september's coming soon

ANIME
The Royal Tutor
Samurai Flamenco
Erased
Tiger and Bunny (Re-watch)
Ouran (re-watch)
Finish Cowboy Bebop
Code Geass S2
Fruits Basket

COMICS
Saiyuki

GAMES
EVERY FIRE EMBLEM GAME THAT HAS BEEN TRANSLATED TO ENGLISH EXCEPT FOR AWAKENING, I'VE FINISHED AWAKENING



( And for that day in the future where I'll definitely spend more time doing productive stuff than reading wank and fanfic )

Today's adventure was having an ultrasound of my fallopian tubes (nothing worrisome going on). I'd been warned that it might be uncomfortable, and it was uncomfortable even with the self-administered painkillers beforehand. Something about having fluid squirted into places where there usually is none, I suppose; I don't know if "painful" is the word I'd use, but there were cold sweats and occasional groans and then telling them that I'm fine, I'm fine.

Not finer than that the moment the gynocologist declared that everything was peachy, I proceeded to pass out in the chair.

It's not wholly surprising, since the few other times I've been known to pass out in my life, it's been because of menstrual cramps. Still, it certainly was an experience - blacking out, and I remember the darkness, and then waking up to two strange women asking me if I'm okay and the few disoriented seconds before remembering where I was.

I imagine most people would find it fairly indiginfied to recover from a fainting spell with your legs spread in the air, but I'm nothign if not adaptive. I walked home after ten minutes, and reveled in the lightness after my uterus has stopped screaming that I rarely ever feel these days.

I went diving through the archive of LJ comments I've left about Hetalia through the years - the most recent one was in 2011. (god pless LJ's comment alert e-mails) It's kind of heartwarming to see how little has changed about my ways of being a not-really-popular blog who people still notice because of my occasionally contrarian opinions, huh. The difference is that I somehow made friends in the MLB fandom, so I suppose there is something to be said for tumblr's interface for those of us who were too socially awkward to handle the word "friending" because omg who'd want to be friends with me. Anyway, these were the hills I was apparently dying on:

I really did not like the dub
I bet this might surprise some people knowing me through MLB, since I'm the person who insists on calling him "Cat Noir" because it was a good decision to change it, actually. It certainly surprised me because I had completely forgotten that I was so passionate about that. My issue with the Hetalia dub was mainly that they changed the show from cutesy comedy to South Park except stupid, because the vulgarity was completely aimless. In retrospect, I've occasionally been thinking that this was probably the only route they could've gone in publishing it in the US without some insane backlash (a minute of silence for "Red Shoes and the Seven Dwarves"), but that still doesn't make it good. I've been watching bits of it on youtube through the years, and to this day I fail to see how anyone can find it funny, and the voice work is bad but not funny bad, even.

Look at me being the one telling people to stop treating this like something that deserved serious scrutiny
Grimdark ~historically accurate characterisation~ fic was not my cup of tea, and I remember that one comm that was dedicated to treating Hetalia like the "serious" work that it was, instead of the cesspit of yaoi fangirls that was the fandom at large. Yeah, Hetalia for sure was a thoughtful depiction of history, not a moeblob comedy about obscure cultural fact and national stereotypes that was occasionally illustrated by being set during historically significant events, huh. I cringed at the fangirls eventually swarming the place as much as anyone, but the snobby "history fans" so weren't my crowd, either. Suffice it to say that I've always been the advocate of treating something as exactly as silly and childish as it is, rather than trying to make it look sophisticated by claiming that the fandom's 2K analysis posts were representative of canon.

I took issue people using fancy words to make claims about things that weren't there
Making comedy about political topics =/= satire. And at one point I phrased myself almost word-for-word like I found myself making a point about MLB recently. Paraphrased: "If that's what he's trying to do, he's failing hard at it"

Gotta wonder if my relationship to the anon meme was like my relationship to discord
I knew it existed and I knew a substantial amount of fandom interaction was happening there, but I never went there. Not even that time someone brought up that I was the villain of the week over there because I was stating unpopular fact about its female characters.

