ehyde

❧ I'm jumping on the bandwagon of moving my fic to a personal archive in addition to ao3 - I don't intend to remove my fic from ao3 at this time, but as a backup and as a different option. I got myself a neocities site back in November when everyone started looking for twitter alternatives, but I hadn't done much with it until now. I'm doing this by a combination of melannen's guide, looking at the code of other neocities pages that look nice, and adapting my defunct personal site from a decade ago. Right now my writing page is the most complete - I'm not completely happy with it but it's going in a direction I like (the links just go to the basic html as downloaded from ao3 - I plan to update that eventually too - and I also need to figure out how to make it work on mobile).

❧ Speaking of everyone looking for twitter alternatives, my partner's brother has been building sift, which is more of a recommendation and content sharing tool (for links posted from anywhere) than a social site, but might be interesting to some people.

❧ And speaking of my partner's brother, we flew to California last weekend for his wedding, which was lovely (outdoors in a park with redwoods). Flying cross country with three small kids is always a challenge but it went a lot better this time than the last time.

❧ Some bookbinding projects since I last posted (wow it's been a while since I last posted): Restoration by Ritualist, Impossible to Stay Away, Impossible to Stay by dragongirlG (alternate version), I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter by Isabel Fall, They All Say I've Met a Ghost by Cyan Wings, and a new version of Pluck the Stars by exoscopy. Of these, I had the most fun making Ghost - modeled after a very haunted notebook bound in human skin, about which our oblivious protagonist only thinks "oh, what a nice heirloom."

❧ Bookbinding discord is doing a Tiny Book Bang, for which I'm taking the opportunity to typeset a couple of shorter fics, and having fun with typography. One I'm doing in imitation of William Morris' Kelmscott Press (I would not have the patience to do this for anything longer than 20k lol) and another I'm doing in the style of Aldus Manutius (Italian Renaissance printer, and it's completely appropriate to the MDZS fic I'm typesetting, I'm technically supposed to keep the fics I'm typesetting for the event secret but if you know you know).

❧ Finally, a fic rec: The Scarlet Lotus by rainbowninja167, a canonverse wangxian Scarlet Pimpernel au. I will admit that my first thought was "why would you make WWX the Scarlet Pimpernel analogue when Nie Huaisang is right there?" but it really works. The author has put a lot of thought into writing the characters in a way that works for the AU but still feels like them. This is a wip but there are only two chapters left and the author seems to be updating weekly.

Like, I assume, many, I have Acquired Houseplants during the pandemic. I held off till September, when I picked up two tiny free succulent propagations from a "free plants" box set by the side of the bike path. I'm not sure exactly what they are, but they're still growing! I then bought a few plants at Trader Joe's, and they're doing good too (although the fern still looks...interesting). But then I got interested in bonsai. And, well, it was not the right season to do anything with bonsai, but I watched a lot of videos (Peter Chan's youtube channel is both informative and relaxing, I recommend it). I mentioned my interest in the weeks before Christmas, and my mother in law showed up with five baby trees she'd dug up from her yard. It wasn't really the best time to dig them up and only one survived into the spring, but one is better than none. There's another young tree growing too close to our house, I think white mulberry, that I want to try to uproot and cut the top off of and see if I can keep it growing in a pot. Possible in theory and rapidly approaching the right time of year to try. I'm actually very excited about this one, although I'm trying not to get my hopes up too much--where it's growing means getting enough of the roots out, undamaged, may be very tricky. I still haven't quite figured out how to manage outdoor yardwork and watching kids at the same time, but this year I should be able to get a little more done than last year, at least. With that in mind we started a tray of vegetable seeds, and bought some flower bulbs and two raspberry bushes. Tomorrow's supposed to be good weather, so we'll try to get those in the ground.