Just let me lie here on the tile

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:

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 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? 👀)

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

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 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.

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 )

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.

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.)

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.

wenella_subs posted some images from Guardian that I've never seen before - early costume options for Shen Wei, mostly. And they're so fascinatingly wrong. Those thick-framed glasses!

Shen Wei is also fascinatingly wrong - he doesn't look like himself, yet. His smile is somewhere halfway between Shen Wei and Ye Zun. If I wanted to be Watsonian about this photo, I would say that it was Shen Wei trying for a full 'nerdy academic' look. Just to be safe, because they were taking his photograph for his University ID, and he had no idea if the image was going to leak dark energy around the edges or anything.

And then this wrong!Shen Wei wore this cardigan and I have to laugh. It's too drapey and doesn't fit him right, the color is blah, and just as Lao Xie imagined in my story for sakana17, it is all kinds of wrong on him. It's not quite maroon, but it's so close!

“Hmmm,” said Lao Xie. He was walking around Shen Wei now, slowly and carefully, tottering artistically now and then before going back to his murder stalk. “What color? What fabric?” His hand shot out, to pinch at a fold of Shen Wei’s suit jacket. Shen Wei had carefully chosen his most conservative three-piece suit for this appointment, in an attempt to pacify his tailor for not coming to see him in several months. An attempt that had backfired as soon as he uttered the dreadful word ‘leisurewear.’

“Navy,” Shen Wei reported. “With a white bar on the arm. And—cashmere.” He admitted, “I bought it in heather grey, as well.” The cardigans were soft and silky to the touch. Not like armor. Much more inviting. More—approachable.

Lao Xie paused for a long moment, then sniffed. “At least you have not lost your reason entirely. I was expecting you to say maroon, or salmon pink, or something even more offensive, like acrylics. What else did you buy?”

(from Tailor-made)

The cardigans Shen Wei actually wore on the show look infinitely better on him, like this one. (Image is from sakana17 's Guardian costume gallery, a fabulous resource.)

And also this one, in heather grey, perfect for flirting sweetly with your boyfriend:



(It's not actually a cardigan, it's a sweater or a pullover, but I like imagining Shen Wei's confusion about those terms, not least because US clothing terms are often a mystery to me as well.)

And just in case you like digging into this silly stuff as much as I do - in our world, these pullovers are by Thom Browne, a US brand recognizable by the four bar pattern on the arm, and they cost ridiculous money. Here's the 4-bar cashmere pullover for only $1590 (choke).

So I have to wonder - did these brands sponsor this show? Because Shen Wei does wear a lot of Thom Browne. Or is the rumor that the actors wore some of their own clothing on the show to save money true?

sundial_exchange really delivered a ton of goodies this year, for Guardian and Lost Tomb Reboot and smaller fandoms, and I haven't gone through half the things I bookmarked yet.

I received:

Squared Black Pots and Their Kettles by BadPennyGirl
Shen Wei wakes with the worst headache in the world. But there are bigger problems in the dark where he's trapped with Zhao Yunlan on top of him.

A gorgeous, INTENSE h/c story full of my favorite tropes: cave-ins! "Leave me and go"! Self-sacrifice! Hiding a wound! It's got it all, and some delightful post-canon worldbuilding into the bargain.
This is the author's first story in Guardian fandom and she made her way to the deadline through some major mishaps, so please check it out!

Gorgeous artwork by naye for my story Under a Cloudless Sky. Such a thrill to get a treat like this, with a great choice of headshots for Zhao Yunlan and Shen Wei, full of suffering and tension (sigh, that's the good stuff).

I wrote:

A Tolerance for Pain (Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan, rated T, angst, h/c and Presumed Dead, 18k words) - my main gift for xparrot
Shen Wei faced the storm and let it break around him. In the center of catastrophe, he closed his eyes. He could hear no heartbeats, could feel no life around him other than his own.

Zhao Yunlan. Where are you?

I worked on this story for ages, and then in the last week before the deadline I managed two short stories as treats:

like thunder under earth (Gen, 1726 words, Chu Shuzhi & Shen Wei)
Chu Shuzhi is wounded and his Lordship can’t help him, but that’s all right. He doesn’t deserve the help, anyway.

Tailor-made (Rated G, 1905 words, Shen Wei and his tailor)
"You mean to tell me—you sit here drinking my tea and you mean to tell me that you have been visiting shops that sell leisure apparel?" Lao Xie could not have sounded more horrified if Shen Wei had confessed to being a crime boss.

( It's big, red, and bulbous )

So we've all seen those Refa roller ads where Zhu Yilong lovingly holds them up against his face (aka: the game of Dildo Sex Chicken, courtesy of yantantether ) but this...really is just a coffee ad? Where Z1L gives coffee machines to all his friends? 

HOWEVER. :hands:

The makers of the ad had to know what they were doing here. Right??

I posted about fandomtrees gifts earlier, but that was before the AO3 collection was unlocked, so I only got to rave about half and there were more stories and a VID!

