#dreamwidth

For those of you with an interest in such things, I have a Dreamwidth account. I also have an Instagram, but I only use it for my jewelry stuff, and aside from a small handful of people I know I only follow jewelry-related or Boston-area business-related accounts with it. (The insta is Crowmark Creations, fwiw.)

or rather, the ones since my rewatch, occasionally edited for spag etc.
( Not spoilery so much as shit-post-y )

Got up in my Nirvana in Fire feelings and started rewatching it, and it’s a very interesting show to rewatch, partly because of how dense it is and how much I missed the first time, and partly because I now have a slightly bigger wuxia/costume drama vocabulary, and am catching stuff I missed the first time.

(Also just a slightly larger mandarin vocabulary, which doesn’t help as much as it might when half the characters are named “Jing” something, but.)

Like the fact you can definitely tell who’s a wuxia character and who’s a palace drama character by their hair, and MCS just puts his hair up and switches genres like “Hi, I’m a political operator now.”

(Which is a relief, because the wig budget really doesn’t show to advantage when his hair is down.)

Things established in E1 ( Read more… )

I’ve made this guide to browsing and using dreamwidth on a mobile device, but have not yet confirmed that it works with free accounts. Can anyone with a free account confirm or deny for me?

( details, screenshots )

So I have gotten into the weeds of gauge, such that I now have a favourite cast-on for swatching.

(If you are a person who finds you need at least fifteen rows to recover from whatever happened with your cast-on and have your tension come to its equilibrium: Special Cast On for Swatching. If you do not understand how a person could have this happen, you’re probably fine.)

I have become obsessed with finding a way to make my stockinette stitch match my knitting in the round and have knit an upsetting number of swatches and watched quite a few youtubes trying to figure it out. I did this mostly on some acrylic yarn I mostly use whenever a patterns says “with waste yarn…” The yarn is acrylic, I think, or at least it certainly melts rather than burns, so this is not blocked.

( moderately large images, since I’m showing individual knit stitches )

Lan Zhan, on the other hand, is a delicate flower from Shanghai, yet he wakes up every morning to go jogging around the campus in a tracksuit that Wei Ying is sure he would find sexy if he was ever awake to observe it. In contrast, while Wei Ying is technically the more winter-savvy, he beat Nie Huaisang at fourteen days without leaving the hodge-podge of tunnels and walkways connecting the university’s sprawl, even if it was only because Huaisang’s professor wouldn’t answer his email last week.

So in a confluence of events, Anno Pestis was the year I started to become sensitive to wool against my neck. This is probably my punishment for feeling smug about my ability to wear wool. I spent a long time in denial, and then an even longer time admitting it, but trying to power through it (…??? this is bad and dumb, don’t do it) and finally I have come to acceptance, in a journy that I sure will be repeated many times in my life.

One of the causalities of this is a some favourite sweaters. One of them, this one, I had even tweeted about before, which may make it unique among my sweaters? It’s not a particularly beautiful sweater, but I liked the warmth of it, and it’s weekend-at-the-cabin sturdiness, and one might even say rustic-ness. It’s also a very useful garment, that one can throw on over whatever one is already wearing when one is cold. Which I kept on doing, long after it became evident that doing so would mean six hours of itchy neck.

Another plague indexed event is a friend’s adoption of a dog. His name is Moose, and he is a Jack Russel/Chihuahua cross, two breeds I would not have recommended, but she did not consult me, and the heart wants what it wants. One reason I would not have recommended anything that rhymes with ’-huahua’ is our winters, which are quite severe for at least six weeks. Those big chihuahua ears function to radiate heat back into the sky, which is the opposite of what one wants, hereabouts, and honestly any dog under thirty pounds or with a particularly thin coat is at real risk of injury if it accidentally gets forgotten outside for more than a few minutes. (Moose is trying heroically to get himself out of that weight category, but is really suffering under the constraints of what he was born with.)

