spockandawe

[spockandawe]

For the very fun record, part of what's been tanking my ability to partake of entertaining creative hobbies is that for the last few months, my employer has been gradually rolling out rounds of layoffs, as federal contracts get delayed or cut off, and I've had an ongoing adventure with insomnia that has SUSPICIOUS amounts of overlap with that same timeframe. It was doing better! And then august layoffs were announced last week (and maybe more in september and october) and long story short guess who still hasn't fallen asleep for tuesday night

[spockandawe]

A new project! If this posts twice, it's because tumblr only pretended to eat my first draft. I started this pattern a little while ago when I had a few big trips coming up and needed portable crafts. And then I took my mat cutter for its first test run and got hooked! I wanted to try some more interesting mats, and to also level up with framing fiber crafts in general. I think I probably could have pushed the asymmetry here a little further, but I'm pleased I didn't lose my sense of balance. This was a fun one!!

[spockandawe]

A new project! If this posts twice, it's because tumblr only pretended to eat my first draft. I started this pattern a little while ago when I had a few big trips coming up and needed portable crafts. And then I took my mat cutter for its first test run and got hooked! I wanted to try some more interesting mats, and to also level up with framing fiber crafts in general. I think I probably could have pushed the asymmetry here a little further, but I'm pleased I didn't lose my sense of balance. This was a fun one!!

[spockandawe]

branch into leaf (75,225 words)

Chapters: 5/6

Fandoms: Naruto, The Books of the Raksura

Rating: E

Pairings: Hatake Kakashi/Uchiha Itachi

Chapter Tags: Graphic Depictions of Violence

Standing, Tsunade folds her arms behind her back. "If anyone else in this court brought me a story like this I would slap sense into them so hard they wouldn't see straight for a month," she informs him. And then she looks at him. "Carry on. I trust in your judgement, Kakashi." Three reigning Aeriat. Kakashi is vaguely sure that must be a new record. It feels slightly unreal. He may need to go pass out for an hour or three after this to recover.

Kurama crawling out of his fancy new crater in the ground to continue to shame Raksura-kind:

[spockandawe]

Three-volume quarto binding of Devil Venerable Also Wants To Know by Cyan Wings, a webnovel I haven't got around to reading just yet (but now that I have all of it in physical form, I really should start on soon-ish). Thank you to @spockandawe for supplying me with the typeset!!

I don't know much about the plot beyond the broadest strokes, so I kept the cover design fairly simple - identical in design apart from the main cover color to distinguish the three. The cutouts are filled with faux-vellum, which I printed the title/author on, and the endpapers are real marbled paper which I picked up from Andersen's bindery earlier this year. very glad to finally have this one done!!

[spockandawe]

I am having great fun with this cnovel, and I'm going to post about this in isolation away from the title because I couldn't do the hard work fan translators do and I am sincerely enjoying this story. But man. When I started this book and the main characters kept peering at everything, I thought it was a character choice. As the cast kept expanding and moving to new settings, I was like Oh No. And yes, based on mtl of the raws, it seems like peering was used in most cases that could also be looking/glancing/staring/etc. I did some silly math, and in a sub-200k book, there were 440 instances of peering, or, someone peered at something about every 450 words.

In isolation, this is mildly silly. But then you add some other quirks. 'Woman' and 'man' being translated as 'female' and 'male,' for example. Always specifying that someone looks at [person's figure] rather than at [person].

Point being, by the time a male is peering at a female's figure, i think the connotations of that sentence are a LITTLE different from what was meant to be conveyed 🥲

[spockandawe]

Great news!! Cutting mats is WAY easier than it looks. New skill: UNLOCKED

There we go! First finished cross-stitch in ten million years, give or take! I still have to cut a mat and figure out framing, but this was a delight. I am excited to be free of rectangle hell and picking back up my irregular shapes again, but this really reminded me how much I love this hobby

[spockandawe]

branch into leaf (42,532 words)

Chapters: 3/?

