butterflydreaming

Got any Follow Friday-related posts to share this week? Comment here with the link(s).

Here's the plan: every Friday, let's recommend some people and/or communities to follow on Dreamwidth. That's it. No complicated rules, no "pass this on to 7.328 friends or your cat will die".

Current Mood: busy

igenlode

I picked this book up halfway through at random (to be precise, at the scene where Stephen is clawing desperately at the hands of Pierre Bussac, who is trying to strangle him), read from there to the end, and found the novel to be very much better than I had remembered. And Stephen, "clever, sensitive, gentle" -- who rejects the role of storybook hero and ends up ignominiously defeated when forced into the thoroughly unromantic business of real-life combat, then solves the problem with his intelligence -- is precisely the type of protagonist who appeals to me, as does his ability to subjugate his own long-held desires to Jennifer's immediate need for fraternal comfort and support, rather than playing the he-man and insisting on sweeping her off her feet. I liked the shift in perceptions of Bussac a lot, as well, from terrifying menace to the lesser of two evils to brave ally (and like Jennifer I was sorry that he died, although obviously it simplified the outcome of the plot!)

Then I went back to the beginning and read the book all the way through in order as intended, and found myself back at my original impression of this as being one of Mary Stewart's less satisfactory books, which is a very odd outcome! ( Read more... )

igenlode

YouTube decided that I might be interested in an obscure TV promotional clip that was broadcast shortly after the filming of "Twenty Years After" -- I was, but not least because the young man sitting in the background behind everyone else ("because he sings offstage", jokes Georgii Jungwald-Khil'kevich, a.k.a. the Unpronounceable Director -- Smekhov refers to him in his memoir simply as 'Khili' :-p) turned out, much to my surprise, to be a remarkably good-looking Igor Nadzhiev. I mean, he was striking enough that I'd actively been wondering who he was, since he definitely wasn't one of the actors in the picture. In fact he was the solo soundtrack singer, whose appearance I'm more familiar with from the covers to various individual tracks from the film, obviously released much later:

Watch on YouTube

But by that point he has a fine voice but bears a disconcerting resemblance to Michael Jackson.

Apparently right at the beginning of his career, with shorter hair and several nose jobs earlier, he actually looked quite different...

Watch on YouTube

kalloway

I could complain about work, but what even is the point?

Limited Edition PG 1/60 Blue Frame went up for sale the other night and I ordered one. As I said to my parents, as far as mid-life crises go, model kits are pretty tame. I also have some things on the way from various weekend sales which, whoops, was not terribly expensive but sure is a lot of parcels. I still need to order paint.

My last two Suruga-ya orders rolled in after spending a bit of time in customs. One was the last Estailev kit that I needed, and certainly the biggest. I had not realized it was huge! I will possibly pick away at the related SD-styled ExeCreR kits in the future, but for now I'm pretty good. (No, I do not know why I got absolutely obsessed with these. I really hope they're pleasant builds!)

I tried out a new mobile game, Silver and Blood, but I just didn't click with it. Interesting premise, and I should theoretically like weird vampire game? But nope, after getting through the first chapters and thinking it was okay, I found myself just sort of staring at the icon the next day thinking 'actually I don't really care'.

Time to wait for Seven Knights Rebirth, I guess. And then I'm 100% out of upcoming mobile games?

Tomorrow, I clean out the fridge (not for any awful reason; it's just that time) and do a lot of general pickup if it's not too hot.

kalloway

There often comes a point when I'm building a model kit that I realize that ah, I am being watched right back. There is a tiny plastic soul* in there of some sort, and sometimes not quite the one I'm expecting.

( The last month or so of model kits/gunpla! )

*which is not to say I think that my kits are actually-alive in any way, this is more in the fun way that my aunt and I used to leave offerings of jellybeans for my grandmother's porcelain doll collection so they wouldn't eat us in our sleep.**
**at least I think we weren't serious about that.***
***I should probably email my aunt.

igenlode

The final surviving catch-up tomato has been catching up to the rest at great speed in terms of size, although it hasn't as yet shown any signs of putting out flowers, so I have repotted it into what will have to be its final pot, since I have none larger remaining, and now have my prescribed row of six towel-tomatoes (plus one Roma tomato) filling the front of the balcony :-)

I have managed to give away all but two of my various chilli seedlings, and now have one vigorously bushy plant that is seven inches high and on the verge of flowering, and another that put out a strong spurt of growth and is now five and a half inches high.

igenlode

I do not recommend playing a concert on 3 hours' sleep (and a twelve-mile cycle ride following a similar one returning at 11pm the night before).
I got through it, but it was a bit unfair on the rest of my section -- of which I'm supposed to be the leader! The effects are of course similar to drunk driving; habit gets you through the actual notes and dynamics, but reaction speed and concentration are affected. I kept losing my place in the complex/repeated passages, which is pretty much my job to keep...

