woo the villagers? Who knows! 😂 )

I think it was good just to help me think about the scene differently. My usual outlines sure look nothing like this!! I was also hoping to reduce the chapter's word count to make the prose tighter, but it ended up bubbling up because making things more specific required fleshing out background characters and actions. I think I'm okay with it, but I'll have to see how it flows when I do a full reread later, after I'm done and have taken a break from the story.

Current Mood: amused

laine4466 posting in

baihe_media

I just wanted to share some baihe titles that stuck in my mind for their interesting puns, especially since they are very likely to be dropped in translation (HTL or MTL). I will be dividing this into two obvious categories

( Read more... )

ysabetwordsmith posting in

followfriday

Got any Follow Friday-related posts to share this week? Comment here with the link(s).

Here's the plan: every Friday, let's recommend some people and/or communities to follow on Dreamwidth. That's it. No complicated rules, no "pass this on to 7.328 friends or your cat will die".

Current Mood: busy

maevedarcy posting in

recthething

I'm starting a Rarepair Recs series of posts (for ships with less than 250 complete works on AO3 using the otp:true filter) and I have shared a rec list on my journal with several works for KevJean (Kevin Day/Jean Moreau) to get it started. I encourage more people to make their Rarepair Recs!

Fandom: All for the Game
Relationship: Kevin/Jean
Medium: art, fic

See the rec list at my journal.

yourlibrarian posting in

everykindofcraft

Didn't quite match the color gradations but thought it worked well enough as a whole. ( Read more... )

cupcake_goth

Because of the exciting and inconclusive trip to the ER a few weeks ago, I have been told to schedule All The Tests:

- Monday was multiple ultrasounds, including the always-uncomfortable pelvic ultrasound.

- Today was full fasting labs, which means I got out of bed, got dressed, and went to the lab so they could draw EIGHT VIALS of blood. I am somewhat dizzy.

- I'm playing phone tag with the gastroenterologists' office to schedule both an endoscopy AND a colonoscopy, oh joy.

- Once that's done, I am pretty sure there'll be another appointment with my GP.

- Aaaaand my mammogram in Sept.

I'm not thrilled about any of this, but It Must Be Done.

abyss_valkyrie posting in

perioddrama_ic

Thank you for the votes and the entries! We have our Best icons and Best Set for Challenge Eighty:Icon Maze.

Set A by

flirty_aino Set B by

magicrubbish Set C by

abyss_valkyrie

Best Set: Set B by

magicrubbish

linky posting in

girlgay

Flint and Magine looking at each other lovingly while holding hands. There is text in the upper left corner saying Tokusatsu Femslash Prompt Meme.

Description: A multimedia femslash prompt meme for all tokusatsu series and films. From Kamen Rider, Super Sentai, Power Rangers, Ultraman, Kaiju, Sukeban Deka, and even the most obscure Showa-Era toku out there you can think of. If it's in the tokusatsu genre, it's welcome!
Schedule: August 20th until October 31st.
Links:

glitteryv posting in

recthething

Every Thursday, we have a community post, just like this one, where you can drop a rec or five in the comments.

This works great if you only have one rec and don't want to make a whole post for it, or if you don't have a DW account, or if you're shy. ;)

(But don't forget: you can deffo make posts of your own seven days a week. ;D!)

So what cool fics/podfics/fancrafts/fanvids/fanart/other kinds of fanworks have we discovered this week? Drop it in the comments below. Anon comment is enabled.

BTW, AI fanworks are not eligible for reccing at recthething. If you aware that a fanwork is AI-generated, please do not rec it here.

otw_news_feed

Posted by an

https://www.transformativeworks.org/ao3-celebrates-9-million-registered-users/

https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=266633

What is better than having eight million passionate, dedicated users? Having nine million, of course! That’s right, the Archive of Our Own (AO3) has recently reached nine million registered users! Thanks a million (or rather, nine million!) to every member of our community for making this success possible.

Some of you have likely noticed that AO3 is occasionally—and temporarily—unavailable due to site maintenance. However, if you prepare yourself in advance, you don’t need to be deprived of content!

The best way to prepare yourself for maintenance (both scheduled and unscheduled) is to download works in advance to tide you over until the site is accessible again. You can find instructions on how to download content from AO3 in our FAQs! Works are downloadable in several formats — AZW3, EPUB, MOBI, PDF, and HTML — letting you enjoy reading across devices: desktop, mobile devices, or even eReaders. Whether the site is temporarily down or you’re offline, having works downloaded means that you can always enjoy your favorite works!

