Clever Manka is dressed and undressed

Found via bonibaru lilly_the_kid is asking for vids that convinced you to watch a show. Go pitch your recruitment vids!

I find a lot of new music via fanvids, and I'd love to know what bands/albums/songs others discovered thanks to fanvids. Please share your music finds, as well as (if you remember) what vid used it. Or, you know, if you've got a killer song for a character-themed playlist, I'm certainly not gonna turn that down.

For anyone interested, I have a ton of playlists on YouTube (including one just for Angst) and I recently duplicated my Guardian playlists on Spotify. All the Guardian-related playlists except the 5/20 and 6/13 celebration ones are continual works in progress. If you like the stuff in those, you might check back every month or so to check for updates.

Found a new song to add to Deconstruction writing playlist this morning! Really love me my Music Feels, y'all.

This Twitter thread about why people love Guardian is such a heartwarming read.
Zhu Yilong and Bai Yu as various animals.
Zhu Yilong with that knee-weakening ponytail, playing piano god damn it.
Beautiful and ouch. The likenesses in this are amazing.

Sorta-Guardian related? How to make congee.

I'm beyond ready to start writing Canadian Shack. I actually have a title for it already \o/ but I'm worried it'll make people nervous. It's gonna be a much lighter tale than Ghost Story, though, promise! Well, as light as my stories get, I suppose...

The only new stuff I put to paper this week were additions to Ghost Story that either: don't make any sense out of context, or are huge spoilers. So in lieu of writing content I'm posting links the Guardian character music mixes I've been collecting for a while. I waited until I had at least ten songs for each to make them public (Zhao Yunlan is tricky for me to find songs for--probably the lesser angst quotient). I'll continue adding to them all as I come across appropriate songs, so these will be constant works in progress.

Weilan
Shen Wei
Zhao Yunlan (sorry not sorry for the first song y'all, I couldn't not)
Ye Zun

All the songs from my 5/20 and 6/13 mixes appear in one of those playmixes. I'm not sure how much longer I'll keep those since I rarely listen to them myself anymore BUT! if someone still listens to them, let me know. I won't be hurt at all if you make your own mix based off them, either.

I wish there were a better way to organize playlists on YouTube. I'd like to separate out my fanvid playlists from my music mixes. Someday I need to figure out why Spotify won't let me log in with anything other than my FB account. Or just start a new account, I suppose.

Here's all my public playlists on YouTube, if anyone's interested.

ETA: Forgot to mention I got my hair done by a new stylist yesterday! Pic in comments.

Found on Twitter. You might wanna be sitting down for these.
BB!Shen Wei cosplay
Weilan cosplay

I also saw this Multifandom Secret Virgin Ficfest advertised on Twitter via bonibaru and I'm tempted. Very, very tempted. No way will I be done with Ghost Story by the deadline, but I'm feeling sloggy and blah about where I am with it and it's a daily fuckin' struggle to hit my word count goal right now. Maybe I need a palate cleanser before heading into the home stretch? Idk, idk, something to think about for a couple days. The original announcement led to confusion if this was limited to K-pop fic and it looks like they say it isn't, even though it definitely sounds like it is in the AO3 description. Is anyone else writing for this? ( naye , please tell Dr. Skuld I will read the virgin!Jack fic so hard.)

Card-making was delayed because my gesso was all dried up. Guess that's what happens when you prep a whole bunch of card bases at once and don't use your gesso for over a year. It seemed like such a good idea at the time! So that was a trip to Michael's and nearly $30 because they no longer sell small bottles of gesso. sigh

Last night I saw The HU at a local venue and it was so good. SO GOOD. 1. Metal fans are great. I wish I liked more metal music bc they're all just so damn polite. 2. At several points in the show, I closed my eyes to absorb the sound in my ears, in my chest, and it was like a physical touch--something I've been very much lacking of late. Damn, I love loud music. 3. I highly recommend Etymotic earplugs. I have the first incarnation of their basic version and they are worth every penny. I would like to assume the next generation is the same or better (and who knows, those might be), but as I learned yesterday, this is not always the case.

