marycrawford | Recent Entries

mumblemumble for fandomtrees, about Chu Shuzhi at a slave auction, being put on display by his Lord Envoy for Reasons.

And then

mumblemumble wrote a sequel that goes into more detail about the things Chu Shuzhi would do for his Lord and what his Lord Envoy would ask of him, and it is glorious and you should all read it:

Aftermath (2360 words) by A
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Chu Shuzhi/Shen Wei
Characters: Chu Shuzhi, Shen Wei (Guardian), Zhao Yunlan
Additional Tags: Slaves, Submission, Loyalty Kink, And About Fifteen Other Kinks, Aftercare
Summary:

"Quiet," his Lordship commands, and the room falls silent. His finger settles under Chu Shuzhi's chin to tilt his head up, his gaze heavy on Chu Shuzhi, his eyes dark as a storm underneath the mask. "This one isn't mine to discipline anymore," he says coldly, causing a victorious murmur among the crowd.

Chu Shuzhi doesn't flinch. He doesn't move at all. He has to remind himself to breathe.

I didn't sign up for

fandomtrees this year, but I browsed the various prompts and made two small gifts:

- a pencil/crayon drawing of a Nirvana in Fire festival lantern for

mekare

- a Guardian story (snippet?) for

mumblemumble: "The Auction" on DW or AO3. (Chu Shuzhi/Shen Wei, loyalty kink, rated M)

killabeez posted: K/S Archive news—Please share!

I haven't done Yuletide in its true form since 2013, but I do like writing a treat now and then.

dorinda pointed me to

raspberryhunter's excellent prompts for Nirvana in Fire, and I thought hmmm. Post-canon, consort Jing free to roam, a possible fix-it for Mei Changsu's whole everything? Yes please.

I've never written for Nirvana in Fire before, and I love the show so much in all its complex glory that it felt pretty intimidating, but this idea was compact enough to make it manageable. I wanted to evoke the breathless feeling of the show, where two masterminds drinking tea together can have all the lethal energy of a cagefight.

and remains quiet (1711 words, rated G, no warnings)

She picks up her cup and sips delicately of the chrysanthemum tea she brought. It is cooling and calming. She doesn’t need calming, but Mei Changsu might. She is about to administer a medicine that the patient will find disagreeable.

The patient looks fevered, at the moment. “What is wrong with Jingyan?”

lunarriviera posted: second grace: a mo sanmei/bai sanwan fic

This is such a good story, and provides Mo Sanmei (Zhu Yilong's character in his movie Lighting up the Stars) with the best boyfriend, somehow - even though he is doing okay by himself, mostly, and he doesn't know how to be close with anyone, and anyway, it's more important that his kid gets the noodles she deserves...?

Also, it made me cry.

If you get a string of random letters/numbers followed by a suspect link in your AO3 comments, you've been hit by a spambot that's been targeting the site. Obviously, don't click the link.

AO3 support is aware:

AO3 Status on Twitter: "Spam in your comments? First: don't follow the link! But do use the "Spam" button on the comment to report it. (No need to send in a separate support or abuse report! And please don't mark it as spam in your email, or your provider might start thinking all AO3 emails are spam.)"

Long ages ago, I picked Mary Crawford (or nowadays,

marycrawford) as a fannish pseudonym because there were some writers I admired who had literary pseuds, like Emma Woodhouse and Flora Poste - it's been so long that I can't quite remember, but I think they were all K/S fandom zine writers. And so I chose Mary Crawford, because nobody had chosen her yet, because I love her, and because she was the only character to make a gay joke in all of Jane Austen.

There are some advantages to a 'real name' pseud - it's easy for people to call me Mary when we meet, online or offline, and I like that. The disadvantages are largely that I can't search for my own work when I'm feeling blue and want a pick-me-up, hoping to find someone saying something nice, because any links are inevitably Austen-related. And another issue is that I can't namesquat my pseud on any other type of social media, except if I get there very early, which is rare. (I don't have a twitter, and I'm sorry for everyone who's going to miss using it.)

I was in time for cohost, not that I've used it at all yet, so I'm marycrawford there.

I recently picked up Tumblr again, and I'm

mcvices there. I've used it so rarely because it overloads my brain easily and I hate tagging, but the gifs are pretty. And for me, a major upside of the Twitter breakdown is that fandom saint

wenella has made her way to tumblr and is posting Zhu Yilong photos and interviews she translated there, so I can see them more easily. (He is too beautiful and this is a fascinating interview.)

