anartisticdreamer

I remembered that I had a bunch of paused holds on ebooks in Libby, so I unpaused them, and "Did I Leave Feminism?" by Jude Doyle came in today. I'm only a couple of chapters in, but my main feeling is nostalgia for the era of blogs. I just missed his writing!

tally posting in

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Name: Tally

About Me: After going through a few years of really dire health problems, I'm finally back at a hundred percent and I'm getting back into Dreamwidth and back into writing! I also do some drawing/painting.

About My Journal: I post a lot about writing, reading, my various fandoms, and some artwork as well.

What I Write: Fantasy, sci-fi, and horror! I love deep worldbuilding and lore and creating magic systems! Occasionally, I'll dabble in romance or erotica. The current novel I'm working on is a high fantasy adventure with enemies-to-lovers!

What I Don't Write: Slice of life stuff, or most genre fiction besides the ones I mentioned above.

What I Read: My favorites are the same genres I write in, but I'll give just about any type of book a read!

Could I Edit Someone Else's Work: Sure!

What I'm looking for here: To connect with other people who like to chat about writing—the process, the progress, the pitfalls, all of it! I've connected with a couple of writers on Dreamwidth so far, and joined a few writing communities on here, and it's been great! Looking for more of that same camaraderie. Ideally we'd check out each other's journals from time to time to comment and connect!

buttonsbeadslace

The downside of Spanish's very straightforward spelling system is that some words that differ from each other in spelling (and sometimes pronunciation) in English and/or their original languages, end up being spelled and pronounced identically in Spanish.

Mild example:
Recently we were talking about neologisms in class and I had to look up information about the prefix "eco-". In Spanish, eco- as in ecology and echo- as in echolocation, which come from two different Greek roots, are spelled and pronounced the same.

Spicy example:
A while ago, when we were talking about Catalan holiday traditions on the walking tour, our fearless leader wanted to tell us that the Catalan people have a very "scatological" sense of humor, and of course then he had to explain this word, which turns out to also have another very different definition in Spanish. Because. It's merged with eschatological. That pesky Greek χ!

Example that made me and all my classmates bluescreen in class today:
"El lasaña no sabía bien."

This one apparently is justified because the Latin roots of Spanish sabor (flavor) and saber (to know) are actually related- through the idea of having "good taste". But I was not emotionally prepared to learn this at 11:30am today after spending all morning struggling through the eight different uses of the simple and compound conditional tense.

buttonsbeadslace

Today I did my presentation for my Spanish class on Completely Open Topic - for which I chose the Great Lakes - and I consider it a success because

1. Somebody said that the photos of the beach on Lake Michigan look like an ocean beach in the Caribbean (which is true! it does!)
2. Of course our Russian classmates weren't really impressed, but this photo (and my explanation that the water is freezing as soon as it hits the ground & trees, it's at the freezing point and the only reason the lake doesn't freeze completely is because the water is moving) made the teacher shiver.

These are really the only takeaways that I wanted people to have, so, success!

I also ended up extemporaneously explaining about entrapment in sand dunes, which I had not planned on but it suddenly came to mind.

naye

Recently I've been on a free art kick, browsing images of paintings, sketches, sculptures, photos, needlework and so many other types of artworks that various institutions have digitalized. Here are two such fantastic resources.

The Met Collection
Travel around the world and across 5,000 years of history through 490,000+ works of art.

This is where I found this absolutely fantastic 19th century sketchbook. The artist is unidentified - the only information available is that they must have been Japanese (even though the sketchbook was marked "Chinese Drawings"). I loved their art so much I have turned two of their pieces into embroideries! (But that's a different post.)

And then I learned about the Integrated Collections Database of the National Institutes for Cultural Heritage, Japan, (ColBase) where you can find treasures like THIS!!

Painting of a tabby and white cat licking it's paw. It's got its ears back and its eyes focused on the paw. It's originally a painting by emperor Huizong of Song, this copy is by Sakuma Gantaku. It has so much personality it's amazing.

Painting of a tabby and white cat licking it's paw. It's got its ears back and its eyes focused on the paw. It's originally a painting by emperor Huizong of Song, this copy is by Sakuma Gantaku. It has so much personality it's amazing.

See it here on ColBase.

ColBase is a database containing the collections of the National Institutes for Cultural Heritage, Japan. It encompasses the four National Museums in Tokyo, Kyoto, Nara, and Kyushu, the two National Research Institutes for Cultural Properties in Tokyo and Nara, and the Museum of the Imperial Collections, Sannomaru Shozokan.

About ColBase & (very generous!) Terms of Use.

I have spent so much time doing random browsing, and I've found so much lovely art - and several amazing pieces I kind of want to call "ye olde shitposting" for lack of a better term for something that is clearly a little weird and maybe meant to provoke a reaction in the viewer?

Or what else would you call He's Made Up of Many People, which. Yes. That is indeed what's going on here.

But that kind of stuff is in the minority! It's all art that is out of copyright, but some of it still feels very modern, like this painting of Mount Hiei from the 1920s.