I had been to see 'The Final [restored] Cut" of "The Wicker Man", although it is still apparently missing 7 minutes or about 50% of the shortened material. https://www.rogerebert.com/features/the-wicker-man-the-cut-may-be-final-but-the-film-is-still-incomplete I had just been reading Christopher Lee ("Tall, Dark and Gruesome"), who talks about all the little character parts having been cut, the butcher, the chemist etc., while the archive video introduction warned us that the crucial scene establishing that the protagonist 'had never known a woman' was missing and needed to be inferred in order to understand the plot. I could well imagine that a significant proportion of the film's intended charm might have lain in the background detail (as with the abridged translation of "The Phantom of the Opera"), so this seemed like a good opportunity to see it.( Read more... )

igenlode

Apparently Dumas can't decide on the appearance of the Vicomte de Bragelonne :-p

His characters, where it is mentioned, are all mainly dark-haired, with the notable and probably conscious exception of Milady and her son who are both described as distinctively fair( Read more... )

But we are told that d'Artagnan, on observing a rider making a stealthy exit from Athos' home at dawn, reconnut le justaucorps grenat et les cheveux bruns de Raoul, which struck me at the time as being unexpected in a world where practically no-one has plain brown hair... which is why I then noticed with some surprise that when Athos takes him to visit Madame de Chevreuse in Paris, the allusion there is to ses cheveux noirs[...] élégamment partagés comme on les portait à cette époque! However it seemed not implausible that 'cheveux bruns' could simply have been intended to refer to 'dark hair' in general, so I assumed I'd simply misinterpreted the original phrase.

Matters become completely confused, on the other hand, when we reach the epilogue and d'Artagnan refers fondly to the boy as cette chère tête blonde! So I think that all that can be concluded is that Dumas had no very fixed idea in mind and ascribed a random appearance to Raoul at various different points during the construction of his lengthy serial...

(Given that his father is consistently described as dark-haired and his mother fair an intermediate brown would presumably have made sense :-)

ysabetwordsmith posting in

followfriday

Got any Follow Friday-related posts to share this week? Comment here with the link(s).

Here's the plan: every Friday, let's recommend some people and/or communities to follow on Dreamwidth. That's it. No complicated rules, no "pass this on to 7.328 friends or your cat will die".

Current Mood: busy

kalloway

sunshine_revival's first challenge is goals/plans for the month, just in time for me to actually post my monthly plans roundup. (A couple of days late, because hot.)

So here goes:

( June )

July's plans are to survive being too fucking hot.

( July )

There is another part to the challenge but I'll worry about that later, if at all.

kalloway

Luckily, shutdown this year has us staying on our shifts. (Though I admit to being slightly sad to not be able to grab takeout every day after work...)

Unfortunately it is still stupidly hot despite being dark and the humidity is actually brutal.

Got an amusing postcard from

misbegotten, thank you! And zines from

used_songs, yaaaay! (I flipped through them quickly, will look properly over the weekend, probably.)

And received some lovely icons over in

femgiftboxes from

cosmic_whore_writes and

linky. <3 I wrote three things, which I will try to get archived to my own spaces this weekend for easier reading. ^_^;

sunshine_revival has started. The first prompt includes goals/plans, and since I do those monthly anyway, I'll get that posted sooner than later. (but not til after work, at least)

A few minutes ago, the first drop of 'Gundam Summer Fest' went live on the Premium Bandai site. I had a kinda chonky list of things I wanted and low expectations because "things sell out instantly" and yeaaah, lol. I actually managed nine of sixteen things on my list and then added in a couple other normal pre-orders with the same shipping month, so I'm pretty happy! There'll be at least one other drop next month? and then whatever after the pop-up tour is over, and of course I'm actually going to try to get to the last pop-up tour date so there might be some of these kits there?

I owe a post of kit photos and whatnot. Hopefully over the weekend.

igenlode

On reading the French version of the earlier chapters (this being the rather tediously lengthy chunk of Fronde activity which the film omits entirely :-p) I noticed somewhat to my embarrassment that d'Artagnan explicitly *does* take Raoul 'home' with him to his lodgings on the rue Tiquetonne after the boy gets mixed up in the rioting, and leaves him shut up there in Madeleine's house for some time in order to keep him out of trouble. Since he does this without a moment's qualm almost immediately after Athos leaves for England, it clearly doesn't make much sense to have him embarrassed subsequently by the mere idea of lodging Raoul beneath his mistress' roof ('what would the Comte de La Fère have thought?')

