I've made this guide to browsing and using dreamwidth on a mobile device, but have not yet confirmed that it works with free accounts. Can anyone with a free account confirm or deny for me? ( details, screenshots )
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It is a different type of morning from the usual, and nobody tells Lan Yuan what’s so special about today that means Lan-laoxiansheng can stay until Xichen-ge arrives with breakfast. As far as he knows, nothing is happening besides his usual classes, but he can’t ask until everybody has finished; his knee bounces as he eats as fast as he can without being scolded for it. On another day, someone would have placed a gentle hand on his leg to remind him to hold still. Nobody seems to be paying much attention to him this morning. --https://archiveofourown.org/works/34160740
some MDZS valentines cards from me to you :)
[images are 6 drawings formatted to look like simple greeting cards with pink backgrounds. they depict the following: 1. wei wuxian leaning against a cheerful donkey with a grin, captioned “you’re the apple of my eye!” / 2. lan xichen solemnly playing his xiao, captioned “*flute solo*” / 3. jiang cheng looking a flustered and a little shy, captioned “what i’m looking for…” and then several of his canonical requirements for a wife listed and hastily scribbled out in red, with only the word “you” left at the bottom, circled several times. / 4. a comically brutal drawing of a teary meng yao collapsed at the bottom of some stairs, captioned “i’m falling for you.” / 5. a-yuan planted up to his armpits in the soil and looking pleased about it, captioned “my love for you is growing strong!” / 6. wei wuxian perched on a windowsill, brandishing his flute and leaning over to nuzzle lan wangji, who is seated before his zither. they both look overwhelmingly happy and content. the caption reads, “we’re my favourite song.”]
So I have gotten into the weeds of gauge, such that I now have a favourite cast-on for swatching. (If you are a person who finds you need at least fifteen rows to recover from whatever happened with your cast-on and have your tension come to its equilibrium: Special Cast On for Swatching. If you do not understand how a person could have this happen, you're probably fine.) I have become obsessed with finding a way to make my stockinette stitch match my knitting in the round and have knit an upsetting number of swatches and watched quite a few youtubes trying to figure it out. I did this mostly on some acrylic yarn I mostly use whenever a patterns says "with waste yarn..." The yarn is acrylic, I think, or at least it certainly melts rather than burns, so this is not blocked. ( moderately large images, since I'm showing individual knit stitches )
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I meant to post this here for More Joy Day but then uh, you know, what is time? But is the most joyful thing I have written in yonks. A Lucky Snow First Falling (6224 words) by Betty Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: 陈情令 | The Untamed (TV) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Lán Zhàn | Lán Wàngjī/Wèi Yīng | Wèi Wúxiàn Characters: Lán Zhàn | Lán Wàngjī, Wèi Yīng | Wèi Wúxiàn Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Western Canada, Canadian Shack Summary:
Lan Zhan, on the other hand, is a delicate flower from Shanghai, yet he wakes up every morning to go jogging around the campus in a tracksuit that Wei Ying is sure he would find sexy if he was ever awake to observe it. In contrast, while Wei Ying is technically the more winter-savvy, he beat Nie Huaisang at fourteen days without leaving the hodge-podge of tunnels and walkways connecting the university’s sprawl, even if it was only because Huaisang’s professor wouldn’t answer his email last week.
My inspiration for this fic was twofold: the extremely specific experience of being a kid in western canada where you get in a car and drive for twenty to fourty minutes to do anything, and the winter of it all, but also the giddy feeling of being so in love that you are basically out of your mind on absolutely horse-doses of endorphins your brain is pumping out. Like. Those chemicals cannot be otherwise obtained without using crack, I'm pretty sure. (I haven't tried it, but.) I wrote this in two days for pinch-hit, although I kind of want to fiddle with it still, I'm very pleased with the *feel* of it. comments Comment?
I love the sewn bind-off's look, but apparently I am incapable of binding off a project without wanting to go back and fix something two days later, and it is very tedious to pick out. gumbie_cat recommended combination knitting as a solution to my knit/purl tension problems, and I have to get more profficient at it to regularize my stitches but at the moment I think... maybe? It's possible that I'm actually purling tighter than I knit, using this technique. Really miss having a tiny dog to knit for, going through scarf and cowl patterns to see if there is one with interestingly grotty cables I could make into a hot water bottle cover. comments Comment?