Because in absolutely heartbreaking news, the new Diva Dolphin arrived yesterday and...I hate it. It's smaller than the old model, the silicone feels (very) different, and I don't like the vibration style. It doesn't even use the same size batteries (which I wish I'd realized before purchasing--that would've been a clue). So yeah, I spent $90 on this thing that I'm never ever going to use and of course sex toy stores never take returns. Y'all, I seriously almost cried. I'm back at square one, I guess, only with less money. sigh

Anyone want a brand-new vibrator that I'm sure will work just fine for someone less picky? 

I'm getting my hair trimmed this morning and will see if having my hair straightened (which only happens when I get it cut because I am lazy as hell and dgaf) cheers me up a little bit. I just want a god damn power-assisted orgasm, y'all. My hands are getting tired.

Here's a piece of The Sex Scene That Nearly Killed Me (or at least nearly killed my desire to continue writing, ugh).
( Click for it )

Gonna start the next scene this morning (where significantly less pleasant stuff happens to our intrepid heroes). Wish us all luck.

I am highly motivated by music and also a very organizationally-inclined person. This explains the cough thirty-eight playlists on my YouTube channel (most of those are fanvid playlists tho). If anyone's interested in checking out what I listen to when I'm writing my smutty-smut, here you go.

qikiqtarjuaq posted on Twitter about this woman's amazing make-up skills. Are. You. Kidding. Me. Watch at your own risk because ngl, the lip-lick and widened eye just about killed me.

This person recently followed me on Tumblr and I'm just... ? What? Why? He doesn't seem to be a bot, but I'm flummoxed what in the world he saw on my Tumblr that made him go "Oh, sure, I'll follow her, she posts lots of stuff relevant to my overt, overwhelming love of God and Jesus!" Maybe he thinks I need saved? IDK. Very weird.

Got more than 5k words on Ghost Story written this week. I'm wondering if I'll wind up calling it "Ghost Story" after all. I had planned to name it "Write What You Know," but when I came up with that (brilliant) title I'd planned for ZYL's creative writing project to take a much larger focus of the story. Not only did I wind up nixing the creative portion of his dissertation, I eliminated pretty much all of the on-campus and/or coursework-related plot points from the story. *emoji shrug*

On the reading front, I finally got to Bespoken For last night and it's just, ah... *chef's kiss* 10/10 definitely recommend.

Am listening to no_detective 's most recent Guardian playlist this morning while I work on Ghost Story. Had a bit of a laugh when I recognized a BTS song in the first three notes--it's such a FEELS SONG, so ofc it's one of my faves of theirs. And then right on the heels of it was Taylor Swift's "The Archer" off her new album which--oooof, so good. Angsty songs really are her wheelhouse and I wish she'd explore more varied avenues of those themes instead of going into the tough, angry, revenge stuff which just does not work for me (from her, anyway).

Speaking of music, The HU's album dropped early (!) and I got to pick it up at my local record store this morning. Looking forward to listening to that, but I definitely want to experience that on the big speakers first, so that'll have to wait until I'm alone in the house...

ETA: Writing today has been an exercise in painful tooth-pulling. Fuck it, I'm inserting a pointless jerk-off scene just to get something on the goddamn page.

Woke up at 2am. Couldn't fall back asleep, so got up a bit before 3a. It's getting on to 7a, so I'm pretty sure I'm up for the day. Yay. I've got a ton to do today, too. Grocery store, library, laundry, just enough food prep to get us through the next three days (we're both traveling next week and I don't want stuff sitting in the fridge)...ugh.