Once again, thank you for your continued support of AO3 and for helping us grow each and every day. We look forward to celebrating many more achievements with you in the future!

https://www.transformativeworks.org/ao3-celebrates-9-million-registered-users/

https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=266633

aurumcalendula

Are there particular signs to look out for w/r/t an blu ray drive starting to fail?

I was importing a CD into iTunes last night and my external blu ray drive kept kinda getting stuck on some of the songs (some later imported successfully after I unplugged the drive and checking the connections plus restarting my PC seemed to resolve the issues with the last one).

I'm not sure if the problem was with the CD (it was from a historical society, so I'm not sure if it was burned or pressed), the software I was using, the USB connection, the drive, or something else, but now I'm feeling twitchy about the drive.

osprey_archer

I saved Dorothy P. Lathrop’s The Fairy Circus for the final book in the Newbery project because I had a suspicion that it would be a high note to go out on, and I was 100% correct.

At the beginning of the book, the fairies witness a human circus when it sets up on their field. Enchanted, the fairies decide that they simply MUST have a circus of their own, and the rest of the book is about how the fairies through a circus with the help of the woodland creatures.

The spiders spin a trapeze and a tightrope! The chipmunks are the tigers, but they keep forgetting to be properly fierce! The squirrels are the lions (carefully bunching their squirrels around their heads for manes) and they are SO fierce that they spring on the lion tamer, who flies away just in time! Thrillingly terrified, the fairies “went flitting over the arena looking for anything a little less exciting than lions. They even sat down at the farther end of the arena and let themselves be amused by the clowns! They had been as scared as all that!”

The fairy queen shows up, and the fairies have a grand parade in her honor, with tortoises as elephants and mice as horses. And the whole circus is illuminated by fireflies. And… and… and…

An enchanting book. Perfect for fans of Borrowers-type stories about tiny people (in this case tiny people with wings!) making use of the materials at hand to make their own tiny world.

siderea

Whelp, it looks like I'm in the market for a cell phone again.

On Saturday night, I noticed something dangling from the corner of my cell phone, which immediately struck me as odd, as there's no aperture in the protective gel case there for something to get stuck. Well, there's not supposed to be. On further inspection, I discovered the corner of the gel case no longer fit over the corner of the phone, and some random shmutzig had gotten wedged... between the back plate of the phone and the rest of the phone, to which it was no longer attached along the bottom. Pressing it back down didn't work: something in the middle of the phone was causing resistance to closing the phone.

Lo, verily, my phone's battery was pregnant.

Some of you who follow me on the fediverse might be thinking, "Wait, didn't you just replace a phone, the battery of which swelled up?" Lol, yes: late April. That was my work phone. This is my personal phone. Lolsob.

So, being a proper nerd, I went right to iFixit to order myself a battery. Whereupon I was stopped by something that did not bode well. I entered my phone's model information and iFixit, instead of telling me what battery to buy, alerted me that it is not possible to determine what kind of battery my phone took from the outside.

It turns out that the OnePlus 9 G5 can take one of two batteries, and which one a given OnePlus 9 G5 takes can only be determined by putting eyes on the battery which is in it.

Well, okay then: I clicked through the helpful link to read instructions on how to pull the battery on a OnePlus 9 G5. I read along with slow dawning horror at exactly how involved it was and how many tools I would have to buy, and made it to step twelve – "Use a Phillips screwdriver to remove the ten 3.8 mm-long screws securing the motherboard cover. One of the motherboard cover screws is covered by a white water ingress sticker. To unfasten the screw you can puncture the sticker with your screwdriver." – of thirty and decided: fuck this, I will hire a professional.

(I think maybe it was a fortunate thing that I went through the prior fiasco with trying to change the battery on the Nuu B20 5G, first, because it softened me to the idea of maybe I don't have to service all my electronics personally myself.)

Alas, it was late on a Saturday night and all the cell phone repair places around me were closed until Monday.

Fortunately, I had a short day Monday and would be getting out of work around 5:30pm. I called ahead to a place that is open to 7pm to ask if I needed an appointment and whether they did OnePlus phones. There was a bit of a language barrier with the guy who answered the phone, but he said no appointment was necessary and whether they could fix my phone would entail putting eyes on it, and please try to come before 6pm to give them time to fix it before they close.

