After flipping through the ShB artbook, I realized I barely appreciated so many dungeon & trial's backgrounds :( Then ofc I go back to the one dungeon I do know well and gpose there, ehhh
Featuring my sorta Solus Zos Galvus homage glam, which I could've put together much earlier had I just believed Asher on how easy it was to farm.
Drk also has by faaaaar the prettiest tank lb3
Alright I catch up on food photos from MTL:
Day 0: ignorance sure is bliss
Day 1-2: learning to take nasal swabs and ignoring the bioharzardous waste disposal warning. Straining to read a chapter of Depression Hates a Moving Target (not sure if I like the overly journaling style) in between naps, more asleep than awake.
Day 3 - 5: mistaking a recovery in energy with recovery in general, sleeping too late, halting actual recovery opps. Read Portrait of a Thief, do recommend! Like the range of immigrant children expression.
Day 6 onwards: mix of moments of confidence where I act like a functional human (catching up on chores!) being with moments where I'm yet again lying down on the couch reading (Pachinko this time, as much of an emotional gut puncher as Scenes from a Marriage) and eating Chinese bakery bread for meals.
Carnita (thanks Arty for recipe) and subsequent tacos I made before Day 0:
and some smooth music (thanks Tin):
Rui's recommendation for Love Life is great, I feel sentimental af watching season 1. My favorite episodes are "Bradley Field", "Danny Two Phones", "Luke Ducharme" (and his reappearance) and "Sara Yang". Sara's episode wins hands down for the music tho:
Montreal was quite fun! Food photos forthcoming.
I did change my mind of taking the subway back up from Union and walked instead. Was actually a great decision, even though I found Mtl more human scaled and loved the abundance of greenery there, somehow the concrete & curtain walls of downtown felt so much more like home. A few shots from the walk:
Also loved the abundance of blossoms around Mtl but here is the one good shot I got of the sakura in Toronto this year:
This book is another interesting pov on life in relation to Russia, centered on this idea of a "wily man":
This struck me as the great plea of Dovlatov's writing: to complicate the pose of easy moralizing and to recognize all the incredible and tragicomic ways people make do in whatever system they're stuck with. These compromises and adaptations make us all a little bit complicit, but, for that, entirely human. And this humanity offers a refuge of freedom, however limited or imperfect, in a world that may offer little of it.
Neutrality itself is a position: refusing to apportion blame for violence means letting one side or the other off the hook.
“I don’t have the ability to constantly live a lie. This starts to eat at me. But neither do I have the courage or guts to be a hero all the time. That’s how I ended up in this hole.”
Tbh my sustained interest in reading about Russia life is at least partly because I'm not ready to read about the corresponding history in China. Tho that did happen when I read Three Body Problem (great book, excited to read the other 2 in the trilogy). It's a weird contrast between hearing about the cultural revolution in abstract from older adults (hence being aware of what went on) and reading about a fictional event happening to a character in the book (based on real events).
Another sci-fi I've finished (or rather finished half of) is Shadow & Claw. I've not had this much difficulty reading fiction since like...ever. The difficulty is apparently intentional and I am stubborn enough to challenge it again after I get through more of my other holds.
Do I even know how to take photos anymore??
From the last trip back home, where I was very wrong in not believing my mom when she warned me about the strength of the wind next to the lake.
I am super glad that my coworkers give in to my restaurant antics when we go on work trips. Went to Quebec again for some field assessment work and had some delicious food.
Maple mille-feuille, it was a tough decision between this off the menu dessert and the seabuckthorn pie. I let the waitress decide and she was not wrong at all.
Ok I've been suuuper lazy with getting photos off my phone and onto here. Motivation's not been here ya'know? SO bare with my backlog and the occasional straight out of camera (not the beautiful Fuji presets ;o;) photos.
Things I ate around Toronto:
So I got a little carried away with the LB3 animation that I didn't show off my actual end-game rpr glam, which has been revised to include the arm and feet pieces from Aglaia. Kinda relieved that I don't like the other pieces so I don't have to farm the alliance raid.
Think I'm also done with rpr glams until there is another scythe that I like.
Alright, can I just prematurely say that rpr LB3 is the best in terms of animation? There's a whole sequence of you getting possessed by your voidsent avatar!
Feast your eyes!
