jack

I'm still in the process of losing my mind over a fake videogame, but I can spare a moment to talk about a real game that people have actually played. I recently finished Astro Bot!

This game is ludicrously charming. All the fun references to PlayStation hardware and games! All the cute little robot animals everywhere!

This is not a comparison I would have expected to draw, but it reminds me a little of Horizon Zero Dawn: a world where animals essential to the ecosystem have been replaced by robots with animal behaviours.

Being a little arsehole who punches everyone is both encouraged and surprisingly adorable in this game. You can also do a cute little dance at any time!

I unlocked a new star system and checked its name.

Riona: The Tentacle System?
Ginger: Ooh, Riona's favourite.

This is the reputation I have amongst my friends.

I entered one optional world, saw Teddie of Persona 4 being abducted by a spaceship, went 'ugh, Teddie?? I don't want to rescue you' and immediately left the planet.

I'm cuddling a robot cow!! This is the best game ever made.

I came across Pyramid Head, and, you know, I'm not sure I want to collect this bot.

Oh, God, I'd forgotten that the robots awaiting rescue twerk when you get close. You could have given me five years to prepare, and I still would not have been ready for Pyramid Head twerking in my face.

When I'm looking for something new to play, I often fixate on the idea of playing something I might end up writing fanfiction for; I tend not to pick up games that are light on story and character. Somewhere along the way, I forgot that it's also good to play a game just because it's fun. Not everything has to inspire creativity! Sometimes you just want to sit down and have a good time with a well-crafted videogame.

(And hang out with a bunch of cute little robots. I don't generally consider myself a big robot fan! But I find these ones enchanting.)

irregularcomic_feed

https://www.irregularwebcomic.net/2881.html

Irregular Webcomic! #2881 Rerun

https://www.irregularwebcomic.net/2881.html

calimac

Last week's grocery order came, not with the prepackaged boneless chicken thighs I'd ordered, but with some wrapped up from the meat counter. This made me worried that they wouldn't last as long, so I hastened to use the pound-and-a-half of them in the next two evening's dinners. I fetched two favorite recipes from my little homebrewed cookbook.

First was lemon chicken, which is made by pan-frying whole boneless thighs that have been coated in flour, and then taking the chicken out of the pan and making the sauce in the leftover juices. The recipe says to prepare the chicken by pounding it thin, so it will cook all the way through, as there's a limit for how long you can cook it in the pan before the surface begins to burn. But I can't be bothered with the pounding (experience having shown I can't do it very well), so I found a shortcut: take the cooked chicken, before putting it back in the pan with the sauce, and zap it in the microwave for 30 seconds.

Then one of my two recipes for Chinese cashew chicken, both of which B. likes better than most of the cashew chicken dishes we've had as takeout from local Chinese restaurants. (Actually there's one she likes, but it's from Menlo Park, which is 20 miles away so opportunity to come home from there with dinner is limited.) This requires cutting the meat up in smaller chunks, which is something of a bear of a task but worth it for the results. This one has a sauce including lots of garlic and hoisin sauce as well as soy sauce and chicken broth, which starts out liquid and then sets in place. For cashews, I grab a handful from a can of halves and pieces, which work better in recipes than whole cashews.

For this one, the veggies can be included in the main dish. I'd brought a couple packages of jollof rice home from the newage grocery in Ashland, and made congee* out of it, which owing to the size of the package made for a huge result, especially as I'd mixed a pound of cooked ground turkey into it, a trick I'd borrowed from the recipe for Cajun rice dressing (aka "dirty rice"). Anyway, the point of mentioning this is that the leftovers are making a great side dish for dinners that need rice. Scoop some into a cereal bowl and zap it for a minute and a half.

*Congee is made by taking a rice recipe and doubling both the amount of water and the cooking time. The result is not that different from a regular rice dish, but it has half the carbs.

yhlee

(cross-posted with slight adjustments from

foxmoth at

communal_creator)

Howdy! I’m Yoon, an MFA student in media composition and orchestration. I am here today to talk to you about sampled orchestral mockups in composing music.... It’s a niche field even in (media) composition due to the cost + tech barriers to entry. I thought folks might be curious (and maybe interested in trying their hand at a lower-cost version of it).

