Oof was hectic preparing for raiding in 6.2, but first MSQ was amazing! That and raid quest have sooo much lore, I am one happy gamer.
Absolutely love the dungeon, sooo much details in there that I completely missed when actually fighting through it:
Oops I forgot a couple of other screenshots: night view of Empyreum before player housing and new crafter glam.
I put off taking screenshots for this set of glams for the longest time since I couldn't think of a good location. Still don't think Ktisis is the perfect match but its not bad? Also the poses without the weapon drawn end up feeling very "idol-in-a-mv" welp. Overall I feel quite on the fence about the finished screenshots but do love this glam, the Makai healing set is amazing.
Alternative lines of lyrics that I was indecisive over:
Some older Joji songs for when I'm away (and hopefully) enjoying San Diego. If only the trip is for escape rather than work. Am long due for an escape somewhere, or I just be curled on the floor in a corner.
Hmm, is this the first time I'm saying that I could possibly enjoy a movie version of this more? Maybe this is just because I watched Cloud Atlas and really enjoyed that experience, the aesthetics and music. The comparison between the two novels is pretty apt. The last chapter did really nicely tie things together, very satisfying ending.
A passage that I like:
It's only the two of us now. Your eyes are nothing but subtle concave indentations, your nose a minor bump in a round piece of ice. You're floating on your back, staring at the sky. My hands are around your waist. preventing you from spinning between the waves like a crystal log. The battery on my recorder is fading. I fear water has seeped inside it. Before there is nothing left to hold, I want to tell you all the things I never got to say, what I would have said if I could have played a larger role in what remained of your life. I could have loved you; I did anyway (and maybe if our lives had been different you could have loved me, too). I tell you a million other little things until nothing remains of your kirin-mermaid self except for a piece in my hands the size of a large hailstone, until that too melts.
Praise youtube algorithm that suggested a movie OST whose first song is from ?te:
Not sure how to link a playlist tho. Whole album is great but "Sante", "You Say Goodbye Easily", and "Insomnia" are my favs.
Another book is a string of tough reads, why do I do this to myself?
Like ugly feelings, minor feelings are non-cathartic states of emotion" with "a remarkable capacity for duration.”
He treated me badly because he hated himself. I treated him badly because I hated myself. But what evidence do I have that he hated himself? Why did I think his shame skunked the salon? I am an unreliable narrator, hypervigilant to the point of being paranoid, imposing all my own insecurities onto him. I can't even recall if I actually felt that pain or imagined it, since I have rewritten this memory so many times I have mauled it down to nothing, erasing him down until he was a smudge of resentment while I was a smudge of entitlement until we both smudged into me. But he was nothing like me. I was so privileged I was acquiring the most useless graduate degree imaginable. What did I know about being a Vietnamese teenage boy who spent all his free hours working at a nail salon? I knew nothing.
But having said that, how can I write about us living together when there isn't too much precedent for it? Can I write about it without resorting to some facile vision of multicultural oneness or the sterilizing language of virtue signaling? Can I write honestly? Not only about how much I've been hurt but how I have hurt others? And can I do it without steeping myself in guilt, since guilt demands absolution and is therefore self-serving? In other words, can I apologize without demanding your forgiveness? Where do I begin?
But where does the silence that neglects her end, and where does the silence that respects her begin? The problem with silence is that it can't speak up and say why it's silent. And so silence collects, becomes amplified, takes on a life outside our intentions, in that silence can get misread as indifference, or avoidance, or even shame, and eventually this silence passes over into forgetting.
I don't really remember what prompted me to put this book on hold, it's a pretty heavy read. I'd say this book is largely about dealing with loss, which is one of my favourite topics to read about.
Two quotations stood out:
Grief is a ghost that visits without warning. It comes in the night and rips you from your sleep. It fills your chest with shards of glass. It interrupts you mid-laugh when you're at a party, chastising you that, just for a moment you've forgotten. It haunts you until it becomes a part of you, shadowing you breath for breath.
Moving on. It's a phrase I obsess over: what it means, what it doesn't, how to do it for real. It seemed so easy at first, too easy, and it's starting to dawn on me that moving on is a myth-a lie you sell yourself on when your life has become unendurable. It's the delusion that you can build a barricade between yourself and your past-that you can ignore your pain, that you can bury your great love with a new relationship, that you are among the lucky few who get to skip over the hard work of grieving and healing and rebuilding--and that all this, when it catches up to you, won't come for blood.