Meme

Jul. 24th, 2025 07:42 am
used_songs: (Default)
[personal profile] used_songs
Meme stolen from [personal profile] dine 

Last song I listened to: B-Boys Makin with the Freak - Beastie Boys (When I started this. Now, as I finish it, it's Hank Williams and the Drifting Cowboys' I Saw the Light)

Favorite color: Purple. Then dark green and black.

Currently watching: The last thing I watched was about 5 minutes of Astrid on the PBS app this morning.

Last movie: One of the Hunger Games movies was on while I was reading. E was watching it.

Currently reading:
The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want by Emily Bender

Coffee or tea: COFFEE! I like tea a lot, but I NEED coffee.

Sweet/savory/spicy: Spicy

Relationship status: Married (until they outlaw gay marriage again)

Looking forward to: If I'm honest, it's hard to look forward to anything right now. I guess I'm looking forward to little stuff like DC coming over again Friday, sending some Postcrossing cards, making stuff ... someday I would like to travel again. 

Current obsessions: AI, the new job, Ted Lasso (I finished seasons 1-3 and am now hips deep in the subreddit, Stephen Graham Jones (Buffalo Hunter Hunter), and going to bookstores.

Last Googled: 3I/ATLAS - Someone here posted a link to this story and I thought there might be the potential for a fic in it, so I did some googling. It's going in the idea file.

Last thing you ate and really enjoyed: E's vegan stew from last night

Currently working on:
Replacing several light fixtures downstairs and looking for an idea that will inspire sriting.
sonofgodzilla: (Acchan Christmas ~ !)
[personal profile] sonofgodzilla
Title: Dragon Fruit
Universe: Yuugen Jikkou Sisters Shushutorian
Prompt: Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: S02E17 & E18 - White Light
Character(s): Hanayama Aiko, OC
Rating: U
Warnings: N/A
Summary: A condition of her return had been that the sword, the Seiryu Shinken, stop being a sword. If she had wanted to see people fighting, she could have stayed in the afterlife, she argued, and by that time, both the yokai, Moryo, and Great King Enma had got so sick of her that they were willing to agree with her when it came to the great dragon’s request.
Length: 756 words
Author's Notes: Merry Christmas in July! #12. also: external link.

aiko

Dragon Fruit )
sonofgodzilla: (nanabijou)
[personal profile] sonofgodzilla
This is the first time we’ve actually spoken about MNL48, save for a brief mention when discussing former SKE48 member Igarashi Hayaka and her circuitous route into joining that group.

CJ!


Christine Joyce Dela Cruz, ‘CJ,’ to you and me, is a member of MNL48’s third generation, the mere suggestion of which being enough to throw me into a fit of confusion regarding the passing of time. A short history: MNL48 were announced in 2016 alongside BNK48 and what was then TPE48. By mid-October the following year, things had come together enough for auditions to be held, and in January 2018, those passed auditions went through it as part of reality TV show, It’s Showtime, a move most probably influenced by the rise in popularity of similar Korean shows at the time. In April, the winners were announced, and MNL’s first generation debuted, Hayaka not amongst them. In 2019, auditions took place for a second generation, and then, once again via It’s Showtime, the third generation were announced in March 2020... and promptly failed to debut in the same way due to covid. Nonetheless, votes were cast, the new generation was announced, CJ was amongst them, and now we’re up to date.

After a year as a trainee, CJ was transferred in early 2021 to Team Unknown where she stayed until February 2023 when the third generation were a little codified. Reading around, I was a little bewildered by this as I have been conditioned by former AKB events to see any assignment of members to Team Unknown as the impending declaration of a new team, but MNL did not operate in this way, instead inheriting the post-NGT generation system apparently.

Despite the turmoil of joining during covid and the long period of time before her generation officially debuted, CJ is apparently already winning hearts and minds in Manila, ranking #48 during the group’s third general election in 2021 despite being relatively new.

In 2024, the group’s first original single, the delightfully synth heavy Summertime, debuted with a senbatsu line up comprised solely of undergirls from the second and third generations, ten members which CJ numbered amongst. Like the recent debut of BNK’s Sad Cupid unit, the production and songwriting here feels like a concerted effort to capture the attention of a more international audience, an audience brought up on K-Pop trends; I can’t work out what throws me more, the fact that the song is in English or the fact that it’s such a streamlined evocation of style found in the pop music of both the 1980s and 1990s despite never really committing to being a homage to one specific type of sound. Behind the scenes, there seemed to be a lot going on, with this single being some kind of award for the previous election’s undergirls who never got a B side on the prior release, and the music video not being released due to the group changing management.

Whatever happened though, it’s all behind them now and both MNL48 and CJ are looking forward. With AKB’s sixty-sixth single next month, it will be exciting to see MNL build on that international appeal!

