kevindolenz | Friends

Rereading the middle of Volume 3 (Seven Seas edition), which brings us to the end of Volume 4 (TokyoPop edition). This one has vampires in it! Good times.

As usual, I’m posting the individual reactions on Mastodon and Bluesky, then rounding them up in the blog. Previous roundups in my PSOH fandom tag. You can pick up the books with my affiliate links here.

Still haven’t figured out who “Madam C” is. Keeping an eye out…

Cover art of D with a globe full of orcas

“

( Crimson Baron Girod de L’Ain roses, which bloomed with the morning dew... )

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Happy Wednesday!

I'm taking search offline sometime today to upgrade the server to a new instance type. It should be down for a day or so -- sorry for the inconvenience. If you're curious, the existing search machine is over 10 years old and was starting to accumulate a decade of cruft...!

Also, apparently these older machines cost more than twice what the newer ones cost, on top of being slower. Trying to save a bit of maintenance and cost, and hopefully a Wednesday is okay!

Edited: The other cool thing is that this also means that the search index will be effectively realtime afterwards... no more waiting a few minutes for the indexer to catch new content.

missizzy

I finished Dispatch on stream this morning. My gameplay was terrible, down in the bottom percentage, but I still very much liked it. I also like how many viewers it got my stream. It seems to be a popular game to watch; mostly I've only been getting one viewer at a time, but I got more both last and this Sunday morning. I might play through it again at some point, if only because there are a few alternate scenes I now really want to see, and I'll definitely play through the second season whenever it might come out.
I'm having to play a few games that are new to me. The first one was Little Kitty, Big City, which I started on stream Friday night, and I truly loved it. I'll do at least a few more Friday nights of it, no doubt. (It can apparently be finished in two hours, but I will no doubt take way longer.)
I've also started uploading my past broadcasts to a YouTube account of their own, including some highlights from my test recordings. I might make some other highlight videos too at some point.
Also these past few weekends I've also been trying to record my latest song. I'd gotten some okay recordings, then this afternoon I got one I felt certain I would post right after I finished recording. I got more hesitant after watching through it, but now I've decided to go with it. And hey, a song from from the Hunger Games movies feels appropriate these days:

Watch on YouTube

umadoshi

(Thank you for the comments on my post yesterday about Claudia. I'll try to respond at least a bit.)

Reading: I finished Rachel Reid's Tough Guy, and then my digital hold on Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shroud came in from the Queens library, so I started in on that. I'm maybe a bit more than halfway through that now? It's interesting and I plan to finish it, but it took a long before I actually got interested, and I mainly kept reading through that chunk because I've enjoyed the handful of Tchaikovsky's other work that I've read quite a lot more than I was enjoying the beginning of this one, so I kept figuring I'd give it a bit longer. I doubt I'll wind up loving it, but I do want to see how things play out.

Watching:

scruloose and I have finished everything we were watching! (And glancing at last week's proof-of-life post to see where we were then reminded me to cancel Crave just now, so yay for that. We'll be back eventually, Crave.) "Everything" in this case was the second seasons of OPLA, Frieren, and The Pitt.

My thoughts on Frieren at this point are, I think, more to do with the experience as filtered through its translation, and I'm going to ignore that for now and instead say the most important thing that I can possibly say at the end of that week of TV watching.

And that thing is this: against all odds, the live-action One Piece (which, as I have said countless times aloud and probably at least once here, if not more, should never have worked at all because it's One Piece, FFS) pulled off Chopper. I am floored. I am agog. I am delighted. I am still sort of mumbling "WTF???" about it under my breath once in a while. CHOPPER.

I won't say that he ever feels so natural to me that I forget he's a marvel of technology onscreen, but he works, and the voice is wonderful, and somehow even when I was at my most aware that he's not being performed by an actor in intensive makeup, he felt like...a stuffed animal/puppet brought to life? Not like CG? (Nothing like the plush Luna from the Sailor Moon drama, for the record.) It's incredible work and I love him so much. (I should also note that I haven't watched any making-of material, so all I know about the creation of Chopper is what Naye mentioned about his huge, shiny eyes accurately reflecting what he's looking at.)

As for what I'll/we'll watch next...I still haven't seen past the initially-released chunk of Justice in the Dark, so I'm trying the tactic of seeing if

scruloose will watch it with me, which means an excuse to start over and refresh myself on the drama, as opposed to my blurry combination of memories from watching those episodes and from reading the fan translation of the novel ages ago.

scruloose is willing to at least give it a shot, so hopefully even if they don't wind up sticking with the show, I'll get some momentum on it.

Mood: enthralled

erinptah

Leif & Thorn Volume 8 reward packages are arriving for backers. (If you’re one of them, sharing photos like this and tagging me is encouraged.)

I’m also doing another backlist shipping special for Volumes 1-8, to get them in the mail before the latest Trump-induced price hike. If you’re outside the US and want these books but couldn’t afford the postage costs, grab them quick.

I’m almost out of Volume 3, and running low on Volume 4. So my next crowdfunding campaign might have to be a double reprint.