So after work, Mr B took me there, and we presented the phone. Dude got the back of the phone the rest of the way off the phone with rather more dispatch that I would be have been able to, and pretty quickly discovered that he was in over his head. Credit where it's due – "A man's got to know his limitations" – he promptly backed off, and told me to bring it back tomorrow when the more-expert boss was in.

I'm slightly irritated that we made the unnecessary trip instead of him saying, "Oh, a OnePlus, come tomorrow when our OnePlus expert is in", but it did give me the extra time to do more thorough backing-up. I have never managed to get Android File Transfer to work, nor any a number of alternatives; snapdrop.io would only do single files at a time, not whole directories, and, weirdly, Proton Drive, both app and website, doesn't allow uploading whole directories from Android either.

Finally, I saw a mention that the Android app Solid Explorer "does FTP". I wanted to make a local backup to my Mac, but, fuck it, I have servers, I can run FTP somewhere just to get my files backed up off my phone. Imagine my surprise on opening up the "FTP" option on Solid Explorer and discovering it wasn't an FTP client it was an FTP server. Yes, the easiest way I found to exchange files between my Android phone and my MacBook Pro was to put an FTP server on my phone.

Worked fine. My FTP client on my Mac sucks, but I'll solve that another day. (Does Fetch still exist?)

Mr B and I discussed it and decided he'd bring the phone in the next day, Tuesday, to spare me the hike. He returned with the phone, still with the back off, and the news that they had discovered, as I had, you have to get at the battery to even figure out which battery to order. And that he was told that the battery would be in by 3pm the next day (Wednesday). The only surprising thing here is that they could get the battery that fast.

So, today (Wednesday), after 3pm, Mr B took my phone back for a third visit, and they attempted to install my new battery.

It was the wrong battery.

( Hwaet! The saga continues... )

vriddy

I knew editing at that pace wouldn't be sustainable, and was firmly in "make the most of it while it lasts" mode but man, I've been struggling with the post-high crash. I know, I know, that "being at your 100%" looks very different on different days, and it felt like I was running at like 140% for a while on top of that but damn. The difference is crushing, and I get frustrated enough to tear up. I'm not sure if it's because the first half of the year was so bumpy and it left me more brittle, or because it's so rare that I get a writing high from editing rather than drafting but gaaah. I just remember my first NaNo, the only one I won back in 2006, and how creativity seemed to just feed off itself... like I was writing so much, all of the time, that when a couple of strange little events happened I ended up writing a couple of short stories about them too, on top of my 1.6k words a day. Glorious times. And during the lockdowns I was writing during my lunch breaks, too. Even if not quite at that level of intensity, I'd love to catch that spirit again, and on days when I can have several intense, focused writing sessions, it feels like getting closer. I probably need better systems. Mornings are fine, I have a good routine in place and that time is mostly under my control, but later in the day I struggle and flail to even catch 15 minutes of focused writing time.

I'm not depressed or anything, and I'm still editing for 15-30 minutes a day, sometimes even one hour! Progress is progress! But it still feels like I slammed into a wall I now have to slowly climb with my bare hands and nails, when I was the Road Runner going Meep Meep! and grinning wildly for a while here. And the wall is wet and slimy and it smells weird too XD

Current Mood: frustrated

vriddy

Community Thursday challenge: every Thursday, try to make an effort to engage with a community on Dreamwidth, whether that's posting, commenting, promoting, etc.

Over the last week...

Commented in finalfantasy, bbtp_challenge.

Signal boosts:

Just wanted to bring up pinchhits again as it's really great when current Pinch Hits are also shared there. I follow a bunch of exchange comms, but there are others I could also write for occasionally. Meanwhile, you can find recent PHs there for a couple of exchanges like raremaleslashex and justmarried!

bluapapilio

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

Current Mood: tired

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ebaths

August 2025

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長々と剥いた

ｌｏｎｇｌｙ　ｐｅｅｌｅｄ

Network

Summer mid-season anime impressions

Stone & Sky

Game Check-in: Expedition 33

Book Review: The Golden Compass

Editing for pace, and storyboarding

Some interesting baihe titles (literal)

Follow Friday 8-22-25

All For The Game: KevJean Rec List

Gradations

(no subject)

Challenge Eighty: Icon Maze-Results!

Tokusatsu Femslash Prompt Meme

Community Recs Post!

AO3 Celebrates 9 Million Registered Users

blu ray drive question

Book Review: The Fairy Circus

Phone, again [me, tech]

Crash after the editing high

Community Thursday

🖋 Doujinshi Check-in

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August 2025

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