To the extent that I have musical training (mostly Obligatory Asian-American Piano Lessons by volume), it’s classically inflected. Even folks who hate classical music :) probably know it exists. A more “traditional”/conservatory approach to writing for (symphony) orchestra might involve pen-and-paper composing to generate sheet music. This is my background and I still do a lot of sketching on staff paper.

This inherently means you’re reading (Western classical) music notation (of which more anon) and often means you’re wrassling explicitly with music theory and related topics.

However! These day, hiring a session orchestra is semi-doable by a dedicated individual if you have the money lying around. ( Read more... )

So most mortals who are doing orchesstral or hybrid orchestral scores for film or TV and especially non-AAA video games are using sampled orchestra mockups.

Note: unless otherwise specified, if I say “music notation” or “music theory” I’m referencing more or less common practice Western (European-derived)-style music notation simply in the interests of avoiding unwieldiness in this overview. ( some further observations )

Hiring a session orchestra may be surprisingly semi-doable by a normal human but most work in orchestral media composition (film, TV, video game scores) is now done in software via sampled orchestral mockup. This includes classical-ish, e.g. John Williams everything or Carlos Rafael Rivera’s score for The Queen’s Gambit, or hybrid orchestra (e.g. Two Steps from Hell) with synth or “modern” instrumentation elements.

A quick and dirty (incomplete) overview of terms you might come across in this space, with simplified explanations. There’s a LOT of jargon, some of which is obscure or confusing even to e.g. classical musicians entering this space! ( Read more... )

This has all been in the way of preliminaries, apologies! This is an extremely technical field so the jargon alone is A Lot.

These days, composers often write (in that workflow) using engraving software. In this context, this means “music typesetting for sheet music,” and for session work specifically there are strict formatting rules to save time (money). The other workflow for computer-based composition + production (i.e. not tracking live instruments, of which more discussion later) involves taking everything into the DAW and producing realistic-sounding mockups in software. I will (in future posts) run through DAW examples of this (hopefully with video + audio capture so you can see the workflow).

Happy to answer any questions; it’s almost impossible even to gesture at a bunch of the music or tech stuff in a small space, and I have almost certainly missed some useful jargon because it's UNENDING. :p

kiya

Three lunatics and a paladin!

Dramatis Personae:

Viepuck, driving this bus accidentally, who gave the twelve-year-old the wheel
Izgil, with the frustrated pedantry
Celyn, mostly just vibing (I had a few moments but I get tired and muzzyheaded easily at the moment)
Robin, who got to be dramatic at the end

When we left off we were on top of a cliff near Veltor, the capital of the barony.

( So we jumped off the cliff, which was the plan. )

Current Mood: sore

girlgenius_main_feed

http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20250908

The Girl Genius comic for Monday, September 08, 2025 has been posted.

http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20250908

vvalkyri

or maybe not i dunno.

I'm down on a long penninsula south of virginia beach right now, with Joe and Bernadette and there's been a bit of an object lesson in "sleeps 2 adults and 3 kids" and it's somewhat tempting to sleep in the living room/kitchen instead of my bedroom in that I absolutely do not recommend these mattresses even stacked, and it's cold tonight so at least the lack of a/c is less of a problem.

today we went to great dismal swamp. the earlier part of this was about 1.5 hours of walking out and back on a gravel road to a trailhead before deciding to go to somewhere else in the car. At that point I was kinda wishing that I had gone to acro. But the rest of the time, the time on the boardwalks was cool. I hadn't seen cypress roots before. Freaky. And the lake. And the swamp near it.

Yesterday I stayed with a couple acro people paddleboarding out to some concrete battleships that are used as breakwater (a bit sad my waterproof camera didn't get better pics), and got some [abrasive] acro in while J and B got really sweaty in their hikes.

Day before, 22k steps including a whole lot of beach.

Sadly it'll be another rather cool day tomorrow. Probably will try to get to the beach at least tho. This morning I was simply way too exhausted and went back to sleep after breakfast.

Back in DC there were 10s of thousands at the We Are All DC march and that was good. Come the 19th there's the We Are America march, where folk started today from Philly.

I've been looking at socials some. And everythign is argh. Turnberry said something about how I'm doing the good fight and I'm like "I'm mostly useless and if it gets to that I'll just die." Conversely he got AR14 training back in 2013.

I'm really not enjoying looking at White House and State Department socials and thinking "It's like Idiocracy but make it malevolent."

mecurtin

It's been a long time since I did Purrcy posts regularly, I'll try to get back into the habit, starting with #Caturday! When I got back from Worldcon + extra week in Seattle, Purrcy wasn't *terribly* demonstrative ... but he did try some new things, like just parking on the keyboard. No computer, only cat.

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby sits on a desktop computer keyboard, staring off into space. Bits of the screen (bluesky, Surprised Eel Historian) and a messy desktop can be seen around him, but the basic message of No Computer For You is easy to grasp

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby sits on a desktop computer keyboard, staring off into space. Bits of the screen (bluesky, Surprised Eel Historian) and a messy desktop can be seen around him, but the basic message of No Computer For You is easy to grasp

Love my face! said Purrcy, so I did.
There had to be so many scritches & pets & purrs & paws treading in the air before there could even be cat food or a first cup of coffee, because: priorities! And really, how could I disagree?

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby looks at the camera adoringly while receiving scritches at the side of his chin. His whiskers are spread wide. He's lying on his side on a red blanket spread on a chair, his white paws are clenched as they tread with affection

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby looks at the camera adoringly while receiving scritches at the side of his chin. His whiskers are spread wide. He's lying on his side on a red blanket spread on a chair, his white paws are clenched as they tread with affection

geraineon

This is gonna be a quick and short update. I'm very pleased to find that there's been a translator translating Konohara Narise's BL Novels and has actually finished translating a number of works!

The translations are here: https://itoshiikoto.blogspot.com/

I've mostly experienced her stories through their audio drama adaptations. Of the ones translated on that site, I've heard Utsukushii Koto 1 and 2, La Vie En Rose, the Cold series (Cold Sleep, Cold Light, Cold Fever) and I've cried much tears (of sadness and anger) over them all. I've also read Hako no Naka, translated by a different translator here. Parasitic Soul is currently not translated but I love it too.

Someone described her works as a bruise that stays, and yep, that's accurate. She writes very human characters in sometimes unusual situations, and her characters are always flawed. She's also really, really good at writing selfish people and obsessive love that feels very, very real. Kinda like a heightened reality in terms of emotions? She doesn't write her main characters in a way that inspires love (I don't know if I can say I love any of them), but you will be hoping that they can achieve some sort of happiness by the end of the story (at least, her less dark stories).

And for people who are interested in early danmei influences, Konohara Narise was one of the popular authors during early danmei days (I'd cite the papers, but I am lazy to pull them out right now... perhaps later I'll edit with citations). Danmei has moved away from that style, and I read that Japanese BL in general has also moved away from heavy psychological dark works. So, if you're interested in some of what got disseminated in the CN BL circles in the early days, check out Konohara Narise (but also please heed all the content warnings)!

As an aside, people who translate/have seen the current state of CN->EN webnovel translations might find this rant by the Hako no Naka translator very relatable.

ecosophia

It's midnight, and so it's time to launch a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism, and with certain exceptions noted below, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note: Any question or comment received after that point will not get an answer, and in fact will not be put through. If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 341,928th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.3 of The Magic Monday FAQ here.

Also: I will not be putting through or answering any more questions about practicing magic around children. I've answered those in simple declarative sentences in the FAQ. If you read the FAQ and don't think your question has been answered, read it again. If that doesn't help, consider remedial reading classes; yes, it really is as simple and straightforward as the FAQ says. And further: I've decided that questions about getting goodies from spirits are also permanently off topic here. The point of occultism is to develop your own capacities, not to try to bully or wheedle other beings into doing things for you. I've discussed this in a post on my blog.

(The image? I've finished the sequence of my published books; while I decide what I want to do next, I have some memes to share.)

Buy Me A Coffee

Ko-Fi

I've had several people ask about tipping me for answers here, and though I certainly don't require that I won't turn it down. You can use either of the links above to access my online tip jar; Buymeacoffee is good for small tips, Ko-Fi is better for larger ones. (I used to use PayPal but they developed an allergy to free speech, so I've developed an allergy to them.) If you're interested in political and economic astrology, or simply prefer to use a subscription service to support your favorite authors, you can find my Patreon page here and my SubscribeStar page here.

I've also had quite a few people over the years ask me where they should buy my books, and here's the answer. Bookshop.org is an alternative online bookstore that supports local bookstores and authors, which a certain gargantuan corporation doesn't, and I have a shop there, which you can check out here. Please consider patronizing it if you'd like to purchase any of my books online.

And don't forget to look up your Pangalactic New Age Soul Signature at CosmicOom.com.

With that said, have at it!

Current Mood: bleak
Current Music: George Winston, "Stars"

minoanmiss

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

questionable_content_feed

http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5652

Just girl stuff

http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5652

questionable_content_feed

http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5651

pooping out a window is legal in massachusetts thanks to an obscure 18th century law that is still on the books

http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5651

tablesaw

Following up on the last post, Inbox Zero has been working well. I cleared out my main inbox back to about mid 2019, which appears to be the time that I arbitrarily marked everything in my inbox as read. When I started I had over twenty thousand unread conversations, and I finished with a Trash folder containing over twenty-seven thousand items. I'm now undertaking the same process on my real-name account, and it's going well.

And it's been a pretty good low-effort project to work on while dealing with my first case of COVID-19.

Last Thursday night (August 28), I was feeling unusually antsy regarding my sinuses so I decided to take a COVID test to put my mind at ease. It did not do that. Instead, I woke up Psyche and we figured out how we were going to deal with isolation. I logged into work to tell them that I'd tested positive, but the symptoms were minor, and I would not be working on Friday. I then proceeded to develop a raging fever for the next 24 hours or so. A few days later, Psyche tested positive despite our best efforts, and we have spent the rest of the week muddling through major fatigue coupled with relatively minor flu symptoms.

There is, of course, no good time to be laid out for over a week, but it was particularly rough because we had been the main people organizing the logistics for the 74th wedding anniversary of Psyche's grandparents, an event scheduled to take place last Sunday. So she had to spend a frantic few days collecting all of the remaining tasks and assigning them to various members of her family, all while having to sit at home while everyone enjoyed the party we threw.

As for contact-tracing, I believe I was exposed when visiting with Psyche's other grandmother, who had been sick (untested) earlier that week; and then I exposed Psyche before testing positive myself. Given the way our positive test results seem to be hanging on longer than our main symptoms, it's not too hard to believe that Grammy was still shedding virus when I visited. I didn't spend much time with her directly, but the windows were generally closed in the house.

It's been a week and a half of sleeping and hydrating and then doing it again but reversed.

In less plaguey developments, I'm looking forward to this year's Beyond Fest which will be announcing its full slate this week. So far, the only screenings announced or for a retrospective of Guillermo del Toro, and I have tickets to see his early works (Cronos, The Devil's Backbone, and Mimic) and a screening of Pan's Labyrinth. I will also be in New York at the beginning of October for a work trip and am making the time to see Reeves and Winters in Waiting for Godot before flying back home.

I just need a negative test soon...

Current Mood: sick

dancefloorlandmine

With my weekend plans having changed with about a week's notice, I was reminded (by Jim Bob on the album playthrough on Bandcamp) that there were still a few tickets left for the second album launch on the Saturday. Second album? Yep. Jim was releasing two albums at the same time 'Stick' and 'Automatic'. This isn't a double album, but two completely separate albums. 'Stick' is the punkier number, while 'Automatic' is more of a full-band thing. 'Stick' was launched at the sweaty punkpit that is the Fighting Cocks in Kingston, while 'Automatic' was being launched at Rough Trade East off Brick Lane.

Up to London, some loitering outside chatting to other folks about shared histories of seeing 1990s bands, and then, by way of collecting my copy of the album on the way in, to the space that had been cleared of music racks in front of Rough Trade East's small stage - and then to continue the chatting for most of an hour until the clock ticked around and the band strolled onto the stage. Jim Bob was carrying an electric guitar, backed by a band of electric guitar, bass, drums, and two keyboard players.