A while ago, I wrote two stories that featured Shen Wei's very ~~opinionated~~ skilled tailor, the man responsible for all those tightly tailored suits (yum). And then

mumblemumble came in and wrote a sequel! It was such a cool surprise, I've never had an original character appear in someone else's work before, and it's a fantastic story.

clean shirt, new shoes (1395 words) by A
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan
Characters: Zhao Yunlan, Shen Wei (Guardian), Original Characters
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Fluff, Suit Kink, Lollipops, Academia
Series: Part 6 of Higher Education
Summary:

"You like it?" Yunlan grins, taking the lollipop out of his mouth to do a little twirl. "You have to like it, I'm not getting changed."

I started posting my long Guardian art AU, yay! It's about 85k which I'm still cutting into chapters, and I need to fix and expand some scenes toward the end so it's not quite done yet. But posting once a week or so will give me time to work on that.

Close Your Eyes and See Me (4006 words) by marycrawford
Chapters: 1/?
Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan
Characters: Shen Wei (Guardian), Zhao Yunlan
Additional Tags: Art School, Alternate Universe - No Powers, except the power of Art, Drawing, Painting, Professor Shen Wei (Guardian), Detective Zhao Yunlan, Undercover, Nude Modeling, Identity Porn, Romance, Slow Burn
Summary: It seemed like a good idea to Zhao Yunlan at the time. Take a job as a life drawing model, observe the students, try to figure out if one of them murdered the previous art professor.
Get paid to sit on a chair, basically. Piece of cake, right?
Well.

This all started from a delightful prompt by

cyberbrain in the Guardian Prompt Fest in May 2020. Yeah. It's been a while, but this story kept me company through the upheaval of the past years.

It was really nice of Zhu Yilong to record another one of those Thermos ads in what feels like a very fannish setting - a cozy cabin in the snow, quite an idyll, complete with piano and cat and a raging snowstorm outside. I'm not sure why he would want to leave it for CGI land, all he needs is someone to knock the snow off their boots and join him in the cabin...

Meanwhile, we're having ridiculous late-summer weather over here: 21C tomorrow, or 68F. Which is incredibly welcome, since we're also in an energy crisis and any excuse not to turn on the heating is welcome. (It's frustrating that I want to write 'gas crisis', but the US uses the word for the stuff they put in their cars.)

I've not been doing super great for various reasons, but one third thing that cheers me is that I'm making progress on finishing the long Guardian AU I've been working on intermittently since...somewhere in early 2020, apparently. I'm thinking of posting the first chapters once a week or so, while I work on the back end, as it were.

I've never actually posted a serial on the AO3 before - anything I should be aware of? I presume you can still change tags, ratings, etc, as the story progresses?

Today (20 August) is the last day to sign up for

guardian_wishlist by posting a wishlist there, so if you've been meaning to do it, here's your reminder.

But if you'd prefer to look at people's wishlists (here's mine) and see if anything strikes your fancy, you can do that until September 10th and you don't need to sign up for that.

The

guardian_wishlist event has started, and I signed up here. It's a lovely lowkey little event where you post wishes related to Guardian and adjacent fandoms (anything the actors have appeared in) and people comment on your wishlist to fulfill some wishes. You don't have to be signed up to the event to comment, you can just wander along the wishlists once they're live and see if anything sparks your imagination.

ETA: as

trobadora says below, in a fest like this it's just as important to provide prompts for other people as it is to make gifts. For me personally, an event like this is a fic prompt and deadline generator, and the more prompts there are, the more likely it is that one of them will spark an idea for a story. So if you're thinking "I want to post a wishlist but I don't have time to do anything else" that is 100% okay and encouraged.

In the wishlist, you can ask for fic and fanart, but also things like screencaps from that one episode, or translations, or recs for things you would enjoy. This year I asked for fanart for other people's fic, because I have some favorites that would be fun to see illustrated. (This is where a transformative works policy on one's AO3 profile comes in handy.)

You can sign up until August 20th, and then comment on other people's wishlists right until September 10th, where all the comments get revealed at once.

Vividcon challenge vid: Swing

I made this vid in 2009, and the download links for it still work. (Sorry, no streaming, I don't want to deal with the hassle.)

