withlovebinnie

[withlovebinnie]

guess what:

I still know how to draw!

here's a first page redraw of this rather old comic. I've always wanted to get back to it, but honestly energy never found me to actually do it

Hey, remember that slice of life fancomic I talked about a few days ago? Here it is!

[withlovebinnie]

I've seen that it comes out on netflix tomorrow! Or the other t week day...

But it's super worth it, I'm having the time of my life. Plus, I can't remember the last time I've been so invested in a straight couple!

APOTECHARY DIARIES AU

Started this anime a few days ago (to unwind from filming set adventures...) and OMG jinshi and maomao's relationship is SO kairine coded!!!!

can we just take a second to imagine prince kai who is coveted by the whole palace, silently solving crimes and mysteries under the covers, and irene, lady in waiting, obsessed with danger and has built resistence to most poisons by exposure?

[withlovebinnie]

APOTECHARY DIARIES AU

Started this anime a few days ago (to unwind from filming set adventures...) and OMG jinshi and maomao's relationship is SO kairine coded!!!!

can we just take a second to imagine prince kai who is coveted by the whole palace, silently solving crimes and mysteries under the covers, and irene, lady in waiting, obsessed with danger and has built resistence to most poisons by exposure?

[withlovebinnie]

Day 6/7

Li Ming and Ao Shun

[withlovebinnie]

More Froststorm

and no one is surprised

It's not much, but I just missed and wanted to draw them. So yeah, lizard Ao Shun getting a kiss to break the curse :)

[withlovebinnie]

Zayanna @ Irene

[withlovebinnie]

Kai and dresses

@shitpostsfromtheinvisiblelibrary I suddenly remembered this and absolutely had to draw it!

[withlovebinnie]

Day 5

Silver

I wish I had an explanation... but I don’t

[withlovebinnie]

Cleaning

Very much inspired by @shitpostsfromtheinvisiblelibrary's latest (ABSOLUTELY AMAZING) fic

Kai and Irene have to kick Vale out of his study so they can clean the place <3

[withlovebinnie]

Movie Night

I like to think that Kai loves watching movies. He used to go to the cinema everyday as a kid, but as he grew up his father expected him to find a better role than a film lover. So he dropped it.

Then, one day Vale comes home super excited about the news of the first film ever made: The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, by the Lumieres. This reignites Kai's passion and he finds a way to bring modern movies back to Vale's London.

Every Monday they lay on the couch and watch a new movie togheter, and Kai is very opionated about it.

[withlovebinnie]

About Falling Asleep

I got lazy so I probably won't finish this... Anyways, have the flat colors version!

[withlovebinnie]

The Shadow of You

She moved on. She swears.

[withlovebinnie]

Grandpa AU - 2024

Kostchei took a deep breath and sighed, dialing the last number.

“Hello?”

“It’s me”, he said, counting on Alberich to recognize his voice even through the tinny phone line. “Are you home right now?”

“Of course I’m home, I answered the phone you twat”, Alberich said. “What do you want?”

“I lost my keys. Well actually, I lost my coat with my keys and my wallet and I’m kind of cold.”

“Shit night”, Alberich commented. “How the hell did you lose your coat?”

“I was in a bar.”

“Really? You, the misanthrope?”

“It was- listen, I don’t have a lot of change on me for the phone box. Can I crash on your couch tonight?” It was a humiliating, infuriating thing to ask, and Kostchei had severely weighed the pros and cons of maybe just spending the night driving around on public transports or on the floor of a train station. When he’d been younger he would have done it, no hesitation, but with his joints already aching from the cold and his back feeling stiff on a good day, he’d reluctantly called the number thankfully still listed in phone books.

“I guess.”

Can you pick me up, Kostchei wanted to ask, but his pride wouldn’t let him. His time ran out with a click at that moment, too, rendering the point moot. He stared at the receiver for a moment. He just hoped Margaret wouldn’t resent him for it.

Kostchei hunched his shoulders against the freezing cold and started the twenty-minute walk to Alberich’s apartment. He’d been at his front door once, years and years ago, planning to ring the doorbell and smack him in the face when he’d open up, but Coppelia had convinced him it would just worsen Kostchei’s standing. This time he did ring and was buzzed through the intercom, walking up flights of stairs till he spotted the ridiculous name on a bell.

Much as he hated to admit it, Alberich did have a nice apartment. It was surprisingly big and high ceilinged for someone who hadn’t bought new tshirts in the thirty years he’d known him, and things started to make sense when Alberich showed him into the living room. There was a couch and a turned on TV, but other than that it was mostly endless amounts of bookshelves, all made of the same nice wood and in excellent condition. Some simply lined the walls but others were placed at jarring angles, the placement and different heights creating a cityscape of reading material in the large room. Two more areas branched off it, frames freed of the doors they probably once held, and on the other side he could see more overflowing shelves, containing everything from crummy paperbacks to gleaming leather volumes. To his left, a grandfather clock was ticking loudly.

Kostchei wasn’t sure where the man slept, but Alberich had effectively built a small library out of the apartment.

He refused to give him the gratification of gazing around, only focusing on what was directly in front of them, in the center of the living room, or main room, or whatever Alberich might call it in this realm of his. The couch looked threadbare, but it didn’t matter because a whole block of coffee-table books had been stacked waist-high against its back, hundreds of pounds worth of glossy covers showing where the money had ended up instead. There was a coffee table to go with the books, too, boxes of magazines visible beneath the glass tabletop. A couple children coloring books were resting on top of it, which explained all the red crayon smeared on one side of the couch.