Fandoms: Naruto, The Books of the Raksura

Rating: E

Pairings: Hatake Kakashi/Uchiha Itachi

Chapter Tags: In this one they bang again good for them, The Equal And Opposite Presence of Danzo Haunting The Narrative (derogatory)

There's a momentary hitch when Itachi finally pushes himself up: still lingering over Kakashi, hand planted to steady himself. He looks better like this than he does in flight – which is a very tough, very important call to make, but one which Kakashi has taken on the responsibility for making, you're welcome, Konoha – the kind of effortless prettiness that makes Kakashi's eye ache to memorize better: skin flushed, breathing with visible control, hair half-undone, overgrown bangs unevenly shadowing his face where they've been messily shoved back. He studies him with dark eyes, as if Kakashi's anything much to look at. But hey, if a man's gonna look at you with eyelashes as pretty as those, who's complaining? The shadows run deeper than normal. Unthinking, Kakashi lifts a hand to thumb at the one under Itachi's right eye, the rest of his fingers curled slightly as he brushes over thin skin. Itachi flinches, a tiny jump that makes both of them blink. Gingerly, rather than slapping the hand away, Itachi tilts his face out from under the touch. Eye tight, expression oddly unsure.

This is a single chapter split into two for once to be a reasonable length; the rest will be posted tomorrow.

[spockandawe]

gayyyyyyy

GAYYYYYYYYYYY

[spockandawe]

Ah man, it's agonizing to sit on a wip for so long when i want to share SO bad. But there's the progress i made during book club tonight 😂

[spockandawe]

I have to say, in some ways rereading naruto twenty years down the line is a WILD experience. Some of it is the dramatic recalibration of character ages (is zabuza an old man, or is he Baby? in my teens, he was old, in my now, he's a baby). But some of it is just down to wallowing in wuxia and xianxia for the last several years 😂

I swear to god, i made that meme, shared it with fellow cnovel/anime fans, then clicked on in the manga, and--

Chakra holes.... 😳

[spockandawe]

Oh! You know what I've been up to that I haven't updated this blog on? I took a still life class, and I've signed up for another! In the time between classes, I'm doing some studies of unrelated art to mix it up and keep adhd brain happy, but this was a ton of fun. I walked into the class like okay, i have (abstract) approximate knowledge of many art things, but almost no practical experience with paint or realism. So the teacher started me on the simple default beginner project to get me used to the process

And then she let me pick what I wanted for the next one and I went mad with power 😂 This isn't the photo I worked from, but it shows the spread!

So, the triumph of time was my first time doing a leather binding start to finish on my own (the other time i used a half-prepared hide). I accumulate silly toys every time i go to a tfcon. And the hinged slipcase for ToT remains one of my favorite experimental enclosures I've made. It was meant to be!

And I love an overambitious craft project, I think i really grow well pushing my limits like that, but thank GOODNESS i was in a class with an actual experienced teacher, because she was able to give me pointers when i hit the Hideous stage about what to work on next 😂 And now I know what the hideous stage looks like and how to get past it, which I think was DEFINITELY a roadblock in prior attempts to learn to paint. Plus, i think trying to paint an image of something i can see is better learning material for me than painting something i imagine, like i can draw. So this was very exciting! I'm working on studies in the time until the next class, and that's not ready to share yet, but is also delightful.

[spockandawe]

If i had a nickel for every annihilation-esque body horror apocalypse danmei where one main character is a confused innocent eldritch weirdo with an unearthly beauty, and the other is the hyperefficient ice-cold military commander with an uncanny instinct for the eldritch standing as one of the last lines of defense for humanity, all while the last human strongholds struggle through a slow extinction, i would have two nickels, but it's weird that it happened twice 😂

(I think 'little mushroom' was overall better paced than 'how to feed an abyss,' and i respect the hell out of them for directly addressing the logistics of population growth in this setting. But i also think that how to feed an abyss did a better job of rounding out the worldbuilding for the day to day life of the average populace in a setting like these. In both cases, the ingredients are a LITTLE bleak for my preferred reading diet, and i might have dropped either one if i wasn't reassured of a happy ending. But they were ultimately both good! Not my preferred subgenre, and not one i anticipate seeking out SUPER often, but i always appreciate some body horror in my diet)

[spockandawe]

Can I ask where you've been reading dropped in a ghost story still gotta work? I started it a while back but I think I was reading a machine translation and if there's a better fan translation available I'd like to give it another try

Sure thing!!! I can't speak to whether the translator here is leaning on mtl, i have a really bad natural sense for that, but they ARE actively, personally engaged on the site, and I've found the translation to be very readable!!

https://mythicregressor.com/series/got-dropped-into-a-ghost-story-still-gotta-work/

[spockandawe]

Thank you so much for reccing "dropped into a ghost story", I started reading it, blinked, and now it's an hour later and im having emotions about a stuffed animal. 10/10

Ahaha, I'm glad!!!! It really, REALLY is astonishingly compelling! I was uncertain about trying this one, because I'm a massive weenie when it comes to horror and this is a chonky thing (never mind that it's still only part one!), so i was surprised and delighted by how easy it went down! It really is a cool movie, I'm glad i stumbled across it/had the opportunity to rec it to others :D

[spockandawe]

God, i always feel like I'm full of things to say and have no energy to say them. What have i been reading since the last time i posted here?