So in a confluence of events, Anno Pestis was the year I started to become sensitive to wool against my neck. This is probably my punishment for feeling smug about my ability to wear wool. I spent a long time in denial, and then an even longer time admitting it, but trying to power through it (...??? this is bad and dumb, don't do it) and finally I have come to acceptance, in a journy that I sure will be repeated many times in my life. One of the causalities of this is a some favourite sweaters. One of them, this one, I had even tweeted about before, which may make it unique among my sweaters? It's not a particularly beautiful sweater, but I liked the warmth of it, and it's weekend-at-the-cabin sturdiness, and one might even say rustic-ness. It's also a very useful garment, that one can throw on over whatever one is already wearing when one is cold. Which I kept on doing, long after it became evident that doing so would mean six hours of itchy neck. Another plague indexed event is a friend's adoption of a dog. His name is Moose, and he is a Jack Russel/Chihuahua cross, two breeds I would not have recommended, but she did not consult me, and the heart wants what it wants. One reason I would not have recommended anything that rhymes with '-huahua' is our winters, which are quite severe for at least six weeks. Those big chihuahua ears function to radiate heat back into the sky, which is the opposite of what one wants, hereabouts, and honestly any dog under thirty pounds or with a particularly thin coat is at real risk of injury if it accidentally gets forgotten outside for more than a few minutes. (Moose is trying heroically to get himself out of that weight category, but is really suffering under the constraints of what he was born with.) (Many cat population control initiatives will cut a notch in the tip of feral cats' ears once they have been spayed so that it is easy to tell they have already been trapped. In most parts of Canada this does not work because many ferals have damage to the edges of their ears from frostbite, such that it looks like they've been in a large number of fights.) Anyway, I am dog-sitting Moose, and we are in the coldest weeks of the year. Obviously, the solution to this is to knit him teeny dumb sweaters. But what if there was a cheat? What if I could cut up a sweater, save myself from the temptation of wearing it, and consigning myself to itchery, and do a good deed (arguable, dog is not that into it., but.) My genius idea was that because of sweater shaping, I could use the wedge shaped bits at the tops of some of the panels to create the funnel shape that a dog has in front, and save myself all that knitting, as well as preserve the patterned bits. The sweater itself has seen a lot of wear and less than careful washing, so it is moderately felted, and I thought I could maybe just cut it to shape. ( come with me. on a journey. a journey of sweater cutting. Dog/sweater pics, and knit talk )
Lessons Learned: ( use larger needle )
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I started this fic a couple months ago and stalled out on the first scene, and then banged the rest out more or less in two days right before christmas. Stulti was v. helpful in giving it enough structure to feel story-shaped.
By The River-side (3867 words) by Betty Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: 陈情令 | The Untamed (TV), 魔道祖师 - 墨香铜臭 | Módào Zǔshī - Mòxiāng Tóngxiù Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Characters: Wèi Yīng | Wèi Wúxiàn, Jīn Líng | Jīn Rúlán, Jiāng Chéng | Jiāng Wǎnyín, Lán Zhàn | Lán Wàngjī Additional Tags: Twin Prides of Yúnmèng Feels Summary:
The youngest shidis, however, weren’t sharing a room with Jiang Cheng, who could swim like a tadpole.
“What’s a tadpole?” asked Wei Ying.
“It’s a frog,” said Jiang Cheng. “Don’t you know anything?”
I thought I was writing "vignettes around the device of frogs" but 9/10ths of comments are "this story made me cry!" which. Uh. Guys, I dunno, feelings?? I am not sure I did a very good job summarizing it. Sometimes, in Yunmeng, we don't talk about our feelings, we just invest them in symbolic objects, okay? comments Comment?
Rec-set: Extremely Specific occupation AUs.
I really enjoy stories that bring a specificity to their AUs, and one of the areas that is often done is in the choice of character profession. All of these stories use the profession of the character to explore something about the relationship with those around them and their world, and/or to drive the plot. All of these were richly textured enough to feel real to me (a person who has not… worked any of these jobs.)
These stories differ in length, tone, and rating, although they are all wwx/lwj. (Sorry, this only now occurs to me. If you can think of one w/ a different ship or none at all that fits this description, lmk!)
grave goods (28535 words) by luckymarrow
When you think “Wei Wuxian, mortician,” it just makes sense, doesn’t it? Brings WWX’s canonical relationship with death into a non-magial, modern setting.
and oh, bask in his glory (62205 words) by belle_abroad
If you, like me, feel about pro-wrestling a sort of “no, thank you,” I urge you to try this anyway. This story gets into the weeds of pro-wrestling in a way that is engaging, and full of affection for the sport(?).
Pentimento. (72966 words) by orange_crushed
A richly textured story of painting conservation, in which Wei Wuxian’s interactions with the art world mirror his canon interactions with the jianghu. A long fic that takes you on the whole journey and will give you feelings.
In The Dark Right Now (10637 words) by phnelt
This is maybe the most marginal in terms of adherence to my theme, but I love it, and it’s going in! You don’t get to see Wei Wuxian do much bat-research, but his job as a bat-researcher sets the stage and gives the story a shape and theme.