(Many cat population control initiatives will cut a notch in the tip of feral cats’ ears once they have been spayed so that it is easy to tell they have already been trapped. In most parts of Canada this does not work because many ferals have damage to the edges of their ears from frostbite, such that it looks like they’ve been in a large number of fights.)

Anyway, I am dog-sitting Moose, and we are in the coldest weeks of the year. Obviously, the solution to this is to knit him teeny dumb sweaters. But what if there was a cheat? What if I could cut up a sweater, save myself from the temptation of wearing it, and consigning myself to itchery, and do a good deed (arguable, dog is not that into it., but.)

My genius idea was that because of sweater shaping, I could use the wedge shaped bits at the tops of some of the panels to create the funnel shape that a dog has in front, and save myself all that knitting, as well as preserve the patterned bits. The sweater itself has seen a lot of wear and less than careful washing, so it is moderately felted, and I thought I could maybe just cut it to shape.

( come with me. on a journey. a journey of sweater cutting. Dog/sweater pics, and knit talk )

By The River-side (3867 words) by Betty
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom:陈情令 | The Untamed (TV),魔道祖师 - 墨香铜臭 | Módào Zǔshī - Mòxiāng Tóngxiù
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Wèi Yīng | Wèi Wúxiàn, Jīn Líng | Jīn Rúlán, Jiāng Chéng | Jiāng Wǎnyín, Lán Zhàn | Lán Wàngjī
Additional Tags: Twin Prides of Yúnmèng Feels
Summary:

The youngest shidis, however, weren’t sharing a room with Jiang Cheng, who could swim like a tadpole.

“What’s a tadpole?” asked Wei Ying.

“It’s a frog,” said Jiang Cheng. “Don’t you know anything?”

Rec-set: Extremely Specific occupation AUs.

I really enjoy stories that bring a specificity to their AUs, and one of the areas that is often done is in the choice of character profession. All of these stories use the profession of the character to explore something about the relationship with those around them and their world, and/or to drive the plot. All of these were richly textured enough to feel real to me (a person who has not… worked any of these jobs.)

These stories differ in length, tone, and rating, although they are all wwx/lwj. (Sorry, this only now occurs to me. If you can think of one w/ a different ship or none at all that fits this description, lmk!)

grave goods (28535 words) by luckymarrow

When you think “Wei Wuxian, mortician,” it just makes sense, doesn’t it? Brings WWX’s canonical relationship with death into a non-magial, modern setting.

( archive description )

and oh, bask in his glory (62205 words) by belle_abroad

If you, like me, feel about pro-wrestling a sort of “no, thank you,” I urge you to try this anyway. This story gets into the weeds of pro-wrestling in a way that is engaging, and full of affection for the sport(?).

( archive description )

Pentimento. (72966 words) by orange_crushed

A richly textured story of painting conservation, in which Wei Wuxian’s interactions with the art world mirror his canon interactions with the jianghu. A long fic that takes you on the whole journey and will give you feelings.

( archive description )

In The Dark Right Now (10637 words) by phnelt

This is maybe the most marginal in terms of adherence to my theme, but I love it, and it’s going in! You don’t get to see Wei Wuxian do much bat-research, but his job as a bat-researcher sets the stage and gives the story a shape and theme.

( archive description )

Waiting for Spring (130787 words) by thievinghippo

This is a repeat,but it belongs here. Major league baseball player is an extremely specific occupation!

( archive description )

if you go chasing rabbits (23569 words) by occultings

Is witch’s familiar an occupation? This fic argues that it is! There are some bits of descriptive language in this that I absolutely loved. Usually a fic leaves behind in me a vague feeling, maybe some scenes and character dynamics, but the bit “spines of books pile up in vertebral turret” has stayed with me ever since reading this.

( archive description )

Year Of Night Call (22006 words) by ailuridae

Usually I cut the archive description to let me talk about the fic but actually: ( archive stats and tags cut here )

A “What If All The Cultivators Were Surgeons?” AU.