The governor's illness something is wrong with the governor: Fine! Had some tasty components, but didn't super stick with me. It felt like it struggled to find its momentum and didnt have strong end to end flow

Is my attacker a ghost?: Fun, the bullying sections are a bit hard to read, and it did feel like it blew its load before the actual end of the story, but I have an increased appreciation for spoopy stories that aren't full-on HORROR

I excavated an emperor to become my wife: only partway through, but enjoying it! I wish this had a bit more spoop, but the concept is very fun to me

My husband and i sleep in the same coffin: also only partway through. It's fun, but having trouble finding its momentum, and I think the combination of fully decamping to the modern world plus trying to Humorously describe a person of..... multiracial descent? (i think???) kind of stalled me out. (his name means white jade, which is funny, because his skin is very DARK, you see) (I'm not sure how much is on the translator versus the author versus my own understanding, but it kind of killed my momentum)

After marrying the disabled god of war as my concubine: a delight!!! Some of the most fun I've had reading an imperial succession story, and it's such a galaxy brain move to make the modern person suddenly dumped into the past a professional history nerd (university history lecturer)

You yao/are you okay: holy shit, so clever and fun. The idea of having a world not dealing with a SINGLE transmigrator, but a SYSTEMIC PLAGUE of transmigrators, and then playing with concepts like a connecticut yankee in king arthur's court on that scale.... hot damn. This is the same author as the next one, and their brain is SO big.

How ridiculous/how dare you: okay, so a modern office worker transmigrates into a book. She transmigrates into a TRANSMIGRATION BOOK. I'm not done yet, i had to put it down because it was SO good that i got overwhelmed and stressed out. But i would officially follow this author into hell now

Married the scum gong's villain brother: good, but in a quiet way where I don't feel much urge to return or gush about it! In modern mundane settings, where the only significant plot thread is getting the relationship pinned down, i feel like it's relatively easy to set up a compelling beginning, but much harder to see it through to the end with as much momentum. It wasn't bad! But it wasn't notable.

After being forced to marry the evil star general: still not done, but it's the book in progress I'm most active on. This. This is tasty. It's not as clown4clown as peerless was, but it's one of the closer books ive found to the antagonistic fascination those two leads brought, if you follow. It's a lot of fun! One main character very much has a stone cold bitch energy a la cui buqu, though also like him, the lines between a natural rancid personality and a deliberate act are also blurred. This one is compelling!!

And, not a cnovel, but a korean one: got dropped into a ghost story, still gotta work. So imagine. There was a fictional universe kind of like the scp foundation fused with the greater creepypasta ecosystem. And imagine some poor fucker transmigrated into that universe as a drone worker in a business that profits from harvesting these stories. And imagine he's a massive fan of the universe, but is ALSO a massive horror weenie who can't even handle looking at the pictures sometimes included in these stories. YEAH, IT'S DELIGHTFUL. This book isn't actually complete yet, which I'm grumpy about, i had the distinct impression it was when I heard about it, but part one appears to be complete and it's BEEFY. Even incomplete, there's some really awesome stuff in here.

[spockandawe]

branch into leaf (30,931 words)

Chapters: 2/?

Fandoms: Naruto, The Books of the Raksura

Rating: E

Pairings: Hatake Kakashi/Uchiha Itachi

Chapter Tags: Obligatory Sick Fic Chapter, The Presence of Arbora-Mode Gai Haunting The Narrative, Chronic Illness, Unreality, Suicidal Ideation, Itachi and His Severely Unnegotiated Deathwish Kink

"Well, well. This is different," Kakashi comments, from the other side of Itachi's tree. He made the long gliding leap from the edge of the platform to the branch above – this branch – between one heartbeat and the next. The change of form, grounded to winged and back again, executed with precision. Now the Konoha warrior cants his head to the side. "Should I be concerned?" he adds, mild as plant milk and simultaneously nothing of the kind, acting oblivious to Itachi's tension. Should I be concerned for the security of Konoha with its borders breached by an exiled solitary, Itachi interprets. A sane question. After all, the last time Itachi graced Konoha, he executed approximately three hundred people, along with his heart.

Meanwhile, Sarutobi: