ehyde

Reading:
- when I started reading Lie Huo Jiao Chou the translation seemed to be updating at a reasonable pace of 1-2 chapters a month. Since I caught up, it hasn't updated since the end of November, and just as it was getting into some really juicy backstory bits.
- I started another ongoing translation, Married Thrice to Salted Fish, which is a transmigration story from the pov of the transmigrator's love interest. The transmigrator is an unapologetic villainfucker (or, he would like to be, but this is incredibly slow burn) and the pov character is his problematic fave. I LOVE the characters and the unfolding relationship but it doesn't have a plot that really grabs me, so I don't mind taking it slow and waiting for updates.
- My ebook hold for A Memory Called Empire came in and like a fool, I waited till there were only a few days left on the loan to start reading it (I'm not far enough into it to know if it's going to grab me in the "finish it in two days" way or not).

Admiring:
- this William Morris gift wrap paper pack from Pepin Press. They would be great for endpapers in the right book.

Working on:
- Renegade Bindery does "binderary" in February, which is kinda like inktober but in a different month--basically the idea is just, make as much as you can, and also people can give online talks or workshops if they want. I don't know if I'll be able to attend any scheduled events but there's going to be at least one marbling demo so I'm hoping I can make it. Anyway, I just finished a late gift for my dad, and the rest of this month I'm going to spend prepping for hopefully finishing a lot of books in February! I typeset They All Say I've Met a Ghost and I'm finishing up typesets for a few more fics, and I've spent Too Much on supplies and I'm going to start decorating some fabrics for covers.
- Some furniture rearranging at home: we got a bunk bed for 4yo and 2yo and moved them from 4yo's smallish room into me & husband's slightly bigger room. Husband and I are temporarily in the smallish room, we're going to move to the downstairs bedroom eventually but at this point 2yo still wakes up enough at night that I want to be on the same floor as him. I don't know how long 4yo and 2yo are going to want to share a room, but for now they love it.

Hey, I'm E. Hyde! I've been involved in various fannish hobbies over the years; currently I'm focusing on bookbinding. Mo Dao Zu Shi has been my main fandom for a while, and lately I've been enjoying Priest's novels as well. Before that my main fandom was Yona of the Dawn, and going further back you get the Cosmere, MCU, Star Wars, etc.These days I watch hardly any tv as it's much easier for me to read.

This journal is mostly a personal journal, expect a lot of "what I've been doing this week" posts as well as some crafting updates and commentary on things I've been reading. Most of my posts are public; if I've locked a post it's most likely because I talked about my kids or posted pictures of them.

You can find me elsewhere online at
ehyde
ehyde
teleportbooks (bookbinding sideblog)
fallenwithstyle

The local bubble tea shop's seasonal offering is green tea with honey, ginger, and citron, and when I ordered it last week I missed the part of the description saying it was a "seasonal hot tea" and ordered it iced. I liked it enough that I wanted to try it as intended, so today I ordered it hot, and I think I like it better iced. I hope it stays on the menu for a while!

6yo has been sick this week so I haven't done as much as I'd wanted to, but we did still manage to pick up a dresser I found on craigslist--a kids' wooden dresser that the previous owner had painted purple, teal, and what I thought in the picture was brown but turned out to be a dark green. It has greenish-purple crystal knobs, too. It's a welcome change from furniture painted gray, and 6yo loves it.
( bookbinding thoughts )

I went ahead and deleted twitter from my phone, which means I'm spending very little time there now. It's nice actually. I'm not planning on deleting my account and I'm still checking in from time to time on my computer but now it's not this thing I automatically look at when I think "now, what was I looking for?" anymore and I think training my brain out of doing that is good, actually.

It probably helps that all this is happening at a time when I'm moving on, a bit, from MDZS fandom, and not really feeling deep in any fandom at the moment. (I mean, I would be deep in Tai Sui fandom if there was a bigger fandom, sigh). I mean I'm not actively trying to distance myself from MDZS fandom like I know some people have done--I still think it's great--it's just that it's not catching my imagination as much as it used to. But I'm pretty sure it's always going to be one of those back-of-my-mind favorites.

So yeah, I've made a mastodon account (ehyde@wandering.shop) but I'm not really spending much time there and I don't know if I will start. I think I'm better off without twitter-style social media.

I finally picked up and read Network Effect, which I've had since it came out but never read, and I enjoyed it so much that I went back and read three of the first Murderbot novellas and also read Fugitive Telemetry. Fandom brain is going "SecUnit should meet [crossover character from x canon]" quickly followed by "come on now, SecUnit doesn't want to be forced to socialize with new people!" (it's Wen Ning. the person I want him to meet is Wen Ning).

Now I'm reading "How to Survive as a Villain" which was recommended to me a couple of years ago, back when the english translation wasn't very far along. I wasn't up for reading an ongoing translation then but I remembered it was a thing and checked back and it's fully translated now. On the surface it has a similar premise to Scum Villain: the main character transmigrates into the villain of a novel and has to make nice with the male lead to avoid getting brutally killed. But it feels pretty different. The comedic aspects are almost slapstick and the main character really doesn't give a shit about preserving the original storyline, aside from the romance between the male and female lead (his OTP) (guess how well that's going). I'm less than a quarter into the book and he's already told the male lead that he's a transmigrator, so I'm excited to see where that goes.

6yo's friend's girl scout troop had a cookie booth at the skating rink today (6yo may be joining said friend's troop soon) so we decided to go skating and get cookies. I'm pretty wobbly on ice skates and I think after a few more afternoons like this, 6yo will be better at it than I am. Still had fun though! 4yo had to hold hands the whole time he was on the ice but he had fun too. 2yo was excited about the whole concept but alas, they didn't have any rental skates small enough for him. He had fun going for a lap in my arms but kept asking if he could be on the ice "with my feet".

Dec. 5: @galadhir asked do you have a fandom type? (Like you always go for the noble characters, or the villains etc?)

...masterminds who seem cold and calculating but actually have deeply suppressed feelings about it, probably. Often villains but they don't have to be!

Dec. 7: @lingeringdust asked if I have a comfort food for when you're sick or feeling under the weather!

I don't know if this quite counts as a comfort food but when I was a kid my mom would always buy us the candy "hot tamales" (cinnamon gummies with a candy shell, kind of like jelly beans) when we had a cold, she said they helped sore throats, and you know what, I don't think she was wrong. I still buy a box for myself whenever I've got a sore throat. Honestly not sure why cinnamon isn't a more common cough drop flavor.

I'm posting this on December 9 and someone did ask me a question for the ninth, but it's one that's going to take a bit more thought, so I'll post these for now so I don't fall even further behind.

December 2: @asrabkin asked about my favorite place I have lived, and why

To start with, Not Tennessee
Hmmm but other than that...actually where we are now, probably. Don't get me wrong I have Much Nostalgia for growing up in rural Oregon, being able to see the stars at night and all that, but I like being able to walk places. I like public transit (even if I haven't used it much in the past few years). I like being able to go places without having to plan my entire day around it. And I don't actually like yard work!

...mystery, I guess? As for why...well actually I like plenty of stories where there's some sort of mystery to be solved so it's not that I object to solving a case as the central plot, I think it's just that plausibly realistic crime...is not something I find interesting (and a Really Cool Detective isn't gonna be enough of a favorite character type to outweigh that). There are probably mysteries I would like a lot but you'd have to sell them to me individually.

So it looks like this is a thing!

Dec 31 - do you have a favorite comfort read? (fic or original work) @elvenjaneite

"I should make a bookbinding icon. What if I took a nice pic of a stack of my favorite books I bound--" I said, forgetting for a moment that my book designs are most interesting on the front covers and very boring on the spines.

The books in the new icon are: pluck the stars - Moonlight Caught in Mutton Fat - Last of Our Kind - we waste the same day like nobody dies - Son of a Notorious Father and these are all fic recs too, btw.

I need to make other new icons too, if I'm going to be more active here. I want to make a Tai Sui icon, but there's no official art! Time to go take a picture of a tree I guess.

A couple days ago I thought, "this would be a great time for a friending meme," and spookykingdomstarlight is running a MDZS/CQL one now!

There HAS to be a better way to solve my printer's color balance issues than manually lowering the cyan saturation in each individual image. Ugh. But whatever it is, I have not found it. Printer troubleshooting is my least favorite aspect of bookbinding.

Before I got to this step of the process, I was having a fun time typesetting--that's what I've been doing with most of my free time this week. Most of my reading has been (sigh) rubbernecking the twitter situation, but I do have a fic rec to drop off: "Hear a song so deeply" by so_shhy It's a modern cultivation au, which I'm predisposed to like already, but something else I really liked about this was the worldbuilding surrounding musical cultivation and demonic cultivation. In this universe, the Lan sect's musical cultivation techniques were lost centuries ago, and LWJ is a researcher attempting to reconstruct them. If I bound this fic (we'll see; my list is long), I'd like to do some sort of longstitch/visible stitching technique with the stitching on the spine mimicking guqin strings.

Related: sometimes I ask myself "is this book design too gimmicky?" and then I remind myself that I am printing and binding fanfiction and I should do what makes me happy.

I took a few weeks off from bookbinding to make sure I'd have enough time to finish Halloween costumes, but those are done now and I am free to return to books!

I signed up for renegadepublishing's winter exchange (essentially a secret santa), both the typesetting and the binding exchange. I can't say what they are but I'm almost done typesetting the first of them and I bought some cover paper for it today.

The other project that has a winter deadline isn't fanfic, but rather a collection of my granddad's letters from WWII that I'm typesetting and binding for my dad for Christmas. They're really interesting to read--not so much from a "military history" perspective; but more the mundane aspects of that period. Granddad had spent his whole life up till then in rural Oregon--he saw a lot more of the world than he probably ever would have, otherwise (and met my grandma, too).

I bought paper for the endpapers today, too--a marbled paper with a bit of an old-fashioned feel. I'll use an army green cloth for the cover (the red paper here is for the exchange fic).