So I probably need to go more explicitly for my original image, which was the idea that what d'Artagnan considers and rejects is the expedient of having Madeleine 'mother' the bereaved boy on his behalf ("I don't know how to give him what he needs now" -- but a woman's touch possibly might).

igenlode

I went sleeveless due to the heat for the first time this summer (something I can only risk when I know I'm going to be indoors all day) and managed to display an impressive blue tracery of veins underneath the aristocratically pale and translucent skin thus revealed ;-)
( Read more... )

My first poached-egg flower has now come out :-)
Unfortunately I think the ants have transferred their base of operations to the miniature rose pot, where I keep finding the main stem sheathed in earth (presumably from their excavations?) to a height of several inches, with frenetic activity going on around the pot. I daren't empty out the pot to locate and remove the nest for fear of killing off the rose and/or the fragments of the yellow poppy that have reappeared, but on the other hand I'm worried that the ants will end up doing just that :-(

igenlode

The first of my towel-tomatoes are ready to harvest, about a month earlier than last year thanks to the warm spring. On the other hand, just as happened last year, these first fruits are all seedless. Very tasty, with an intense burst of tomato flavour, but useless in terms of reproduction. However, the plants did eventually begin producing fertile fruits last year, so I'm not panicking at the moment.

(These plants are of course the linear descendants of those same 'seedless' tomato bushes, so the genetic potential is inevitably there; I was hoping that by having chosen to save seed from fruits that were bursting with them I would avoid inadvertently 'selecting for' seedlessness, but evidently not. Of course if one could only produce a reliably seed-free tomato it might be of commercial value for the picky eaters of this world... if only you could find a way of breeding from it!)

The coriander and pink Linaria that I sowed last week have both now germinated -- a considerable relief in the case of the Linaria, which really was black dust from the bottom of the envelope.

igenlode

Finally got round to proof-reading this, long after I typed it and about nine months after it was written, mainly on the grounds that I need to upload it *before* uploading "Think Only This of Me" if it is ever to get any eyeballs on it at all. Twenty Years After fics get pitifully few hits anyway, but since there is no fandom whatsoever for "The Yellow Poppy" the only scenario in which anyone is ever likely even to glance at this is if they are reading something else of mine and are checking my other recent works. Although nobody is likely to get as far as chapter 3 anyway on that basis... I did a review swap on fanfiction.net and got a review on chapter 1 which said that, despite all my efforts on rewriting the start, it felt as if the reader was being "expositioned at", which is incredibly depressing: I *cannot* do any more rewriting on this, so am just stuck with a non-working story :-(

Chapter 3 — Revelation

The long room was panelled in white and gilt, and Valentine de Trélan, seated at an escritoire at the far end, wore a gown of a dusky rose colour; not draperies of the modern fashion in Paris that left very little to the imagination, nor a daringly slim gown such as that worn by Marthe de Céligny, but a sedate dress more suited to one her age. Only she did not look any older.

( Read more... )

kalloway

I have bought more dirt though I'm not sure if there will be further plant hijinks this weekend or not.

Back at the beginning of the month, it was announced that there was going to be a Gundam Pop-Up Shop this weekend down in Kentucky and I thought 'well that's only seven hours away' and took a day off- but got talked out of it and a closer location has since been announced... I kept the day off mostly because I've barely used any, the year is half-over, and an extra day off sounded nice. ^^;;

Worked out well because I'll admit that finding out my ancient site was finally going offline did throw me for a bit of a loop. Did I then spend the night frantically archiving? Nope. I finished up HG Sazabi, who is a seriously big boy filled with Yearning, and noodled with some other stuff. And sprawled on my bed and let a cross-breeze blow through my place...

Saturday was mostly fussing around, looking for notes and building a little non-Gundam kit from Sheik Mainland, called a Yunque. Cute little critter, and while I'm not without minor complaints, it was a good build. Started on Starfall, finally, after what, two months of being utterly intimidated?

Going to try to get through a bit of my inbox. It's amazing that no matter what I do, I just don't seem to get anywhere. But, I suppose, it's not getting actively worse, either?

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butterflydreaming

Poems and Cardcaptor Sakura Fanfic

April 2023

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Page generated Jul. 12th, 2025 10:54 am

Lines Drawn in Starlight

Rough Shapes at Dusk

Reading

Follow Friday 7-11-25

"Thunder on the Right", Mary Stewart

Entirely unexpected

Dailies

Tiny Plastic Souls

Plant progress

The WIcker Man (1973)

More inconsistencies in Dumas

Follow Friday 7-4-25

Monthly Roundup Returns

M-T-W

Raoul at the rue Tiquetonne

Blue blood

First tomatoes - without seeds

Ashes (Ch3)

Chapter 3 — Revelation

The Long Weekend

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April 2023

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