I'm so bad at posting here (sorry) BUT if you are into this sort of thing, we've got a little Fallout icon battle going on over here. Come play!

characters20in20 has loosened its rules so you can now also icon multiple characters from the same show. I claimed Nie Jiuluo from Love on the Turquoise Land for round 20, but for the category set I went with five different characters just because I thought it would be more fun. :D Oh, and the vampire queen got the red/green octopus.



( 20 Turquoise Land icons )

Every single comment is treasured. All icons shareable! Concrit welcome. Check out my resource post for makers of textures and brushes I use.

Previous icon posts:

Reading yuletide fic here and there suited my current state, and I've had a lot of fun with it so far, I actually have a whole batch of recs ready to go for once. (I still need to go back and pick up some fandoms, especially in the first half of the alphabet, and I've barely touched Madness).


( 22 recs in As You Like It, British Airways, Cabin Pressure, Cadfael, Dogsbody, Enigma, Flower Fairies, The Good Place, Georgette Heyer, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme, Ludwig, The Prisoner, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Shakespeare & Hathaway, Time Master, Welcome to Our Village Please Invade Carefully & Yes Minister )

OMG I was so sure I had already posted this - I assembled it in November. /o\ All the icons I made for challenge communities in September and October:



( 63 icons - about half of Wu-Lei-related things )

Concrit welcome! Comments adored! Credit appreciated! Take and use as many icons as you like. If you want to know whose textures and brushes I use, take a look at my resource post.

Previous icon posts:

I've been having a lovely yuletide, in the right sort of place to do reading through it, if not much else! So much so, there should be a recs post to follow soon. But first of all, of course, my lovely gift!

It was for Enigma, which I was excited enough about just for that, but it is also excellent - a really well-done layered look at Tom & Hester running into Wigram a few years post-canon. Plus, my recip turned up to leave a comment on my assignment, so Yuletide 2025 is a win! \o/ (Even more so, as that other Enigma ficlet I mentioned? The author replied to my comment to say that they'd watched the film because of my promo post, so double yay and bonus outside-of-Yule ficlets!)

After the End (1472 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Enigma (2001)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Tom Jericho, Hester Wallace, Wigram (Enigma 2001)
Additional Tags: Post-Canon
Summary: Summer 1949. An encounter in a Parisian park.

The Village Teacher by Liu Cixin [Graphic Novel by Zhang Xiaoyu]

Li Laoshi spends his whole life teaching and protecting the youth in a remote Chinese village. What for?

I read the German edition of the graphic novel version of Liu Cixin's novella. Same as last year, I needed to add a graphic novel to gain time for my challenge. It's cheating in a way, but just like last year, this graphic novel was a Christmas present that I would not otherwise have read, so it's predestined to be used for the Mount TBR challenge, and I don't feel very bad about it. (Not to mention that no amount of cheating will make me reach my goal of 12 books this year.)

some thoughts, spoilery

* The graphics style is very detailed and the aliens and starscapes especially are beautiful. The humans are a little ugly in comparison - but that's the point, I think.

* The whole point of the book is to show how much good teachers are worth. They'll save Earth from destruction.

* That the Earth is saved by a few youngsters spouting physical formulas (Kepler's laws) without understanding them is hilariously Chinese. (And maybe also the point.)

* The two things that stuck in my mind from this book:

** the idea that anyone could at any time be chosen by an alien race as a representative for Earth's population. This would not go well. (But hey, even choosing Chinese students from a backwater village seems to have been enough. Is there hope? :) )

** the fact that even with government support, the teacher wasn't able to pay for his cancer treatment

* It's, from what I've now seen, a pretty typical book for Liu Cixin. He puts his finger on systemic failures of Chinese society, and he invents fantastical alien races. Two for two.

* The moral of the story isn't even bad, knowledge is important, teachers are important. It's okay for a short story.

* I read the whole thing in under an hour, so I'm not surprised that the moral didn't leave a huge impression. It didn't have enough time to develop.

3 stars - very detailed artwork, the human faces a bit too (intentionally) ugly in places to really draw me in, but the novella plot was good



1 - 5 stars - Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky The Final Architecture #1 [DW link]
2 - 2 stars - Miss Merkel: Mord auf dem Friedhof by David Safier Miss Merkel #2 [DW link]
3 - 4 stars - Once Broken Faith by Seanan McGuire Toby Daye #10 [DW link]
4 - 1 star - Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin [DW link]
5 - 5 stars - Murderbot Diaries 1-4 by Martha Wells [DW link]
6 - 4 stars - Die Neuerfindung der Diktatur/We Have Been Harmonized by Kai Strittmatter [DW link]
7 - tbd
8 - 3 stars - Der Markisenmann by Jan Weiler [DW link]
9 - 3 stars - The Village Teacher by Liu Cixin [Graphic Novel by Zhang Xiaoyu] [DW link]

These icons I made for Round #34 The Iconquest 2 over @ retro_icontest.