The good: Since I started painting my nails, I HAVE reduced the amount of biting my cuticles

The bad: Since I started painting my nails and keeping them longer (because short nails + nail polish looks silly), I've been experienceing that previously unknown feminine ailment of "broken nails", culminating with today's fun which took a third of the nail off and bled like a pig and today is mealprep + hair washing day and this is inconvenient (but luckily not painful, at least not yet)

Conclusion: Long nails are bothersome and nail painting is time-consuming, but will hopefully be worth it if one day I either no longer have torn cuticles, or at least stop fixing them with my teeth

OTOH: Should Luka Couffaine, who I despise not because of the person he is portrayed as but because of the way he is written, count as a kindred spirit or not? He would share my suffering of the tediousness of nail painting, but as a guitarist he keeps his short and don't have to live with the fear of doing jumping jacks and catching a thumb on a shelf

1. Mireille Guiliano's advice boils down to "get used to smaller portions and a treat can be one bit of chocolate, not half the box", and also home-made yoghurt. I have never particularly liked yoghurt, but her advice was such that I in all seriousness looked up the cost of aquiring a yoghurt maker. I never did, but I have since gotten an instant cooker with a yoghurt setting, and I absolutely see her point. I'm consuming something like two litres milk worth of "greek" yoghurt weekly now, which is rather less in volume because "greek" essentially just means "strained".

2. I essentially never eat jam on bread, which makes my fondness of harvesting wild berries a bit of a conundrum. An Episode with my freezing cabinet over Christmas meant that all the food there spoiled except for two small containers of lingonberry jam, which means that just as I was getting ready to start eating all my hoarded jam, I lost it.

3. Luckily for me, if not necessarily the planet, we like to do things that The Americans do on TV, apparently also including cranberry sauce for Christmas even if I'm pretty sure that's just the US version of lingonberry jam and none of our traditional Christmas staples are eaten with lingonberry jam in the first place. Clearly a local supermarket had over-estimated the demand, because they've been selling whole cranberries for almost nothing and tl;dr that's how I ended up with a whole lot of spiced cranberry jam for diet-changing purposes

even if I'm not sure I ever ate much sweets that I'm substituting this with in the first place.

My first fic finished in a year was one where I expressed surprise at having written something “bittersweet leaning on sad”, but then I went over my bibliography and realised that for someone who does not expose herself to hurt without the promise of “comfort” as a reader, I sure publish a lot of fic where happy endings are debatable or at least comes with a distinct aftertaste.

So even though I really had better things to do, I went back and looked it over and did a bit of a rating. And then I did the stats.

( Me talking about my own fanfic )

The bad:
- I've been shedding a lot of hair the last week. It seems to be getting better, and even if not, I'm not so sentimental about my somewhere-below-shoulder length hair that I won't get a pixie cut if it gets too bad. It started after my hair suddenly got MEGA GREASY for a week, after which I did an apple cider vinegar rinse against dandruff. The grease let up, but at what cost.

Part of the story here is that Covid-19 and lucky coincidence the two weeks before it meant that my second attempt at quitting shampoo was a lot more realistic than the first, some five years ago. I'll admit that my real ambition was the hope that natural oils in hair would translate into less frizz, which has only been moderately successful. There's also the environmental aspect of how much hair product do we really need, anyway?

Anyway. Here's to hoping that it's over so that my mum won't be panicking about it when I go home for the summer in a week or so.


- One pair of sandals give me mighty blisters, another just EATS THEIR WAY INTO MY FEET. Such is the punishment for my vanity.




The good:
- Talking about vanity, I've dropped some three or four kilos since New Years and a lot of my clothes are suddenly cute on me.

- I got this poster and it transformed my living room.

- The kids are out of school and the teachers only have a few mandatory meetings, so my days are bright and easy.

- I have, for the third time, gotten a lot of compliments on my baking from colleagues. I'm still a bit hesitant about claiming mad skillz since the only thing I do differently is that I use cold rising a lot, but that's mostly just becaues it's easier to make the dough the night before than stress about it after coming home from work.

- I've got a straw big enough for the bubble tea sized tapioka, meaning that I can drink bubble tea at home. Huzzah.

The worst thing about all the time I've spent on fandom through the years is unquestionably the endless text files with meta and other commentary I've written and never had the guts to post.

Seriously, to the point where I've re-installed Cold Turkey and blocked a number of websites and a single app, and you bet that app is text files because even if I can't go online, you bet there's going to be some dumb fandom topic on which I have opinions that I can detail to my heart's content even if it has like a 3% chance of ever making it online.

I'd love to say that I've avoided this at work by the mercy of keeping fandom stuff strictly off computers to which others have access, but hahaha what do you think the e-mail drafts are there for. (yes, I'm going to empty them too just to remind myself to not start down that path again)

At some level, at some point, I'm sure someone will be intersted in a peek into the mind of someone who is looking into getting a Lumia 950 two years after it was released. And is looking into getting it used, because even bloody Microsoft has given up on their smartphones, going by their online store around here.

( wherein I start talking about smartphone politics and somehow end up concluding that everything was better during the war )

ETA: So let's talk about the further irony of the timing of this post, and let me add that my Lumia 950xl arrived yesterday and it is a marvel in all ways. It even has a real xbox Go app.