Monday, July 7th, 2025 01:35 am
I'm ashamed to say I've just discovered Corvyx tonight. He is a phenomenal talent. The kind of performer you listen to with your mouth hanging open. His videos are professional quality, too. There are so many amazingly talented musicians on YouTube, and they share their art with us, and you can listen for free. I love YouTube artists.

I know, I know. Disturbed did the ultimate cover of this song, but just... give it a listen.


Sunday, July 6th, 2025 10:35 pm
It’s been a while since the last update, but these past few weeks have been chaotic. I almost broke my brain again, even though last time I promised it wouldn’t happen anymore. But that’s a topic for another post. The thing is, everything going on in my life during those days kept me away from the little things that help me stay at peace: what I do in my free time. It was awful, but I made some decisions, and now I’m back.


Currently making
  • Still working on my Yuri on Ice embroidery (very slowly, though).
  • The Heart Killers fanmeeting freebies.

Currently reading
  • SVSSS Vol. 4 - Chapter 26

Finished watching
  • Leap Day (Thai drama) – 12 episodes
  • My Stubborn (Thai BL drama) – 12 episodes
  • Boys in Love (Thai BL drama) – 12 episodes
  • Kpop Demon Hunters – movie
Currently watching

Dramas:
  • Winter Begonia (Chinese) – Weekly, weekends – 42/49 episodes
  • The Ex-Morning (Thai BL) – Weekly, Thursdays – 7/10 episodes
  • Break Up Service (Thai) – Weekly, Mondays – 10/12 episodes
  • The Promise of the Soul (Taiwanese BL) – No idea what day it’s airing, lol – 3/12
  • 10 Things I Want to Do Before I Turn 40 (Japanese BL) – Not sure if I’m gonna end up bingeing or if I’m going to watch it weekly - 1/12

Anime:
  • Komi Can’t Communicate – No schedule – 4/24
  • Sanrio Danshi – No schedule – 2/12
  • Rokuhōdō Yotsuiro Biyori – No schedule – 2/12
  • The Summer Hikaru Died – Weekly, Fridays – 1/?

On hold
  • The Bangkok Boy (Thai BL drama) – Weekly, Saturdays – 2/12 episodes
  • Perfect 10 Liners (Thai BL drama) – No schedule – 4/24 episodes

The only things I didn’t pause watching (even before quitting the side job) were the Sunday shows, The Ex-Morning, and Winter Begonia. I also binged Leap Day right before quitting because I was on the verge of collapse and needed a distraction to avoid disaster.

Since quitting, I’ve been trying new shows. Last night, I watched the first three episodes of The Promise of the Soul… it’s a bit weird, but the soul-transfer plot has me intrigued. There’s also a new Japanese one, 10 Things I Want to Do Before I Turn 40. For the first two minutes, it looked so similar to Old Fashioned Cupcake (my favorite) that I almost dropped it, but then some fun details caught my eye, and I decided to give it a chance.

At some point, Citrus Con happened, and I got a taste of Sanrio Danshi, which piqued my curiosity, so I started it. Then, somehow, I stumbled upon Rokuhōdō Yotsuiro Biyori and liked it enough to add it to my list. This weekend, The Summer Hikaru Died premiered, and it looks interesting. I remember seeing a manga recommendation for it on Blorbo last year (iirc), but I never got around to reading it. Now might be the time, since waiting for the next episode might be too much for my anxious brain. I’d love to go into more detail about my experience about the con too, but that might be better saved for another post. It wasn't my first time but I participated a bit more and it was so much fun, even though there were moments I felt very overwhelmed. 

I’m not planning to binge all the anime on my list, I just like having options of things to watch when I’m not in the mood for live action, and these recent months anime has been good for my brain.  

The only finished show on my list that I still need to wrap up is Break Up Service, but this week I’ve been working on freebies and can’t watch anything subtitled, so it’s been music instead. I could watch something in English or Spanish, but I don’t have the patience to look things up.

Now, about the shows I’ve finished:

Leap Day: I liked it, even though the story wasn’t the tightest. It had a lot of plot holes (like, a lot) but I enjoyed the weekly suspense. I stopped watching for a while because I was busy, anxious, and a mess, but when I was about to break, I needed something cathartic, and this kinda worked. What really stood out was the found-family trope and the finale. It was sad, but for me, it was the only possible resolution. I’d been thinking about it since around episode 6 or 7, but I didn’t expect them to actually go there. Overall, I enjoyed it, though I would’ve loved it more with tighter writing. Still, I wonder if I’m missing some cultural context or something.

Boys in Love: This was such a cute, comforting show. I loved the teenage shenanigans, how their conflicts were portrayed, and the sweetness of it all. The ending was hopeful… though, as a 38-year-old, I know not every relationship that starts at that age lasts forever. The teachers were a highlight, and I’d really like to watch a spin-off about them. Yes, I need more Papang in glasses, please. It was genuinely a show I looked forward to every Sunday, and I’m gonna miss it.

