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merelydovelyhere are some things I enjoyed this week:
fandom
Magical Cultivator Wangxian AU fanart from hellinglaozu. A handful of very professional-looking B&W manhua panels. Can't wait for more!
I Hate the Way You Look at Me, a wangxian fic with some original worldbuilding. Picked up the rec from somewhere on dreamwidth but can't remember where to save my life.
life meta
Friendship degradation mechanics. I brought this up in a comment on libitina's post earlier, and though I might as well share it here too: When A Cactus Meets A Rose: Why Autistic/Neurotypical Friendships Often Fail And How To Prevent It. I'm not autistic, but I do have ADHD, so I have a lot of the same struggles, and I bet a fair bit of subclinical neurotypes might as well.
fiction meta
yhlee's newsletter, which briefly discoursed on linear worldbuilding vs metaphorical worldbuilding, and what scifi has grandfathered in as scifi rather than magic
art
We're looking into getting sculpture work from local artists to brighten up our planned backyard landscape project, which meant I spent a little time looking at local sculptors this week. There's a lot of cool stuff we can't (1) fit (2) keep outside or (3) afford, sadly, but I'm sharing them here at least!
Stephen Cartwright makes what are essentially infographic sculptures - brightly colored resin suspended in acrylic blocks to illustrate data points. And also suspension topography data maps.
Diana Al-Hadid does amazingly haunting abstract pieces that are sometimes just paint splatter on canvas, but are other times paint splatter off canvas, just sort of....suspended in midair.
events
This isn't a specific event per se, but in service of finding art for the back yard remodel as mentioned above, I've been looking for ways to discover local artists, and one recommendation was FestivalNet. I've been trying to follow local event aggregators on Instagram but it's so full of ads that it's a huge pain. This website had a ton of tiny events near me I'd never heard of, including even high school craft fairs!
Victorian Country Christmas. I have no idea why FestivalNet served me this event when I searched for things within 25 miles of my own location—the city of El Cajon is more than 7 hours' drive away—but I was inordinately amused by the website tagline: "The most breathtaking Victorian Country Christmas hosted in El Cajon." Is there more than one???
Of course the SF Bay Area already has its own Victorian Country Christmas: the entire Dickens Fair, which will start up next weekend. I'm not entirely sure I feel COVID-safe going, even masked and triple-vaxxed, because it's quite crowded and technically indoors (though admittedly the Cow Palace is an extremely large kind of indoors.) But I'll think very very hard about it. Does anyone have an event like this near them? Any other era I need a very expensive dress for, now that I've got one each for Ren Faire and Dickens Fair?
I've been slowly adding things to a private post for a few days, and just updated the date and made the post public. Is there a better way to make drafts?