I'll be adding icons to this post has I get them done. :)
I think I'm in the class Rogue.


Chapter 4 - Side Quest (Light & Fog)



https://i.postimg.cc/prc0jRG4/lightfog1.png
https://i.postimg.cc/sxHnWs6t/lightfog2.png
https://i.postimg.cc/fyqHdD21/lightfog3.png
https://i.postimg.cc/x8psmnxZ/lightfog4.png
https://i.postimg.cc/D0pCGnpV/lightfog5.png
https://i.postimg.cc/fyqHdDqn/lightfog6.png
https://i.postimg.cc/90gx9CgH/lightfog7.png

Der Markisenmann by Jan Weiler

i read book 7 before this but the draft is on my computer at home. i will post it once i'm home again.

For some reason, this book has not been translated to English. Considering it seems to be on the German school curriculum and is by far the author's most popular novel, that surprised me. Oh, well.

It's not like I liked it that much, so you're not missing out. ;)

Kim, 15 years old, and unhappy growing up with her mother, her stepdad and half-brother, has to spend the summer with her father, who she has never met before. Both of them carry a large guilt. Her father is trying to make up for his by selling unsellable old product door-to-door, and she starts helping him.

some thoughts, non-spoilery

* It took me three chapters to figure out that the main character is a girl - that was weird. I still don't quite trust the author to realistically write a 15-year-old girl, even after having read that book and being unable to put my finger on exactly why.

* From the very start, I had trouble identifying with the main character. I don't think I want to blame the author, I'm just not very interested in 15-year-old girls and their problems, even if those problems are relatable - although to be fair I don't remember having had similar problems, myself. (Except for the unrequited crushes, I do remember those. :D )

* I liked that there was never an answer for all the guilt. She feels guilty for setting her brother on fire - half accidentally, half not, she herself doesn't know - but there is no solution for it.

* Her father deals with his guilt in his own way, by setting himself an impossible task and doing penance for the rest of his life. I never quite managed to get how anone would do that. Yes, he ruined someone's life, yes he can never make up for that, and still. It just never clicked with me.

* Nothing much happens in this book. She gets to know the people who live around her father, falls in love with a neighbor boy but doesn't make anything of it, goes door to door with her father selling ugly canvas blinds (which is where the name of the book comes from). It's quite unremarkable, but she grows up a lot. That's the point.

* The parts about the father's (and mother's and stepdad's) East German past were quite good, but too short in my opinion, and it took a bit long for her to find out what exactly happened. They're probably the reason why the book is on the school curriculum.

* The insights into different people were quite poignant, but overall nothing really gripped me. Maybe it's because the author wrote the book for his daughter, i.e. it's basically a YA book, and I felt like there was nothing new for me in it.

3 stars - Not bad, just not my type of book.



1 - 5 stars - Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky The Final Architecture #1 [DW link]
2 - 2 stars - Miss Merkel: Mord auf dem Friedhof by David Safier Miss Merkel #2 [DW link]
3 - 4 stars - Once Broken Faith by Seanan McGuire Toby Daye #10 [DW link]
4 - 1 star - Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin [DW link]
5 - 5 stars - Murderbot Diaries 1-4 by Martha Wells [DW link]
6 - 4 stars - Die Neuerfindung der Diktatur/We Have Been Harmonized by Kai Strittmatter [DW link]
7 - tbd
8 - 3 stars - Der Markisenmann by Jan Weiler [DW link]

 Preview
     

76 icons from various Thai BL dramas ( 4 minutes , Jack & Joker , KinnPorsche , Love in the air , Love mechanics , Manner of Death , Only Friends , Sotus, The Heart Killers , Triage )


( See them under the cut. )

I did another themed table over @ dailyicons.

It has been so long since I started this table but so happy to be able to finally finish it! 

Enjoy! :)
Comments are ♥

01: Winter	02: Cute	03: Profile	04: Sport	05: Warm Colors
06: Crowd	07: Close Up	08: Passion	09: Blurry	10: Partial

Medium: anime, film
Fandoms: Gachiakuta; Clash of the Titans (2010)
Characters: Rudo Surebrec; Draco (Clash of the Titans)
Notes: Gifs for "24.23 - on the hunt" at Land of Art.

( Read more... )

-aliensamba of ren


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