My Stubborn: Oh boy. This one was a ride. It was way more fun than I expected when I started. The high heat was great, but at some point, I got really invested in Sorn and needed to know what was going on in his head. By the end, we got a glimpse of why he acted the way he did, and even though he stayed a walking red flag, at least he figured his shit out enough to resolve his main issue and told Jun about his real feelings. And they gave us spice in the last episode too, so I’m happy. I’m gonna miss this messy show; it made Sundays something to look forward to. So much fun.

Lastly, earlier today I watched Kpop Demon Hunters in a watch party, and it was so much fun. I liked it, but I kinda want to rewatch it because I think there’s a lot going on. The songs were bangers, and now I can’t get “Soda Pop” out of my head now (not that I’m trying really hard lol).

Anyway, I'm still in a weird headspace, but I'm starting to feel like myself again, so that's good. I also need to finish reading SVSSS, but reading always gets harder after my brain goes through that kind of thing... so I'm taking it slow.
Sunday, July 6th, 2025 11:45 pm
From an apparent radiant in Arcturus, which made it either a straggler of the Boötids or just a stranger passing through, just as [personal profile] spatch and I were getting up from our summer-hazed star-watching under the three-quarter moon, we saw a slow fireball of a meteor streak south and westward. All we had seen until then were the familiar blinks of planes and what we less happily took for satellites crawling steadily across the body of Ursa Major. We lay on the granite blocks that were installed six or seven years ago in commemoration of the eighteenth-century farm that became first a field of victory gardens and then the public park where I would spend my childhood sledding in winter and setting off model rockets in summer. The jeweled string of the Boston skyline has built itself considerably up since then. I used to dream of finding a meteorite in a field. It seemed statistically not impossible.
Monday, July 7th, 2025 12:36 am
Signups are closed and matching has been run! We have three unmatchables. Unmatchables have 24 hours from when signups closed to get back to me!

Please check the email attached to your AO3 account if your AO3 name starts with M or S!


For everyone else, if you have a Do Not Match request, want to adjust your offers, or want to add something to your requests, you have until the unmatchables get back to me (which may not take the full 24 hours)! Please email littleblackdressex@gmail.com
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Sunday, July 6th, 2025 10:49 pm
This poem is spillover from the March 4, 2025 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by a prompt from [personal profile] wyld_dandelyon. It also fills the "Secrets" square in my 3-1-25 card for the Tolkien Bingo Fest. This poem has been sponsored by Anthony Barrette. It belongs to the series Polychrome Heroics.

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Sunday, July 6th, 2025 10:20 pm
This poem came out of the July 1, 2025 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired and sponsored by [personal profile] janetmiles. It also fills the "close-knit community" square in my 7-1-25 card for the Western Bingo fest. It belongs to the series Frankenstein's Family; it follows "Signs of Their Trespass," so read that first or this won't make much sense.

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Sunday, July 6th, 2025 10:05 pm
This poem came out of the July 1, 2025 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by a prompt from [personal profile] rix_scaedu. It also fills "The Harder They Fall" square in my 7-1-25 card for the Western Bingo fest. This poem has been sponsored by [personal profile] janetmiles. It belongs to the series Polychrome Heroics.

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Sunday, July 6th, 2025 06:18 pm
This poem is spillover from the July 1, 2025 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by a prompt from [personal profile] jake67jake. It also fills the "He's all hat and no cattle." square in my 7-1-25 card for the Western Bingo fest. This poem has been sponsored by [personal profile] janetmiles. It belongs to the series Polychrome Heroics.

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Sunday, July 6th, 2025 08:44 am

Ghost Quartet is a band: Dave Malloy on keyboard, Brent Arnold on cello, Gelsey Bell and Brittain Ashford on various instruments, and everyone providing vocals. Ghost Quartet is a song cycle, a concert album performed semi-staged, a mash-up of "Snow White, Rose Red," The One Thousand and One Nights, the Noh play Matsukaze, "Cruel Sister", "The Fall of the House of Usher", the front page photo of a fatal train accident, and a grab bag of Twilight Zone episodes. The ghost of Thelonious Monk is sometimes invoked, but does not appear; whisky is often invoked, and, if you see the show live, will most certainly appear. "I'm confused/And more than a little frightened," says (one incarnation of) the (more-or-less) protagonist. "It's okay, my dear," her sister/lover/mother/daughter/deuteragonist reassures her, "this is a circular story."

Once upon a time two sisters fell in love with an astronomer who lived in a tree. He seduced Rose, the younger, then stole her work ("for a prestigious astronomy journal"), and then abandoned her for her sister, Pearl. Rose asked a bear to maul the astronomer in revenge, but the bear first demanded a pot of honey, a piece of stardust, a secret baptism, and a photograph of a ghost. (The music is a direct quote of the list of spell ingredients from Into the Woods.) Rose searches for all these ingredients through multiple lifetimes; and that's the plot.