Or maybe I’ll pay for the reprints upfront, and offer them along with all my other existing books/merch at the next BackerKit Holiday Market. They haven’t announced another one yet, so no promises…but the November 2025 one was a huge success, they’ve gotta be planning a reprise for 2026.

Tiernan sketch on the outside of a package

umadoshi

( years-ago pet loss; old grief and random thoughts )

Mood: melancholy

badfalcon

OK So. Li and I booked a tennis court for an hour at our local sports centre yesterday evening. We almost didn't go because the weather was crappy - it was drizzling, I didn't sleep well last night, was a little work stressed.

But in the end, we did go. I was so excited that there was like no anxiety. Although it helped that we went and saw the place on Sunday and knew it was going to be quiet (yay safety behaviours, or something?) It flared a couple of times when I realised people on treadmills in the gym could see us, and there was a couple of times some kids on the skate park were watching us. I get super paranoid about being a fat person trying to exercise :/

Slight tangent. Anyway. So we borrowed a couple of rackets and balls from the place. We were both completely convinced we were never going to be able to hit the ball, that we were only going to manage like 5, maybe 10 minutes, because we're both very unfit, and I had no idea how my joints were going to behave.

Y'all, we were out there for the entire hour and by the end of it, we were both moving pretty well. I was even almost jogging for balls at one point - I wasn't thinking about how I was moving, I wasn't scared I was going to fall or throw something out, I was just reacting to and reaching for the ball. I hurt like fuck two hours later, doped up nicely on naproxen and cocodamol and cbd and I'm very glad I took my crutches for the walk home.

We were basically doing drop feeds from the service box, initially just trying to connect ball to racket and over the net. Then go retrieve it from the back of the court cos neither of us could return it and there were no ball kids 😂 But as time went on, we were starting to hit returns, I tried out a few backhands. My aim is terrible but I'm starting to figure out power and reach. Li's the other way around - their aim is good but they haven't figured out the power. By the end of the hour, we managed like a 3 or 4 shot rally. Like, the ball was still bouncing two or three times but we were reaching it, hitting it back.

We were maybe 30 minutes in and we were both like 'yeah no i want my own racket' so tomorrow (maybe Sunday depending on my legs) we're going to go to the wee sports shop in town, try out some of their rackets, pick up some low-compression balls. If we don't find anything, we're heading into Exeter next weekend and there's a Sports Direct there. Li also wants some new trainers. I do not need new trainers but I am eyeing a pair of Nike Air Monarch IV.

One thing's for sure. We are absolutely going back to that tennis court next week!

Mood: excited

deidlit

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

Mood: relaxed
Music: "Erased OST", Yuki Kajiura

erinptah

Taxes are done for the year, time to reward myself with some PetShopOfHorrorsposting. My readalong has reached the start of Volume 3 in the Seven Seas Collector’s Edition, which is the start of volume 4 in the original Tokyopop release.

I’m posting the individual reactions on Mastodon and Bluesky, then rounding them up in the blog. Previous roundups in my PSOH fandom tag. You can pick up the books with my affiliate links here.

One thing before I start: There’s an AO3 tag for a PSOH character called “Madam C“. She only shows up in one fic, in this chapter. Haven’t seen her in my reread yet. Anybody know what part of canon she’s from?

(There’s a “Madame” in the Sofu D spinoff manga, but she doesn’t get an initial. And this fic has “Madam C” interacting with Leon, so, probably not the 19th-century Paris woman.)

D with red carnations, cover art of volume 4

( As you can see, there are no humans here. )

umadoshi

Our planter is here! Getting it wasn't actually a saga, but it felt a bit like one. ( TL;DR: delivery service annoyance )

We also both took yesterday off (and I'm off the rest of the week, but got up at my usual workday time today in hopes of getting a fair amount of manga work done), and ventured out to buy veg seeds for the planter. (We also still need to get soil/fertilizer/etc., but want to read up on it more first. I think I might order a hard copy of The Vegetable Gardener's Bible, which I got on sale in ebook recently and like so far.)

Yesterday's important lesson: when noting down which seed varieties we like the looks of, include the source, because our local store, at least, has separate displays for each originating company, and knowing that would make it much easier to check for the various varieties. Anyway, here's what we wound up with (descriptions are in my last post):

Basil: Devotion.

Cabbage: Early Golden Acre (green) and Serpentine F1 (savoy).

Spinach: Bloomsdale and Renegade.

Lettuce: Brighton (Butterhead), Black Seeded Simpson (green leaf), Red Salad Bowl (red leaf), Grand Rapids (green leaf), Freckles (romaine), and Drunken Woman.

Mood: busy

brilliant mind.

Friends

Erin Reads: Pet Shop of Horrors, Collector’s Edition (volume 3, chapters 16-17)

Search maintenance

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Weekly proof of life: media intake

Leif & Thorn news tidbits

Six years on (CN: far-from-fresh pet loss)

Cassie's adventures in hitting a tennis ball!

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Erin Reads: Pet Shop of Horrors, Collector’s Edition (volume 3, chapters 13-15)

Planter and seeds acquired!

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