Nichelle Nichols still shines in every scene she's in. 💖

In the hottest week of the year so far, sitting indoors and waiting for better times, I wrote some self-indulgent fluff:

the day of harvest
(Guardian, Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan, 3k words, rated Teen)

“You buying Shen Wei a kitchen appliance was already a terrible idea,” Da Qing says, with a slowly increasing look of horror. He backs away from the countertop, eyes wide. “You messing with the thing before Shen Wei gets home is an even worse idea. You should just return it and get him…I don’t know…a watch or something.”

“Yeah, because that’s romantic,” Zhao Yunlan scoffs.

I've been in a weird headspace re: fandom where I've mostly stopped reading Guardian fanfic because I love it so much, and it has such good writers, that reading anything awesome will do my head in as far as writing goes. (And I'm inching closer on finishing the AU I started, whoops, two years ago? Still a way from the finish, and then there's beta, but things are looking up.) I want to get this story out and catch up to everything I missed, damn it.

But here's a story from a while ago that lit my imagination on fire:

Follow You Everywhere (5091 words) by achray
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018), Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan
Characters: Shen Wei (Guardian), Zhao Yunlan, SID team
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Kuroshitsuji Fusion, Canon-Typical dark content for Black Butler canon, Canon-typical violence for Black Butler canon, black humour, Constant Innuendo, Demonic Contracts (Kuroshitsuji), Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan as themselves
Summary:

Never had Shen Wei known such enjoyment, in fulfilling the duties a demonic contract required.

It's a crossover with a manga/anime series I had never heard of, and it doesn't matter because I found the story entirely comprehensible and deeply delicious. And then I fell into a hole and read a whole bunch of the manga, and watched the anime as well. Good times.

And now Guardian has been removed from Youtube, again, which sucks, since it's just so handy to rewatch a scene or an episode through Youtube for a quick fix. And to attract new fans.

But fandom has access to all the beautiful HD files with fan-curated subs. (That link goes straight to a Mega download site that I share with permission!)

I found this so charming, both the story behind the last minute collaboration and the feedback loop where the music makes the audience happy, which makes the organist happy, which makes me happy to watch:

"I often do middle-of-the-night practice sessions at the Royal Albert Hall , and have grown rather fond of hall staff calling up to the organ with requests. At 1am on Friday 20th, someone called up asking me to play Bach's Toccata in D minor. It turned out it was Bonobo's band. 12 hours later they had written me an organ part, and 18 hours later I was helping them close their show to an audience of 5000. This was, undoubtedly, the best moment of my life so far...!"

(warning for strobe lights and general light FX)

Watch on YouTube

sef1029 posted: One day left for Ukraine auction bids

I feel like this auction sort of bypassed my small area of fandom - I hadn't heard of it before signups were already closed, and there are three Guardian creators to bid on for fic and podfic, which is awesome, but feels like a low number? And no Lost Tomb Reboot offers, for example. Anyway, go bid!

sef1029 posted: Sunflower auction (for Ukraine) now open

Thanks to lovely anon who gave me a DW subscription! 💖
I have been keeping my head down, trying to avoid checking the news more than five times a day. The one fannish thing I've been doing is work on the Guardian AU I started pre-pandemic. I really want to get it done so I can have some time off writing and read all the fic in my Marked for Later box.

Some links for cheer:
- a Zhu Yilong burger ad that shows no product whatsoever, just a classy art installation (ie: his face, especially at 0:07) telling us to imagine something "THICK and JUICY". 😹

- I've been watching people's video content for the new Star Wars hotel in Disney World, the one that's really more of a 48 hour roleplay experience with a bonkers pricetag, and the guy playing First Order Lt. Croy is killing it. Love him.

- this week I learned about the artist who made a shark crash into the roof of his house as an anti-war message. "Without the approval of local officials, because he didn’t think they should have the right to decide what art people see." 36 years later, the shark is still there, and the message still matters.

Twitter is now choosing to let me see about five tweets from any account before I get a "log in to see the rest" popup. I can kill the popup, but the entire page freezes so I can't scroll, anyway.

You may ask "why do you care, if you don't want to be on Twitter" but the thing is, all through the pandemic I have kept a single Twitter tab open to wenella's feed of wonderful Zhu Yilong pics and gifs and it has been a real mood-booster. Ditto for the links to fanart and Guardian-related content on twitter that I can click on, thanks to @clevermanka and @plingo_kat posting them here.

So I want to be a ghost on twitter, and clearly they don't want to let me waft around anymore. Anyone got any way around this? (I know, I could open an account and that would solve it, but that is exactly what I want to avoid.)

