i don't storm, i sunshower

my college roommate recommended me the house in the cerulean sea and i decently enjoyed it. it's like if the mysterious benedict society was for adults and also about the umbrella academy. and also it could still be a kids book. i don't love it and the tone took some time for me to settle in to but i don't hate that everyone's raving about it.

instead of watching 911 season 7 (which im shamefully putting off to try and reward system myself into actually working on my 911 longfic) i watched next goal wins and ponyo. both good.

and finally, my friend kira and i have been watching boys planet aka the unofficial korean produce 101 season 6. it's taken me six episodes, but i'm finally sort of invested. some faves so far: yoon jongwoo, both hanbins, jay chang, and cong. the first episodes i was really like UGH GOD I DONT WANT TO DO THIS IM BORED IM JUST DOING THIS TO SPEND TIME WITH MY FRIEND but watching position battles get started i am now somewhat interested. also, not to speculate on the sexualities of real people celebrities from another country, but some of these men are like, pretty gay.

oh, the other thing is that it's barbershop international contest this week. the current favorites to win, three and a half men, contain a guy for whom this would be his fifth first place medal. you're allowed to compete again if you win as long as only one other guy who was in a quartet with you is in that new quartet, otherwise it's legally the same quartet. like you can't just swap out your bass forever and say it's a new quartet and whatever. i'm getting some pretty major fomo if i'm being honest but hopefully my chorus makes it next year so i can go to denver or whatever.

anyway send me good vibes so i can actually get motivated to write my fic ok bye.

first off - tried to read through the book "real men knit", by kwana jackson, in pursuit of clearing out my bookshelf. readers, this book is BAD. first of all the editing is shoddy - the author mixed up "exacerbated" with "exasperated" and that's the point at which i put the book down because please, the EDITOR missed this???? but also the storyline was just meh. it's about a man whose mother dies and he inherits her knitting store and gets romantically entangled with a knitting store employee. jackson is very clearly a romance author and not a story author - if that distinction even makes sense. the plot is sort of vague. the knitting shop is sort of in financial trouble and the male lead has drama with his brothers and the female lead gets kicked out of her apartment building because it's a safety hazard but mostly it's the two leads arguing with each other in ways that belie any chemistry they have and then talking about how steaming hot the other is. i get the sense that jesse was supposed to have some kind of emotional depth where he slowly opens up to kerry and stops being a player or it's revealed that he's like that because of trauma from being a foster kid or something like that but it just never happens. you see his soft side throughout the whole book, there's no reveal, you're just expected to hold both realities in your head at once. so it was just bad and i put it down. so it goes.

hey, remember the post i made about a pjo longfic? yeah i put that down because an idea struck me for "game of thrones but it's the bear". like, stark siblings are dysfunctional and try to run a restaurant. i finished it--there's no plot, only a loose collection of vibes. and to keep myself in the mindset and force myself to finish it, i've been reading asoiaf fic. this is a familiar territory for me. some of the first fic i ever read was asoiaf fic, even though i only read maybe 3 of the books and watched the first season of the show. however, i almost exclusively read modern au, because i'm more interested in the character dynamics (specifically stark family shit, but i'm also into jaime lannister getting his act together) than the medieval brutalist setting. highlights include: rickon/shireen where rickon is an iraq vet and shireen's bodyguard; brienne and tyrion run a bar together; the one where they all work at a university library (this is a reread, and the reason behind my unsuccessful foray into a mlis program last spring).

finally, i've started girls planet 999. for those not in the know, it's a korean survival show loosely in the vein of the produce 101 series about which i've previously posted. the premise of the original season was that an equal number of korean, chinese, and japanese girls would compete with the girl group ultimately being wholly multinational. this, uh, isn't how it worked out, but i'm a fan of kep1er (the group that came out of it. pronounce it "kepler" like the astronomer), and my friend kira wants to watch the second season with me down the line, so this is what we're doing. it's interesting conceptually in that the girls are sorted into "cells" with one girl of each nationality, so groups of three, and they compete and survive together, at least for the first part of the show. i'm familiar with many of the contestants--some of them have since debuted into groups i like (kep1er members, kim suyeon), some were previously or have since been on other survival shows i've watched (kim dayeon, fujimoto ayaka, sakurai miu, kanno miyu), while others previously released music in groups that i followed before the show (doah and jiayi, yujin, the cherry bullet girls, seungeun). i've also seen a couple of the performances from the show. obviously i have a few favorites going in from my previous experience with the contestants, but i'm half an hour in and a completely unfamiliar contestant to me, lin chenhan, has been added to my list as well. we'll see how this goes and, like produce japan, i'm probably going to insufferably blog about it. sorry guys.