Tomorrow might be rough. And then I leave for Indianapolis on Sunday. HA HA HA HA *thud*

At least waking so early gave me plenty of time to do a final pass over my first draft of the First Time fic. Sent it to beta a couple hours ago. My second fic! What a world, what a world. Now I just need to start my third watch of Guardian before digging into the Ghost Story. This time I'll be watching with solo 's subtitles and am Very Excited About That. It'll be mckitterick 's second time watching and I'm excited to hear what he thinks. I got so much out of my first re-watch.

I linked to BTS's "Airplane pt. 2" music video in yesterday's dump (and yes, I did watch it again just now since I obviously had to grab the URL for the link WHAT EXACTLY IS YOUR POINT) and in the comments on cm.net kazoogrrl mentioned the MV for Blood Sweat & Tears. Since our tastes align like 90% of the time, I of course checked it out immediately and...um, yeah. It's a lot. Dear lord. Just when you think it's reached Peak Hotness (for me, 1:09 with the swing and again at 1:20 with the swing) it keeps on giving more and more (fingers in mouths! blowing smoke! fucking blindfolds! the...kissing?) until you're left with nothing but your own id and a white flag.

Honestly I'm not entirely sure what is the narrative, but I am HERE FOR IT.

Looks like in addition to the songs I'm (still) accumulating for Guardian, I'm collecting for a History 3: Trapped playlist now.

I want to share bits of an email that a (tragically no longer local) friend wrote to me, now that she's well into Guardian. We used to talk due South all the time and it pleases me so much that she's On Fucking Board with Guardian, too. She wrote:
"After my initial wiki read for background info, I know the source material is REALLY BEAUTIFULLY GAY, and for TV they changed it because of Chinese censorship laws.... But the thing is, the gay subtext is so vibrant that it just feels like REALLY GOOD slow burn, like in the Keira Knightley P&P when we get cuts to Darcy's hands to see how excited he was just to touch her hand

Because KU will only reimburse me up to 176 hours of accrued vacation, I'm taking a handful of days off between now and May 24--today is one of them. I had plans to get a whole bunch of shit done: laundry, grocery shopping, general cleaning. But the dryer broke (of course) and mckitterick wanted to go to the store with me (but had writing group today) so it looks like I'm down to just the cleaning, my least favorite of the options. Eh. At least I can crank the music while he's gone and since I won't be driving anywhere, I can get fucked up. That'll at least make scrubbing the stove top less tedious.

Speaking of music, I was listening to Young & Dangerous by The Struts last night (loudly, before mckitterick got back from class) and this is such a Weilan song.

As kazoogrrl pointed out in an email, it even sounds like Zhao Yunlan's laugh at the very beginning.



ETA:  okay yeah I'm making a playlist. *sigh* For, you know, this show that I  wasn't going to start watching.

I forgot to post about this week's Tuesday's collection, since I didn't actually put up a new collection for this week. My current collections (of which there aren't many) are all pretty thin. I like to have at least 20 reblogs/posts per collection and right now the most any of them have are fifteen except for another due South collection that's going up next week. So on cm.net I posted a link to an old collection: Boots.

I also forgot to post Thursday's Link Dump. Sorry. Habits are slow to build.

Not much going on to update y'all about except last night I was listening to a song by one of my fave country bands (now sadly disbanded). I sometimes have a hard time singing along because I start laughing over these lyrics:
Our wedding day was nothin' short of perfect
Everything so beautifully arranged
Then out of the blue right before we said 'I do'
She turned and ran like she'd gone insane
There goes the bride you can kiss that girl goodbye
I guess she really takes the cake this time

Those bold lines just kill me every. single. time. They don't give you time to recover from the hilarity of "kiss that girl goodbye" before hitting you with the "takes the cake" line and you guys country music lyrics can be so good sometimes.

Anyone else here feel like admitting to a love of country music?  I can enjoy anything from Bakersfield (I especially love that style) to modern country (which is a lot dicier) as long as the sound is good and the lyrics aren't offensive (or boring). The biggest factor for me is I'm annoyingly tied to things having a typical verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, (verse), chorus. Blues and most bluegrass don't really do it for me, alas.