Related news, I can't believe that Zhu Yilong made a Lenovo ad in 2018 that looks like it was meant to snare Guardian fans, with Z1L saying "I promised you that we will meet again" against a suspiciously glowy, spacy background... (If they hired Bai Yu to make the counterpart ad, fandom would have told me, right?)

Edit: suggested workarounds in comments, thanks all! I haven't tried out Incognito mode in Chrome yet (since I use Firefox and a bunch of ad blockers, add-ons, etc) but what does seem to work is deleting all the twitter-specific cookies from my browser. Which I will probably have to do every day, then.

Edit II, brother of Edit: nitter.net is an open source front end for twitter - very low key, type in the account name you want to look at and go. Thanks to @trobadora for linking me to this!

The developer has also created browser extensions - there's the Nitter one, but there's also a more nuclear option that "redirects Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Google Maps, Reddit, Medium, Google & Google Translate requests to privacy friendly alternative frontends for those sites". That is the kind of thing I am here for.

There's a Youtube chill beats channel I listen to when I'm writing, called Lofi Girl - they're the ones with the great animations of a girl reading a book, writing, etc, usually with a cat in the background.

And right now the cat is wearing a party hat, because they hit 10 million subscribers. They're giving away ipads, macbooks and graphic tablets to celebrate, and it's worldwide, so I figured I'd share the link:

Lofi Giveaway

Today's the last day and it closes in a couple hours, good luck!

My brain is empty and I can't concentrate on anything serious, so I started watching Granting You a Dreamlike Life on Youtube, which is nicely HD and has smooth English subs. It's a soap opera, full of the kind of "romance" cliches that drive me crazy, and the only reason I keep watching (I'm at...ep 10 I think?) is because it's got Zhu Yilong and I'm a sucker.

That said, his character, Luo Fusheng, is a delight - for once he's playing someone who lets his emotions spill all over his face, even if he also still loves to hide them away behind a smile and tell people he's fine after he got shot (aka: the Zhu Yilong special). SO much fun to watch, he's incredibly alive in every scene.

Plus, there was a fight scene where he kept listening to and appreciating (badly dubbed, but never mind) Chinese opera while downing guys right and left with careless competence, and I love that kind of thing.

Also his hair got wet:

luo fusheng with wet hair

goss posted: It's More Joy Day! \o/

I'm going to steal

goss's brilliant idea for

sdwolfpup's More Joy Day, because: More Joy!

Leave a comment sharing 3 things that bring you joy and/or a quote or phrase that you love, and I'll doodle you something inspired by it.

Offer open to anyone that comes across this post today.

(Closed now, thank you for participating!)

I have been exploring etegami art lately, and made new year's cards for people in that very loose style, it was fun. So I may turn any doodles into cards, we shall see!

fandomtrees just went live after a week's delay, and there are 8 Guardian stories!

I had too little oomph to sign up, but I was treated extremely generously last year, so I can only pay it forward. What I really needed this year was a deadline, to get anything done at all, and it worked!

For

laireshi, who always has the best hurt/comfort prompts, I wrote:

Snowmelt (2790 words)
(Guardian, Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan)

Shen Wei felt heavier when he was unconscious. The idea was ridiculous, of course. Or maybe it wasn’t. If anyone could find a way to make himself less of a burden, it would be Shen Wei.

I liked seeing

elenothar's fanfic year in review post, and it made me want to do one too.

January
Two stories for

fandomtrees:

Threat Level: Bears for

laireshi. Guardian, Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan. The one with the bears.

the food of sweet and bitter fancy for

shipperslist. Guardian, Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan. The one with the outside POV.

February
Three stories for

sundial_exchange:

Tailor-made for

sakana17. Guardian, Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan. The one where Shen Wei visits his tailor.

A Tolerance for Pain for

xparrot. Guardian, Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan. The one where Zhao Yunlan is lost and Shen Wei goes metal.

like thunder under earth for

dorinda. Guardian, Chu Shuzhi & Shen Wei. The one where Chu Shuzhi is wounded and doesn't need any help from his Lord.

May
The Wake. Star Trek: TOS, Kirk/Spock. Not actually new fic, this is a tiny dialogue-only story I once wrote for a K/S con.

September
Two stories for

guardian_wishlist:

Seamless for

sakana17. Guardian, Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan. The sequel to Tailor-made: Shen Wei takes Zhao Yunlan to his tailor.

spoils of war for

sasamelons. Guardian, Zhao Yunlan and Da Qing. The one where Da Qing leaves Zhao Yunlan a present.