Except it is much less comprehensible than that. The songs are nested in each other like Scheherazade's stories; you can follow from one song to the next, but retracing the connections in memory is impossible; this is less a narrative than a maze. Surreal timelines crash together in atonal cacophany; one moment Dave Malloy, or a nameless astronomer played by Dave Malloy, or Dave Malloy playing Dave Malloy is trying to solve epistemology and another moment the entire house of Usher, or all the actors, are telling you about their favorite whiskies. The climax is a subway accident we have glimpsed before, in aftermath, in full, circling around it, a trauma and a terror that cannot be faced directly; the crash is the fall of a house is the failure to act is the failure to look is the failure to look away.

There are two recordings available. Ghost Quartet, recorded in a studio, has cleaner audio, but Live at the McKitterick includes more of the interstitial scenes and feels more like the performance.

In Greenwood Cemetery, there were three slightly raised stages separated by batches of folding chairs, one for Dave Malloy, one for Brent Arnold, and one for Gelsey Bell and Brittain Ashford, with a flat patch of grass in the center across which they sang to each other, and into which they sometimes moved; you could sit in the chairs, or on cushions in front of the first row, or with cheaper tickets you could sit in the grass on the very low hills above the staging area, among the monuments and gravestones, and, presumably, among more ghosts. The show started a little before sunset; I saw a hawk fly over, and I could hear birds singing along when the humans sang a capella. It was in the middle of Brooklyn, so even after dark I couldn't see stars; but fireflies sparked everywhere.

Sunday, July 6th, 2025 08:50 pm
Unwanteds (41367 words) by Sharpest_Asp
Chapters: 30/30
Fandom: Original Work
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Original Female Character(s), Original Male Character(s)
Additional Tags: Original Universe, Superheroes, Post-Apocalypse, Rebuilding, Asexual Character(s), Queer Relationships, Magic-Users, Future Technology, Age Difference
Summary:

In the aftermath of the Collapse, life finds new ways, making new paths, and there are heroes rising from the ashes --

-- just as villains remain to tear it all down again.



Content Notes: Fascism as history and antagonist, liberty with cultural mythology, comic-book level violence

Author's Note: This universe has been built from the ground up with many influences of pop culture and history. It was began in 2005. I posted the last main part of the story in 2023. There is a prequel and sequel both forming in my plans for the future. When I began crafting it... we were not so far down the fascism slide in real life. I very nearly did not touch it again after 2016. Ultimately though, I needed to let the good guys win.

On Dreamwidth, must join comm (Click and scroll to the bottom for the beginning. SqWA account needed to read it in chaptered format at link above)
Sunday, July 6th, 2025 09:10 pm
Title: Speaker Phone
Fandom: Kim Possible
Characters: Kim Possible
Rating: G
Length: 112 words
Summary: Kim is embarrassed while talking to her mother.

Read more... )
Sunday, July 6th, 2025 08:01 pm
Fandom: Star Trek AOS (Reboot)
Pairings/Characters: Kirk/inappropriateness, hints of Kirk/Spock
Rating: Teen +
Length: 3,235 for the fic, 23 minutes for the podfic
Creator Links: [livejournal.com profile] insaneidiot [archiveofourown.org profile] reena_jenkins
Theme: Working Together

Summary: The crew of the Enterprise is subjected to a compulsory seminar on Inappropriate Workplace Behavior, and Jim Kirk finds this to be particularly challenging.

Content notes: In addition to Kirk being inappropriate in the ways one might expect from canon, the seminar leader is stereotyped in a way that might be considered offensive.

Reccer's Notes: I'm reccing both the story and the podfic here because the story is only on LJ, and the writer does not seem to be active anymore. The podficcer, however, is still around, and the pod is hosted on AO3, which may be more accessible for some. It is also the way I first encountered this story.

Now that we have all that out of the way, I can gush about how hilarious this story is because Jim Kirk + Starfleet bullshit is fertile territory, and I always laugh really loudly when listening to the podfic. Jim is so deeply wounded by any attempt to rein in his obnoxiousness, inappropriateness, and mouthiness. The best thing about this fic, though, is Jim's relationship with his crew. Throughout the seminar, we see the dynamics play out, and it becomes clear that the seminar was put together for a very different kind of workplace and a very different kind of crew. As Jim puts it: "All the team unity and 'synergy' exercises in the universe aren’t going to build real trust or strong relationships amongst a crew."

As you might expect, Jim gets kicked down a couple notches by the seminar leader, but the tables turn in an unexpected way by the end of the seminar.

Reena, as usual, does a wonderful job with the podfic.

Fanwork Links: Wrote the Book fic at LJ and Wrote the Book podfic at AO3
Monday, July 7th, 2025 12:00 am

Posted by NASA Earth Observatory

Lake Titicaca in Sunglint
The optical phenomenon revealed features on and below the Peruvian lake’s surface, such as wind patterns, natural surface films, and boat wakes.

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