This tells you what you are getting.

it is wednesday my dudes (3796 words) by ritualist

Stripper is an occupation that is presented here as very much about the workplace and the politics and logistics thereof. Also, I too have panicked and talked about squid facts.

( archive description )

Every book its reader (21854 words) by twigofwillow

The author is fairly open about working in the field, but even if they weren’t, it would be very obvious from the details of the story that they not only have experience working as a librarian, but also Opinions. Much like LWJ definitely would.

( archive description )

( weight talk from a thin person, don’t feel any obligation )

Who wants to hear about the FORBIDDEN DOG PARK?( Read more… )

for halloween, some fic about our favourite spooky boy, the ghost general himself.

(Wen Ning is not usually particularly spooky, not is he guaranteed to be spooky in these fic, but I’m in my Wen Ning Feelings, so.)

These fic vary in the extent to which they consider Wen Ning the ‘main character’ of the fic, but he plays a central part in all of them. None of them are too long, one might very reasonably make an evening of this list, if that were one’s inclination!

If there’s a fic that you’re like, Betty, I can’t believe you didn’t mention [[blank]], please tell me about it!

( recs, assorted ratings )

I wrote a fic! It’s kind of a thesis about Wen Ning, but also some stuff happens.

Return to White Clouds (3526 words) by Betty
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom:陈情令 | The Untamed (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Lán Huàn | Lán Xīchén, Wēn Níng | Wēn Qiónglín
Additional Tags: forestry and feels
Summary:

Wen Ning recognizes what is happening. He is being confessed to. This happens to him, sometimes. There is something about him that makes people tell him secrets, although he doesn’t think he does anything to encourage this. His sister used to say he had trust-worthy proportions, which people could naturally see. Since she had never read his fate in his face, this doesn’t seem too reliable.

tenshinokorin:

Btw

Tags:the person who founded dreamwidthis the same person who threw lj users to the wolves during strikethroughwhile appeasing the mobs of puritans and pearlclutchersparticipating in erasing large chunks of fandom contentwhile protecting herselfand being outraged when she was outed as a creator of nsfw fanworks herselfclaiming that doing so violated her privacywhen really it just violated her ability to cover her own assfeel free to use dw if you wantbut this is why I don’tget a pillowfort insteadsupport ao3and code your own backup archive

Ah yes, blame someone for doing their job, and then, when they realized that doing that job compromised their ethics, continue to hold that against them even after they quit that job, and founded a new company that is specifically set up so that it WON’T violate said ethics, and send people to a platform that’s not currently open for registration and which hasn’t effectively answered “okay but what about NSFW?”

There’s a lot to criticize DW about (their lack of mobile-friendly layouts, their stodgey Web 2.0 feel, the horrific image uploading interface), but their commitment to free expression even in the face of concrete economic threats –like when when PayPal dropped them because they wouldn’t censor NSFW content–isn’t in question. 

Pillowfort may absolutely be the place fandom lands, and I’m perfectly fine with that, but it shouldn’t be because people are flat-out lying about fandom history.

A small update on the Annas backup saga, I have saved 66 posts so far. *toots own horn* I’m still in 2009, but I’m in December so almost to 2010. The posts are starting to get more picture heavy so that is gonna slow me down, but gonna keep shouldering forward. It will be worth it! Then it will just be saving all the picture on Flickr, reuploading all her downloads to sfs, and getting everything back onto Dreamwidth. I’ll mess with formatting after that. :D

I also immediately thought of Anna’s journal! Maybe we can repost her posts? If you want any help saving her posts just poke me!

Thanks Lisa! Anna has 200 posts, but I think if I do 20 per day (and I might be able to do more than that today b/c I’m off work) I should be done in 10 days. My other concern is saving the journals of pennysims and atticbox. They’ll be my next order of business, but they each have SO MANY picture-heavy posts. Ugh.