October
The Catboy's Day Off. Fanfic for an original AO3 series. Irredeemable filth. The one where a catboy gets more help than he can handle.

Most of the year I've also been working on a Guardian AU in fits and starts (the one where Shen Wei is an art teacher and Zhao Yunlan becomes his model). I really hope that I can post it in 2022, I want to get the plane out the hangar!

And from this list, it's quickly evident how much I enjoy fanfic challenges and writing treats for people; having a deadline to work up to has been a saving grace in a year when it's been so hard to concentrate and get anything done. I have a story for

fandomtrees this year, too, but it won't be live until tomorrow.

I wrote two stories for the

guardian_wishlist event. For

sakana17, a sequel to a previous short story about Shen Wei's extremely opinionated tailor:

Seamless (4181 words) by marycrawford
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan
Characters: Shen Wei (Guardian), Zhao Yunlan, Original Male Character(s)
Additional Tags: Fashion & Couture, Tailoring, Shopping, Unexpected Inlaws, Established Relationship
Series: Part 2 of Made By Hand
Summary: Zhao Yunlan waited to see if Lao Xie would take the bait. He had a whole speech prepared, dwelling on the fit of Shen Wei’s pants and the taut elastic of those garters spanning his biceps. Maybe he could get Shen Wei to blush a bit, or fidget, or give him one of those looks that promised retribution later.
--
Or: Shen Wei introduces Zhao Yunlan to his tailor.

On the last day before the deadline I managed one more little story for

sasamelons, for the "Da Qing being very cat" prompt that spoke to me:

spoils of war (766 words) by marycrawford
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Da Qing & Zhao Yunlan
Characters: Da Qing (Guardian), Zhao Yunlan
Additional Tags: Domestic Fluff, Bugs & Insects, Jail for Father for Ten Thousand Years, Cat Tribe Best Tribe (Guardian)
Summary: Zhao Yunlan has had a Very Long Day, and Da Qing has left him a present.

There were a LOT of great prompts on everyone's wishlists, and I bookmarked several pages to come back to later. (Asking for a friend, who is me: if you're working on a long (50K-ish) fic that is unrelated to this event but fits someone's prompt ideas perfectly, is it an imposition to gift it to them when it's finally done? 👀)

Slightly more brain today means that I realize yesterday wasn't the solstice but the equinox. Neither of those words have ever held any real meaning to me though, I must admit. The Dutch word for solstice is pretty, but we don't seem to have an equinox equivalent, just like English doesn't.

I got three wonderful story gifts for

guardian_wishlist !

I didn't even think to put this in my prompts, but I love "5 things" fics. There's just something about the structure that makes interesting things happen, and both of these use it beautifully in different ways:

Domesticity (2414 words) by buriedbybooks
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan
Characters: Da Qing (Guardian), Zhu Hong (Guardian), Lin Jing (Guardian), Jiajia (Guardian), Guo Changcheng, Chu Shuzhi
Additional Tags: 5+1 Things, Domesticity, soft moments, Fluff, SID escapades
Summary:

Five times Wēilán was caught acting married and one time it was just them.

in the smallest of ways (1837 words) by china_shop
Chapters: 5/5
Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan, Zhao Yunlan & Da Qing
Characters: Zhao Yunlan, Shěn Wēi, The SID Team
Additional Tags: Caretaking in the smallest of ways, Missing Scenes, episode 14, Episode 19, Family, Lowkey get-together, Five Times
Summary:

Five times Zhao Yunlan looked out for Shen Wei.

And

elenothar took on the prompt of "Shen Wei's students Find Out" and boy, do they. I adore Shen Wei's student Jiajia, and to get her PoV of events as well as Zhao Yunlan's and Shen Wei's is so satisfying:

One for the conspiracy theorists (4638 words) by Elenothar
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan, Jiajia & Shen Wei (Guardian)
Characters: Shen Wei (Guardian), Zhao Yunlan, Jiajia (Guardian), Li Qian (Guardian), Da Qing (Guardian), Lin Jing (Guardian)
Additional Tags: Identity Reveal, Post-Canon, dragon city university students, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Protective Shen Wei (Guardian), hei pao shi in professor shen's clothing
Summary:

Shen Wei's identity is revealed to his students in the most dramatic way possible.

(No grad students were harmed during the writing of this fic.)