Anyway, I can definitely recommend art scrolling as an option to doom scrolling!

buttonsbeadslace

Yesterday I got to explain to a slightly confused Spaniard that "condominium" in the US means the type of multi-unit residential building that is apparently standard here, where each unit is owned by the person who lives in it, and that the type of building that's owned by a company which then rents out the units to residents, is so much seen as the default in the US that it doesn't have a specific name.

(The difference in corporate attitudes to profit-making that this implies is fascinating to me - I feel like the overall sentiment, not just in real estate but in everything lately, is that renters who pay over and over are easier to squeeze money out of than customers who buy once and then own the product. But apparently here the main model is that a company buys land, builds a residential building, sells off each unit to an individual buyer who presumably intends to live in it themself, then moves on to the next project. However, does that mean that finding housing is less of a struggle? No, it's just different.)

naye

You know what's awesome? Vids. Which is why I had the best time watching almost all of the 128 Festivids from this year. I am avoiding certain spoilers, warnings and tags, so I did not in fact watch all of them, but I definitely got through well over a hundred. An absolute feast!

While I was watching (mostly before reveals) I was also putting together a document of vids I really liked so I'd be able to go back and check who'd made them after reveals. It's not the most intricate of rec systems - it's got the title, vidder, fandom and the comment I left after watching, and they are sort of but not fully in reverse alphabetical order. But if you like vids, you will probably enjoy these!

Fandoms include: A Man on the Inside, Dimension 20, Steerswoman, The Pitt, Jeongnyeon: The Star is Born, Men's Pole Vaulting (the sport), Murderbot, Babylon 5, Conclave, Dykes to Watch Out For (the comic), Star Trek: Lower Decks and Hades. This is not an exhaustive list! Check out all the Festivid fandoms here. (Or rather: all the fandoms with canon AO3 tags. One of my vids isn't in this list, so I guess there are plenty of others that aren't either.)

( Come get your recs here! )

naye

March really is coming in like a lion! February was long and cold, but as March drew near the snow turned into fog, and today a wild wind has blown the fog into scattered clouds. It was a wonderful day for my first bike ride since July - the ebike is in good shape, fortunately, it just needed a little wash! I've really missed biking.

One of many things I've missed since my chronic illness flared up and I lost my hold of "normal" during a summer and fall of hospital stays and emergency surgeries... I'm still on part time sick leave, still waiting for another surgery. But then perhaps I can go back to commuting by bike and going for slow runs and making plans for things I can be reasonably sure of actually getting to do!

Writing here - we'll see if that becomes part of that new normal I am dreaming of. For now, a little post. Maybe one with sections?

Fandom Trumps Hate
I am doing something very exciting (and a little scary) for the first time ever, and offering to vid almost anything (within limits) over here for

fandomtrumpshate. Bidding opens soon and I am about equally nervous about nobody bidding on my offer, and about fulfilling the offer! (I am confident in my abilities, but my anxiety does not care.) Feel free to contact me through the details in the post or right here in the comments if you've got any questions about the offer!

Currently Watching
...I was gonna start with a few things I enjoyed in the past few months, but that got overwhelming. And since I'm on part time sick leave under doctor's orders to rest up as much as possible, I've been watching TV on my own - also while embroidering.

Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo is an anime from 2004 that I watched back then. I remembered the fascinating animation style, using patterns and textures instead of flat colors, but I had forgotten how extremely, canonically queer it is. Having a slow rewatch and really enjoying the whole experience.

Mushishi is available for free on YouTube, thanks to Kodansha! IF, of course, you live in an "English Speaking Country". I do not, but I have my ways... It's a slow rewatch, which is really perfect for enjoying it properly. Which I also do through giffing it! I decided to do 10 gifs for each episode. So far I've done the first ten. I'm putting them all in the tag 10xmushishi on my Tumblr. Eventually I think there are going to be episodes I've never seen, which is going to be fun (and not too heartbreaking, I hope).

Chef & My Fridge is what Skuld and I have been watching...basically for a month straight? It started with us both getting really into the second season of Culinary Class Wars, having been really into S1 as well (it was my comfort show when I was hospitalized in December 2024). Then we ran out of that, and Netflix was like "Hey... do you wanna see more of chefs who have been on CCW? We've got a bunch here in this variety show!" So we checked out the variety show and got hooked because it's delightful. Now we're caught up with the almost 60 episodes (each over an hour long) and it'll be fun to have it to look forward to, but it would be even more fun if Netflix could make the 254 episode back catalogue from 2014-2019 available too... (I have my ways but the ways did not have subs for all the episodes, alas.)

I loved Sell Your Haunted House so much that I vidded it after watching it in 2023. Now I'm using it to introduce a friend to Kdrama, and it's worked fantastically well - we watched 4 of the 16 episodes just on Friday night and Saturday before she went back home. It's got so much I love, including great characters, a canonically gen (but easy to ship) M/F friendship, lots of h/c, an intriguing plot, found family, and a great sense of humor.

And we just started a new-to-us show that is not a reality competition or variety show! Knight Flower, which I got curious about after seeing requests for in Festivids letter, and decided we needed to check out after watching marah_sarie's vid for it. I like the concept so far, and love Lee Hanee, so I'm confident it'll be a good watch!

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