And then they set off, playing through the album tracks in order. A couple of tracks featured a slight stumble, as this was the first time these tracks had all been run through live, but it was a good-humoured gig and audience. The songs on the album are the usual Jim Bob mix of whimsy, observation, and biting lyrics. Once the album play-through was completed, there was just enough time for an extra song, with the band managing to play through Carter's Lean On Me, I Won't Fall Over¹ and finish with seconds to spare before the curfew.

And then to join the queue to leave by way of Jim's signing table, with an extended comparing of notes regarding disappeared venues with the guy behind me in the queue, who turned out to have lived in Croydon in the late 80s and early 90s.

A full photo album is here.

¹ One of my favourite Carter songs.

westiec posting in

fandomcalendar

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shannon_a

Yesterday, I stayed home rather than going out hiking or biking because I wanted to spend some time with Elmer (and didn't want him locked up alone downstairs for his next-to-last day in Hawaii).

I'd hoped to clean up my office while I hung out with him, which involved getting my filing cabinet back together (it's been increasingly falling apart in different ways) and then doing a year's worth of filing. Alas, I decided the filing cabinet was unsalvageable. Over the years the drawers have stretched a little front to back, which makes the metal slidings constantly fall out and more recently the bottom fall out. I tried to get it back together, and likely could have if I'd had proper wood screws, but I didn't. Combine that with the fact that the file cabinet has been attacked by cockroaches and I threw up my hands.

New file cabinet ordered. (Wasteful? Probably. But I'm just not in a state for dealing with problems right now, and the filing cabinet has been a problem for more than a year.)

But Elmer got to hang out with me. And Kimberly. And the rubber mallet that I had out, to try and bang the drawers tighter, and he loves that rubber mallet: he grabs ahold of it and writhes all over!

(Weird cat!)

We had a much smellier problem in the evening.

Kimberly and I have both been feeling a bit sick to our stomach this week, and I especially want to make sure that doesn't turn into sickness Monday morning when we run Elmer to the airport at 4 in the morning, so we decided on light food for dinner. For me, that often means Bibigo Steamed Dumplings. Very simple food.

So we went out to the garage, so I could pull my steaming dumplings out of the chest freezer there and so Kimberly could see what additional lunch supplies she had. And when I opened the freezer I noticed a foul smell coming out of it.

The freezer was not on. And we hadn't touched it for weeks. Everything was foully rotted, with some of that rot dripping into the melted ice in the bottom of the freezer, turning it into a pool of putrescence.

Every bit as gross as it sounds!

I figured that I'd accidentally unplugged the freezer when I was redoing plugs a few weeks ago for my new multiport Ryobi battery charger. That was part of my garage cleanup before everything extra got derailed by the Elmer move. Because the fault was obvious mine, that meant the goal was to salvage the freezer. Kimberly and I got all the food (fortunately, in baskets, not lying in the rotting liquid) into the trash, which immediately began stinking. Then we managed to carry the chest freezer out to the gutter, to pour out the icky liquid, and to use my power washer to really thoroughly clean it out.

I wasn't convinced we had all the smell out, but we hauled it back to the garage to dry out.

That's when I traced the plug. The freezer had an extension cord on it, but it was plugged into the wall, not the powerstrip I'd been fooling with a few weeks ago.

Huh. So I fiddled with extension cords and power plugs for a while, ultimately plugging the freezer into the plug used by my Ryobi batterie, also using a fresh extension cord ... and the freezer still wouldn't power on.

CORRELATION DOES NOT IMPLY CAUSATION.

Apparently, it had just happened to die around the time I was fiddling with totally different cords nearby.

I'm not entirely surprised. The freezer was banged up with some pretty big dents when we got it, but it worked, so I shrugged my shoulders and said, I guess it's OK.

Maybe it was. But I'm also starting to get a little suspicious of all the appliances that have died since we moved here. In just under six years we've lost one old dishwasher, one new dishwasher, and one new chest freezer.