I had a day today, nothing terrible just busy, and it ended with a family Zoom across timezones and continents where everyone talked over each other. The best moment was getting our cats to wave at each other.

Today is also the solstice and the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival, which means that all the gifts for

guardian_wishlist just went live.

I want to comment on the fabulous fics I received, but I'm completely out of brain, so I will leave anything requiring...thought...? to tomorrow. Today, let me draw your attention to the pics and gifs, which all feel like they were chosen specifically for my tired synapses to appreciate:

-

mumblemumble's Zhu Yilong murder barber gifs with bonus! picspam of Zhu Yilong with cute animals
- ober-affen-geil's gifspam of Shen Wei protecting and caring for Zhao Yunlan
-

sakana17's curated collection of Zhu Yilong 🍑, that is to say, butt shots. Mmmmmm.

Please have a wonderful solstice/festival/full moon, and thanks so much to everyone. <3

There are wonderful art channels on Youtube that provide free videos where you can draw figure models who take on a variety of poses. Some of them have timers so you can try to catch a gesture in a minute, two minutes, five, etc. And my favorite channel now has an AGE CHECK on it, which means you a) have to sign into Youtube with an account and b) provide Youtube/Google with a credit card or a scan of your passport. All because you might get to see naked people posing in an entirely non sexual way. My eyeroll could be seen from space.

I absolutely don't want to give Google that much of my personal information, but I suspect the 'age check' block parameters might not be the same everywhere. I managed to grab the first four videos of this playlist before the gates went down, but the rest is unaccessible now. If you can see and play the files, then presumably you are currently not blocked.

If anyone here is willing, could you do me a huge favor and download a few of the videos, as many as you feel like clicking through, starting at Session 5? (I use a Firefox extension called YouTube Video and Audio Downloader, with the 'quick download' option which is just one click to grab a video and save it as mp4.) And if you could put them up on WeTransfer for easy download, that would be fantastic.

ETA: apparently the US can still see the videos and

plingo_kat was able to download some of them, which is wonderful (see comments below). Also, for some reason episode 4 of the playlist is still accessible on Youtube even to me in the EU, and features a lovely well-built man posing, if you want to see what the episodes are like.

Also, are there any art/drawing DW communities I could ask this same question in, or share the files with?

I have a rice cooker for the first time ever, and now I want to make All The Rice Dishes. It's tiny, because in a two person household we eat at most a cup of (uncooked) rice a day, and it has fuzzy logic magic. It's a Cuckoo model, Korean, and it's adorably shaped like an egg, which makes me wonder if it's going to hatch into something that will throw all our other appliances out of the nest.

Please hit me up with your rice cooker tips, tricks, recipes? So far I've only made basmati in it, but I've been watching this Chinese (subtitled) cooking channel and she does some amazing things. If you're in Europe, tips for good asian rice brands would also be welcome - my Aldi basmati is okay but unexciting, and I want to branch out to other flavors. We have a big Asian supermarket in town, so I'll probably have choice paralysis.

I've signed up for

guardian_wishlist, a nice lowkey fic/art/anything challenge that works like

fandomtrees: you sign up with a wishlist, the mods post it, and anyone can comment on that post with something that fits your wishes.

fandomtrees was a blast, and I hope this will be as well. Signups are open until the end of the month, but there's no need to sign up yourself if you only want to make treats for other people. (I'm a big fan of that option: I'm hesitant to sign up for many types of challenges, but the option to make treats is always exciting.)

I'm rewatching Nirvana in Fire very slowly, with copious pauses to try and draw people's faces. (Quote from a newspaper series on portrait art: "If you can draw shadow shapes, you can draw anything". It turns out that drawing shadow shapes and even seeing them in the first place is really hard, ha.) And I'm stuck on episode 7, which has such good scenes--

( like the one with Nihuang in the courtyard )

( and the one where Xia Dong comes to ask MCS about his intentions )

I finished watching Nirvana in Fire and thoroughly enjoyed the ride. Now I want to rewatch it, because this is one of those shows (like Guardian) that will reward rewatching, for sure. And I still have a ton of faces and complicated hairdos to draw.

After I watched the ending, I went looking for something short and cheery on AO3, and found the perfect story to satisfy my immediate needs:

Accustomed To Disguise (5710 words) by orphan_account
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 琅琊榜 | Nirvana in Fire (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Lin Shu | Mei Changsu | Su Zhe/Xiao Jingyan
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Gay Chicken For Great Justice, The One Where Lin Shu Stabs Himself In The Back
Summary:

Jingyan tucked his hands into his sleeves and said with serene and infinite calm, “I am going to kill him.”