Waiting for Spring (130787 words) by thievinghippo
This is a repeat,but it belongs here. Major league baseball player is an extremely specific occupation!
if you go chasing rabbits (23569 words) by occultings
Is witch’s familiar an occupation? This fic argues that it is! There are some bits of descriptive language in this that I absolutely loved. Usually a fic leaves behind in me a vague feeling, maybe some scenes and character dynamics, but the bit “spines of books pile up in vertebral turret” has stayed with me ever since reading this.
Year Of Night Call (22006 words) by ailuridae
Usually I cut the archive description to let me talk about the fic but actually: ( archive stats and tags cut here )
Very few jobs give you the perfect storm of moral high ground, manic energy, and being a huge dick to people on the regular that Wei Wuxian finds so satisfying about trauma surgery. However, they don’t call it trauma for its psychological wellness. A year of q2 36 hour call would be unbearable if Lan Wangji weren’t the other fellow that he shares a call bed with.
A “What If All The Cultivators Were Surgeons?” AU.
This tells you what you are getting.
it is wednesday my dudes (3796 words) by ritualist
Stripper is an occupation that is presented here as very much about the workplace and the politics and logistics thereof. Also, I too have panicked and talked about squid facts.
Every book its reader (21854 words) by twigofwillow
The author is fairly open about working in the field, but even if they weren’t, it would be very obvious from the details of the story that they not only have experience working as a librarian, but also Opinions. Much like LWJ definitely would.
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If anyone needs moral support for yuletide, I am not signed up and available for beta and hand-holding. Comments screened in case you want to take me up. comments Comment?
thank you mdzs donghua team for giving wei wuxian the domestic gay farm life he deserves🙏
Who wants to hear about the FORBIDDEN DOG PARK?( Read more... )
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(I am not actually concerned about doing it right or wrong, in this particular case) An informal tumblr survey of the reasons people are into Xenokink revealed that I am extremely an outlier, because, while I wouldn't say it's a thing I'm into per se, when I'm into it, I'm into it because the aliens do sex weird. And I think it's because of ace reasons: make sex weird! Acknowledge that sex is weird! It's weird! comments Comment?
for halloween, some fic about our favourite spooky boy, the ghost general himself.
(Wen Ning is not usually particularly spooky, not is he guaranteed to be spooky in these fic, but I’m in my Wen Ning Feelings, so.)
These fic vary in the extent to which they consider Wen Ning the ‘main character’ of the fic, but he plays a central part in all of them. None of them are too long, one might very reasonably make an evening of this list, if that were one’s inclination!
If there’s a fic that you’re like, Betty, I can’t believe you didn’t mention [[blank]], please tell me about it!
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“If you stay to shield me with your body, I’ll call you Da-jiu,” Jin Ling wagers ruthlessly. He isn’t prepared for Wei Wuxian’s face to do something funny before settling on an unbearably gentle expression. “Jin Ling,” he says, not unkindly, “if I thought I could make this better for you by staying, I would. But believe me when I tell you that I’m doing you a favor by making myself scarce. I’ll only make everything worse.” --https://archiveofourown.org/works/30050583
Wei Wuxian braces himself for what might come next, the story of how this man died by the Yiling Patriarch's hand—at Nightless City, at the Burial Mounds, as the rest of the sects tried to bring that great villain to account. "What was his name?" Uncle Gan sits back, twiddles his thumbs as he thinks. "Well, it'd be Wei something, of course." "Wei Changze, wasn't it?" chimes in a new person, and if anyone agrees or disagrees, Wei Wuxian does not hear them. His wine bowl slips from his grip and the sudden clatter of it barely registers over the unexpected sounds of his father's name. Wei Changze, slipping so careless from a stranger's mouth here in small Taozi, here of all places under the open sky. Wei Changze. --https://archiveofourown.org/works/32404465
I wrote a fic! It's kind of a thesis about Wen Ning, but also some stuff happens. Return to White Clouds (3526 words) by Betty Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: 陈情令 | The Untamed (TV) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Characters: Lán Huàn | Lán Xīchén, Wēn Níng | Wēn Qiónglín Additional Tags: forestry and feels Summary:
Wen Ning recognizes what is happening. He is being confessed to. This happens to him, sometimes. There is something about him that makes people tell him secrets, although he doesn't think he does anything to encourage this. His sister used to say he had trust-worthy proportions, which people could naturally see. Since she had never read his fate in his face, this doesn't seem too reliable.
Wen Ning encounters Lan Xichen, and they discuss trees. A secret is shared. ( Process thoughts )
( spoilers )
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