It makes me wonder if it's the electricity doing it. Yes, brownouts are frequent, but we're protected from much of that with our battery. But not all of it. So I've ordered some single plug surge protectors, and we'll see if those work and help.

We actually had some thermometers in the freezers supposed to warn us if either our refrigerator or freezer went out of spec. The console sits on the counter where I usually prepare lunch and dinner. But, it obviously didn't do the job. We just don't pay enough attention to it, and it doesn't have any type of alarm.

So K. and I have decided that if we do replace the freezer in the garage (which is definitely a boon for Costco shopping), it'll only be if we can get a thermometer that will properly warn us, not just wait for us to look at it. (She's found an internet thermometer that will probably do the job.)

The weird thing is, that didn't feel like a particularly horrible disaster. I mean, super-annoying. But I feel like it would have seemed overwhelming at times because resolving the problem has several moving parts (disposing of the old freezer, finding a new one, restocking, etc). But right now, somehow, with all of our attention and stress focused on Elmer, it was just a task to deal with and onward.

It's hot!

Well, it's only 79 according to Alexa, but it feels very warm.

That's because the Trade Winds died out this morning, and they're really what keeps the islands cool.

I've lived here long enough now to recognize the pattern: two to three days out from a hurricane nearing the islands, the Trade Winds drop and it's really warm until the hurricane's wind and rain lofts in.

Kiko is on its way, though it should only be a ~40mph tropical storm when it swings by Kauai early Wednesday morning. The current forecast only has half-an-inch of rain Tuesday through Wednesday and not particularly notable winds, down here on the southern side of the island, so I don't think there's anything to worry about, especially since Elmer should be in Boston by the time it even nears the Big Island.

So this is it, we're sending one of our orangie boys away in something like 16 hours now. We'd thought we were giving them a forever home, but instead we ended up fostering Elmer for three and half a years before sending him on to what should be a great home. So I guess that's OK too.

I expect it'll be stressful until we've heard he's landed, but I've begged off my usual tech writing for Tuesday, so Kimberly and I can at least hear he's landed in Boston, which should be around midnight tomorrow.

Gonna be two days of messy sleep, but then the hope is life starts to return to normal (in new, better configurations for all of us, but especially Elmer and his new adopter).

shadowkat

After high humidity, thunderstorms through most of yesterday afternoon and well into the night, and rain this morning, it's cleared off and is actually bright and sunny and kind of cheerful outside.

Also almost six pm. A bit late to take a walk. I need to make dinner, lunch for tomorrow. Eat. And go to bed - hopefully by 9:30-9:45. I did manage to sleep 9 hours last night, which is a first.

And for some reason or other, I'm still craving chocolate chip cookies. I caved and baked three. The blood sugar eventually went up. I regretted it. Such is life. I won't cave again.

I intended to go to church this morning and do the high line in the city - but alas, it was raining. So I stayed home and watched it on FB instead. Glad I did - their bathrooms and kitchen had no water, and they were offering ice cream instead of carousel rides to the kiddies - because the picnic in Brooklyn Bridge Park had been cancelled. They ended with my favorite religious song - Harry Belafonte's Turn the World Around. My father's was Amazing Grace, mine is "Turn the World Around" - I want Turn the World Around sung at my funeral - although I don't want a funeral - I hate funeral's. I want a small happy gathering on a mountain top, around a campfire, at a river bank, and at a beach, with my ashes spread at each, and this song sung at each place.

That song just comforts me and makes me really happy. The fact that my church keeps singing it about five or six times a year - keeps pulling me back towards it like a magnet.

****

I didn't do much this weekend. My brain required a break so it took one?
I did watch a few things and re-watched a few things. It's September now, and I've always loved September. (My favorite seasons are the fall and spring, I tend to like the in-between, more then the extreme in both temperatures and growth - the waning of the light, and the renewal of it.) I feel it's a kind of renewal? Or chance at new things, and letting go of old things. It was always the start of school, new television seasons, and theater seasons - and in NYC - the start of a new cultural year. While at work - the beginning of the fall holiday season.