That was a delight and exactly what I needed, so it's a rec from me. It's a shame to see that the author abandoned the work, I always find that a pity, but on the other hand I'm so pleased that it's still there for me to find and enjoy.

Somewhere in the summer of 2019 I was watching Guardian for the first time, and fell back into fandom as a result - I wrote a story before I'd even seen the last dozen episodes of the show. And I'm still there: I've been working on a Guardian AU for the past year which I want to get off the runway and into the air, even if it feels like I'm attaching wings to an elephant sometimes.

I wish I'd taken notes while watching Guardian for the first time, because it's always fun to come back to those later and see what my first impressions were. I've mostly forgotten them now, though I do remember thinking that Shen Wei's pendant had to be one of the Tools that he was hiding for some reason.

And now with Nirvana in Fire I also feel like it would be fun to write down my reactions, but I just don't have the stamina for any detailed recaps. So instead please hold my hand, for I have about 10 episodes left, and what a ride it promises to be. Without spoilers: the last few episodes felt like being on a rollercoaster that was cranking up slowly but surely from day 1 and now we're going downnnn, baby.

As a monofannish type, I don't currently think that I will want to write any fic for Nirvana in Fire, but I'm deeply worried and concerned about basically everyone on Mei Changsu's side, and at the same time I feel like their competence ought to be rewarded. This show and the competence porn, I swear. Although I also love Meng Zhi, who is extremely competent in his areas of expertise, and in other areas a bit of a Jam Watson.

I already know I will want to rewatch, and to continue drawing the hair ornaments and facial expressions for practice. (Consort Yue is my favorite, she is so expressive and so delightfully awful.)

Okay, so I know I said that I understood everyone (who is related to the Emperor) in Nirvana in Fire is called Xiao, and it's not a diminutive but a family name?

Yes, well.

When Mei Changsu is yelling after Prince Jing and calling him "Xiao Jingyan" not once but twice, in the most emotionally charged way possible, IN THE SNOW, I may forget about these things.

I know, I know, it makes sense that he's not actually calling him by an affectionate diminutive in this scene, because it would blow his cover to kingdom come, but still! I have been TRAINED (by Shen Wei) to respond to people being called 'xiao' in emotionally charged moments!

Also: ( this may need a spoiler warning )

Ahh I'm enjoying Nirvana in Fire a lot! It's so beautiful and the various relationships are so complex and engaging. There is a bit in episode 10 that's probably not at all important, but that I kept rewatching to see what I'd missed:

( spoilers, up to ep 12 anyway )

I started watching Nirvana in Fire! Things I found useful to know about (no spoilers edition):

-- the guy in white with long hair who has the nightmare and wakes up in ep 1 is NOT the guy in white with long hair who is doing some extremely acrobatic katas a little bit later.
-- lots of people are called Xiao, which in this case is an actual surname and not a diminutive. (Except for when Ancient Empress Grandma or Handsome Warrior Friend call our hero Xiao Shu and I melt - that's the kind of Xiao I already knew about!)

I am going in mostly blind otherwise, though I have friends to ask questions if needed, and a link to the Nirvana in Fire starter kit. I don't usually like a lot of spoilers for a show - small tips like the 'guy in white' thing are helpful, but otherwise I figure I will have more fun if I don't know every last detail about who is related to whom and who murdered whose grandfather and so on, because the show will presumably tell me. Knowing that this is a 'Count of Monte Christo' kind of story does help a lot to get me hooked in, too.

When I started watching Guardian, the main thing I needed to hear was that despite the editing in ep 1, Xiao Guo is not the protagonist - it really looks like he is for a hot second, and that would have thrown me out immediately - and then I got told about the tropefest that is episode 8, like a lure to draw me in.

And similarly, Prince Yu gets such a lavish introduction scene (complete with assassination attempt!) that even when you sort out the two guys in white, you could still think that this guy is the actualfax hero. Until Our Hero gets his epic "gliding in on a boat, playing the flute, to face down warships" moment, and then we know where we are.

So far, after the first four episodes, Warrior Princess Nihuang is my favorite, but I feel like that's a given, she would be anyone's favorite. She kicks ass, commands armies and has the best hair ornaments, I mean come on! She tells our hero after he held her hand a little too long For Reasons, "On a normal day, I would have cut off your hand"! I luv her.