Next to it he spotted a familiar looking armchair, a sight that twisted his stomach even more than the traces of a child in this apartment. Just like right now he’d seen him take a seat in it before, in a different apartment and a different time. Alberich folded his legs. Like countless times before…

“Make yourself at home”, he offered, as if they weren’t both wishing each other the worst every time they met.

“For the record”, Kostchei stated, “I’m here because everyone else I know is out of town for the holidays.”

“I’m just delighted you lost your wallet.”

“I’ll sleep on the couch, I assume? Or is that your bed?” He picked up one of the pillows. Like everything in the household that wasn’t book related, it was dingy and old.

“I do have a bedroom”, Alberich said, nodding in the direction of the hallway. Kostchei must have missed the door when he’d entered, being busy with the glaring wrongness of setting foot over his threshold. So a three bedroom apartment. Even for something in the outskirts of London the rent couldn’t be pretty.

“I can see why you need to eat all your meals in the university cafeteria now.”

“It’s worth it”, Alberich shrugged.

Kostchei finally sat down, making a point of not settling too comfortably. He glanced out one of the windows: you could climb onto the fire escape from one of them, and he could make out a rain-filled ashtray on the outer windowsill.

“Just pretend I’m not there”, he ordered, realizing he didn’t have his paperback with him anymore (coat pocket), but too proud to pick up one of the many books in his reach. Only now that he’d processed most of the visual impressions his brain registered the hum of background noise: Opposite of him, a movie was running at a low volume on the TV while another voice babbled from the radio sitting in a corner. The crossing noises created an environment of overstimulation that didn’t surprise Kostchei, who’d always maintained that Alberich wasn’t brilliant but simply insane. His host mercifully turned off the TV, lowering the sound sources to one if you didn’t count the nerve-racking ticking of the clock.

“Mind if I keep the radio on?”, he asked, rhetorically Kostchei could only assume. It was a report on some Puccini piece, and he wanted to throw up.

“I don’t mind.”

“Do you want a glass of water?”

“No.”

“Did you have a lot to drink?”

“Not at all.”

“Really? Then why’d you go to a bar on the 25th?”

“Are you starved for human interaction or why the incessant small talk?”, Kostchei finally snapped. Alberich smiled that cocky smile he hated.

“Does my apartment look like I have a lot of visitors over?”

“It looks like you’re trying too hard.”

It didn’t really; it looked like he’d known him all these years, as if someone had torn him open and rubbed his insides all over the walls of the apartment until they’d been absorbed by the mortar.

“Life is all about self-definition”, Alberich commented. He was speaking earnestly, spiteful smile receding behind those bottomless eyes for a minute. “You can make yourself into anything. You just have to be smart enough to know how.”

“And ruthless enough.”

“That does help, yes.”

The regular no-shits-given Alberich was back, or maybe the sincere existentialist who’d just come out was the baseline version and the derisive one just the way the fucker amused himself. Kostchei didn’t know which face he hated more. Whatever self-definition Alberich did in private, Kostchei wanted to knock the man’s head through the glass table and leave a fake suicide note in red kiddy crayon.

“I’ll leave first thing tomorrow”, he declared and laid down on the couch to pretend he was asleep for the rest of the evening. Alberich turned off the light at some point but kept sitting in the armchair listening to his dumb radio transmission, only quietly vanishing into his bedroom when the last notes of Puccini had rung out.

[withlovebinnie]

book 101?

Thank you!

Book 101 of 2024 was: The Masked City (Invisible Library #2) by Genevieve Cogman

A non-mystery series, for a change! Well, there's some mysterious bits to it. I think I saw someone recommend the Invisible Library series to someone else on tumblr (it was an ask, I just happened to scroll by it) and I thought it looked neat, so I read it! After which, I saw some posts by mutuals and mutuals-in-law who had also read (some of) the series and not enjoyed it, so there is that. But I had a good time!

Part of the good time was timing - I read this series in the midst of summer camp season, when it's nice to have something engaging but not too heavy to read, and bonus points for a series, so I don't need to think hard about what book to pick up next. The premise is very neat, I think - there is an Invisible Library that sort of hovers between universes and contains all books everywhere, and Librarians (like our main character, Irene) spend some time reading/researching but a lot more time in spy-like capers stealing books from universes with various levels of magic and technology. There are also fae, and dragons (who often are in human form). In this book, they go to a Venice in a very magical universe built heavily on fae story-logic.

I can also see where the quality of the writing might not hold up to the promise of the neat premise, but again, that might be a personal taste thing. I did predict a pretty central twist to the series very early on, but I wasn't mad about it. Finally, I ended up really liking the relationship between the three central characters (not-quite-poly, unfortunately, though also one of the characters is word-of-god ace I think) so that kept me coming back!

(send me a number between 1 and 208 and I'll tell you about a book I read in 2024!)

[withlovebinnie]

She's the first one to fail

Bradamant : New challenge! Don't say stupid shit for 24 hours!

[withlovebinnie]

Said after she makes out with Kai

Bradamant : I regret getting dragged into your heterosexual tomfoolery.

[withlovebinnie]

prev tag: there's a discord?

YES. THERE IS!!!!

We're only four active people, but we mostly talk through there! There's a lot of headcanons, lore discussions, fics trades, fanart dumps, and also voice calls!

"What if Alberich was good" "Alberich grandfather au" You guys are just talking about Kostchei