Television

1. K-Pop Demon Hunters - on Netflix. This is a fun little movie. I adored it. And I wouldn't consider myself a fan of K-Pop? Pop music tends to annoy me after a bit, and K-Pop is kind of an extreme form of it? Although it has great choreography. This movie also is a kind of 3D computer generated version of anime - which I am not a fan of? But? I loved this. It's adorable, it has an uplifting message, the characters are likable, and it's fun.

I didn't understand what all the hype was about - until I saw it. It's kind of a hopeful movie in difficult times?

2. K-Popped on Apple TV - this is a reality competition show that takes place in Seoul, Korea - and where they split a popular and very large girl's k-pop band into two groups, and pair each group of five or six girls with a popular Western singer. Then the girls teach the Western singer their choreography, the singer teaches the girls their song, and they K-Pop it, while sharing aspects of the Korean culture with the Western singers. They two groups compete. One wins, and it's all very nice, and not all that competitive. They are established - so there's no need to compete for money or fame. It's just a fun little competition.

The one I saw was Keisha's Savage vs. Patti La Belle's Lady Marmalade.
Personally I think Savage was better choreographed? But I prefer Lady Marmalade. I also learned or was reminded of what "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir" - meant.

It's kind of fun? I'm not a huge fan of pop or K-Pop, and watching people be interviewed, doesn't do a lot for me, but it's good background noise.

3. Rogue One and Star Wars: A New Hope - these two films work really well as a two-parter. Actually, Andor S1 and 2, followed directly with Rogue One, and finally Star Wars - is highly satisfying, tragic, and uplifting, and hopeful all at the same time. Talk about a prequel that manages to make the original film that aired over forty years prior, better? Star Wars was good without Rogue One and Andor, but both the film Rogue One and the series Andor - manage to provide a depth and gravitas to Star Wars that wasn't there prior? The stakes are higher somehow. Star Wars is a more suspenseful film after you see Rogue One and Andor, because you see how much is riding on Han, Leia, Luke, Obi-Wan, C3-PO and R2-D2's success. A lot of people died so they could take out the Death Star, and save the Rebel Base of Yavin.
( Read more... )

4. Alien: Earth - still watching. But it's creepy, and we'll see how long I stick with it. ( Read more... )

ffutures

Due to clouds, buildings trees and the horizon in the way, etc. etc. I only managed to catch the last few minutes of the eclipse, and since I had to hand hold the camera with the equivalent of a 2000mm lens it wasn't as sharp as I would like. Best of the bunch below the cut. I've also put in the picture of the near-full moon on Thursday for comparison.

( Picspam - end of the eclipse )

Full-sized images are on flickr from this one (the moon on Thursday) onward

https://www.flickr.com/photos/150868539@N02/54764983482/in/dateposted-public/

trobadora

I don't know where the day went, or the weekend. How is it almost midnight already?!

Anyway: Over at

sid_guardian we've kicked off another rewatch - a slo-mo one this time, half an episode per week. And since we've already done the "take an epic amount of notes and write epic post" kind of rewatch, this one's going to be a bit more relaxed. *g*

Zhao Yunlan sprawled on a couch, grinning at his phone. The background shows a purply sky with stars. Text reads "Slo-Mo Rewatch. Guardian - half an episode per week @ sid-guardian.dreamwidth.org."

Zhao Yunlan sprawled on a couch, grinning at his phone. The background shows a purply sky with stars. Text reads "Slo-Mo Rewatch. Guardian - half an episode per week @ sid-guardian.dreamwidth.org."

Here's the first post, episode 1, part 1.

Network

Alas, I Don't Think There's A Robot James Sunderland.

Irregular Webcomic! #2881 Rerun

chicken for dinner

(no subject)

[ gaming ] In which the party and the plot both fall off a cliff and everyone is a deceiver

Girl Genius for Monday, September 08, 2025

It's late but I wanted to write a bit

Two Purrcys!!

Konohara Narise, translated

Magic Monday

I cannot even with this man

Who Do You Stan?

Quick On Her Feet

Vid Con

[Gigs] Jim Bob, Rough Trade East, 23rd August 2025

Polyship Week 2025

One Day More

Lazy weekend not doing much at alll

End of the Eclipse

Guardian Slo-Mo Rewatch