I recently fell down a Wikipedia hole, and one of the shiny bits of treasure I dug up was this letter from Dorothy L. Sayers, about her book Murder Must Advertise:

The new book is nearly done. I hate it because it isn't the one I wanted to write, but I had to shove it in because I couldn't get the technical dope on The Nine Tailors in time. Still, you never know what people will fancy, do you? It...deals with the dope-traffic, which is fashionable at the moment, but I don't feel that this part is very convincing, as I can't say "I know dope". Not one of my best efforts.

I mean. Wow. First of all, it is one of her best efforts--it's easily my favorite, even though yes, she's right, the dope-traffic stuff is the part I usually skip. The book is half pulp novel and half advertising agency comedy, and the latter half is pure gold. I could read a whole series set in the agency, with all its petty drama and delightful characters.

But second of all--she wrote this letter to her publisher. "Hi, here's my book, I hate it".

OH DLS, I lo-five you across time, because that feels very familiar, even if I'm just working on a long-ass fanfic. Once it's done I will get the urge to hurl it to a beta reader with some uncomplimentary words about it, as if that would entice anyone into reading, and seeing DLS do the same thing makes me feel better.

I was talking to

sakana17 about some favorite tropes, like character X transforming into a monster and character Y immediately recognizing them anyway (sigh!) and she wrote me this delicious bonbon:

The Monster Who Came Back (3652 words) by sakana17
Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Transformation, Fix-It of Sorts
Summary:

"Shen Wei?" Zhao Yunlan said as he looked into the large, troubled, teary eyes of the man he loved.

'I hurt him,' he thought. 'I was the one who broke his heart.' What could he say now?

killabeez posted: The Kirk/Spock Fanfiction Archive is Moving to the AO3

Reading about the K/S archive migration, I realized I had once posted a story on the K/S archive that I never copied anywhere else, so today I put it on AO3:

The Wake, (719 words), rated T, no warnings.
Summary: After Spock's sacrifice, Kirk and McCoy share some Romulan wine.

(I also dropped a note to the Open Doors archivists that I was going to import this story myself, so it doesn't get archived twice. More details about what to do with stories you do or don't want to be archived can be found in

killabeez' post.)

There are Strange People Working in the House (wearing face masks, at least, oof) and the cat has flattened herself between a desk and a radiator in the hope that she will become invisible. I feel the same way, frankly.

To distract myself, let me ramble on about pens. I started drawing with fountain pens a while ago, since I love writing with them so much that it felt natural to draw with them, too. And I went down a whole rabbit hole figuring out how to use waterproof ink in fountain pens without clogging them up. That way I can draw something and then use watercolor paint on it later, which is my favorite way of working with paint so far.

One of the best waterproof inks I found is Platinum Carbon Black, which is just a gorgeous deep, deep black that also dries rapidly and is 100% waterproof. It's from Japan, comes in cartridges as well as bottled ink, and you can use it in ordinary fountain pens, though probably you shouldn't let them sit for a long time without using them. But Platinum also makes a couple of fountain pens that are specifically designed to use the waterproof ink. The Preppy is one, and the Platinum Carbon Ink Desk Pen is another, and the one I use for drawing. I have multiples of this pen now - it's cheap, it's plastic, it looks odd with the long tail because it's meant to go in a desk stand, it draws a very fine line, it always starts up immediately, and I absolutely love it. I've seen people describe it as a cheap-looking pen that writes like a $200 nib. (I don't have any fancy nib pens to compare it to, but I believe it.)

And so, in Lost Tomb Reboot, when Wu Xie started writing in his uncle's diary with that lovely long-tailed red pen, I recognized it immediately.

( Wu Xie's desk pen )

I love that whole setting with the desk and the diary and the warm light, and I love the elegance of that pen in Wu Xie's hand.

There's a great blog post by a sketcher in Singapore here, with lots of detail about the different desk pens he uses. He managed to find a version of Wu Xie's pen that has an actual 14K gold nib, which I've never seen for sale.

Every time I'm stuck in the middle of a story, I say "next time I will learn to outline". Because if I could outline, if I could outline PROPERLY, then I would have a plan. And if I had a plan, then I would be able to stick to it. (This is the point where the gods begin to laugh.)

Instead I'm stuck in the middle of a story again, and trying to come to terms with the idea that maybe outlining isn't how my brain works. But it's so frustrating! Because I want to know what happens next, but the person who knows what happens next is stubbornly not telling me. She's the worst.

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