Please enjoy:

• three amazing cookie recipes from different countries
• a gorgeous artwork of a heartfelt Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan embrace from grayswandir
• a terrific "Leave Me And Go" Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan story by onemuseleft (I don't know if that's the official name for the trope, btw, but it's the moment where one character is in dire straits and begs the other character to leave them for their own safety.... WELP. You can imagine how Weilan deals with that. I love that trope and would read any amount of stories featuring it, and this is a delicious angsty take.
• A WU XIE VID by trickytricky (Lost Tomb Reboot)! A perfect recruiter vid, spoiler-free, featuring everything I love best about LTR, which is basically Wu Xie being badass, sexy, innocent, flirty, snarky, and also more or less naked now and then (which is to say, we can see his bare arms and collarbone, but for Z1L that is a LOT.) It's a total mood lifter and I recommend it highly.
•  an intriguing take on a Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan moment from early Guardian canon in this story by trobadora which does that satisfying thing where I go "huh, that never really made sense to me but NOW it does"!
• a short intense Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan h/c story by laireshi full of ALL the good tropes, including cave-ins, my favorite XD

I love the game Hades so very much and I am so INCREDIBLY bad at it. I was looking around for tips and found people on Reddit listing how many runs it took them to complete their first 'escape' - the game's deal is that you must escape the Underground of Greek myth and make it to the surface - and there were people who claimed totals in the single digits. WHAT. I was on run 55 at the time.

I bought an Xbox controller, because maybe that would help.

I put the game on easy mode (which the makers very sweetly call 'God Mode') and maxed it out to 80% less damage. I still sucked.

But today, I finally made it out of Hell and into spring, and met Persephone.

I hope it's a good omen.

Maru (the Cat who Sits in Boxes) and Hana now have a kitten to deal with.

I'm still watching Lost Tomb Reboot, going very very slowly, mostly because of my fractured attention span but also, I admit it, because I keep pausing to stare at Sir's Face. The best thing about this show is just how much they labor to give Zhu Yilong room to work his microexpression magic and nuanced character acting in the midst of all the action-adventure (he got threatened by clams in the most recent episode, and it was amazing), and to light him beautifully while he does it. They read the label when they bought him, and I really hope other shows will do the same.

I signed up for fandomtrees, which is a really nice little fannish gift challenge that would be especially suitable for anyone who isn't feeling up to the big ones this year, like yuletide. You simply ask for a gift in a fandom of your choice - art, fic, anything. Officially you must request three fandoms, but they can also be non-fannish things like recipes, song recommendations or whatever, so it's suitable for monofannish people like me. And all you need to do to give someone a gift is post a comment under their letter, no need to sign up or anything. It's a 100 word minimum for fic, so it's super low-key, and I will be stalking people's letters to see what tasty things I can offer.

My fandomtrees letter is here, and there are already four Guardian requests!

And the Sundial Exchange signups have started, too, yay! I haven't signed up yet but I plan to, and I'm really looking forward to it. This is for Guardian and Guardian-related fandoms, and there was some spectacular art and fic for it last year.

sakana17 has an inspirational picspam of Bai Yu and Zhu Yilong lounging against walls, floors, windows, etc.

For anyone who has trouble sleeping tonight for...reasons...and who is interested in watching Zhu Yilong wear a fluffy oversized flower sweater and eat foods, may I recommend his livestream for Thermos? 

Yes, it's a giant hour long ad, and no subs are available yet, but mostly what happens is that Z1L gets to eat different foods, decorate a cake, eat the cake, be interviewed, and be super cute with his little sweater paws. I took some screenshots but I don't have the mental energy to get those to Dreamwidth.

Nothing bad happens, it's gently boring and very soothing, and after watching Zhu Yilong in Lost Tomb Reboot where his cheekbones could cut glass, it's just satisfying to watch him be cozy and eat things?

Oh, here we go, fandom saint Wenella has a lot of screenshots and quotes from the interview. Apparently his next show will be a contemporary drama.

I know there are rumors of Lost Tomb Reboot season 2, but I'm still slowly going through the first season, and pausing every now and then just to stare at Zhu Yilong because. HIS FACE. And the things he does with it.

I may never leave episode 26, because it feels like it has everything except the full Iron Triangle experience, and I admit I am fastforwarding through the second annoying subplot (slow your roll, Pangzi, pls), but Wu Xie, GOOD GRIEF.

( some slightly spoilery quotes from last night's viewing )

So...does anyone already have nice sharp caps of this scene with Z1L in his cap and goggles and posing on the floor and generally being a cocky, smirky badass? I presume yes, because fandom is amazing like that, pls hook me up?

It's honestly starting to feel like the makers of Lost Tomb had a bucket of tropes (or a h/c bingo square?) and they were determined to use Every Last One. You won't hear any complaints from me about this.

Two screencaps:

( Zhu Yilong's FACE, with spoilers, yes his face is a spoiler now )

I am still enjoying the Iron Triangle's shenanigans a lot, but it's okay if I just

( avoid something spoilery )