FIC: Utau! Dai Ryugujo - Prescience

Jul. 22nd, 2025 05:33 am
sonofgodzilla: (Acchan Christmas ~ !)
[personal profile] sonofgodzilla
Title: Prescience
Universe: Utau! Dai Ryugujo
Prompt: Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: S02E17 - White Light (Part 2)
Character(s): Otohime/Tako, OC
Rating: U
Warnings: N/A
Summary: Above her and below, she could hear the sound of song, voices calling out in chorus, harps accompanying them, bells and pianos chiming between each word. For a good many years since its restoration, Dai Ryugojo had been a place of celebration and song, yet no kingdom persisted without its subterfuges, and Otohime, her very nature both honest and earnest, had found herself engaged in wrestling with such an idea for quite some time now.
Length: 742 words
Author's Notes: Merry Christmas in July! #11. also: external link.

otohime

Prescience )
sonofgodzilla: (Acchan Christmas ~ !)
[personal profile] sonofgodzilla
Title: Jyakuzuregawa
Universe: Yuugen Jikkou Sisters Shushutorian
Prompt: Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: S02E17 - White Light (Part 1)
Character(s): Otori-sama, OC
Rating: U
Warnings: N/A
Summary: He tried to pretend the matter did not trouble him. If the four gods were to involve themselves, then what did it matter? Less work for him, he supposed, and for a long moment, he tried to make himself believe this.
Length: 1572 words
Author's Notes: Merry Christmas in July! #10. also: external link.

snake

Jyakuzuregawa )

Small triumph

Jul. 19th, 2025 05:32 pm
crantz: Syrian hamster with golden colouring and teddybear fur type eating a broccoli. It is very fluffy. (hamster fluffy)
[personal profile] crantz
I bought my first Rainbow High doll the other day (big mistake, this is a gateway drug) and I didn't like her skirt (it matches her legs skin colour) so I bought an outfit pack to give her a new bottom but now I have a whole second outfit and shoes? So I thought 'there's a CHANCE there might be one at the thrift store' because sometimes there is! Very rarely though, as these are pricey motherfuckers.

But there was one! In a slip! So she had no new clothes that were going to give me problems!

I took photos of fun sculptures too, for a later post.

The two dolls I own now are Zooey Electric (bought new) and Ruby Anderson (needs a bit of tidying and brushing, but a perfect find).

In my heart I want Victoria Whitman but I'm being good and not buying her at the prices she is now.

FIC: Love Live! Superstar!! - Encore

NSFW Jul. 19th, 2025 08:50 am
sonofgodzilla: (Acchan Christmas ~ !)
[personal profile] sonofgodzilla
( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

READ MY MIND

Jul. 18th, 2025 04:40 am
crantz: Mycroft Holmes sits and solves your cases for you. He also likes a good meal. (crime solvin')
[personal profile] crantz
Best beloved Elly has requested we find some new shows to add to our viewing list that:

1) Less to very less white
2) Little to no cops
3) Still mysteries

Which left out Murder She Wrote and Miss Marple, unfortunately, at point number 1. Frankie Drake actually fit the bill pretty nicely but I'm using that as my dinner eating show and I don't want to share.

I thought about putting a call out for story recs except even when I specify *very clearly* the type of shows we're looking for in question (episodic only, no major arcs, on the light side of violence) we always get nc-17 five seasons with one mystery in its entirety recs. Every time!

Every damn time!

I guess I shouldn't be saying 'read my mind', I should be saying 'read my post' but this is the internet where people ask for women writers of colour and get recced Terry Pratchett and Brandon Sanderson.

Anyway, I'm getting my browse on with my many many many many streaming channels bought during a sale so I have 2 months to go through some shows, you know?

I tried out a concert on Stingray and was like 'oh hey Megadeath do I like Megadeth?' and the first song featured: Israel, Homeland, and Holy Wars and I went 'okay uhhh I wonder who Rory Gallagher is, he has a nice hat, let's watch his concert!'

Rory Gallagher was a nice treat and I'll check out more of his music.

Have I done anything else lately other than watch things? No, and I'm worried I have another jazz hands depression episode going on or something. Very low motivation. Very low exercise.

I do, however, have a lot of cheese in the fridge. Camembert, oka, some sort of thing with a friar on the front, smoked processed gouda, triple cream brie, fontina, the works. I'm waiting until tomorrow to dig into some of them because we're in a boil water advisory and I want to wait until we're off that before I wash the fruit I got with it for eating.

sonofgodzilla: shiny cat's pact (yuki)
[personal profile] sonofgodzilla
Let’s take a moment away from me talking about overseas members I am not so familiar with! I’m kind of obsessed with Shoot Sign right now, both as a song and in terms of the drama it represents. I’ll save you my thoughts regarding my watching the 1986 TBS drama, Tenshi no Uppercut about a girl who takes up boxing to defend herself against school bullies, and I’ll also save you my thoughts on 2022’s Doronjo, the plot of which still resonates for me, and whilst we’ve already spoken about Kojima Haruna and Miyawaki Sakura, both of whom are at the heart of this MV, I realise we have yet to mention Team 4 member, Iriyama Anna!

Annin!


Born in ‘strawberry country,’ Chiba in 1995, Annin passed auditions for AKB in 2010 and debuted as a member of the kenkyuusei that year in March. Just over a year later, in July, she was announced as a new member of Oba Mina’s Team 4 at the Seibu Dome concert, appearing later in the revival of Boku no Taiyo in the theatre. Both Annin and Team 4 quickly won over the audience! You can see her in the most fondly remembered line up of the team in the Hashire! Penguin MV, and whilst she was transferred to Team A in the 2012 Tokyo Dome Shuffle, at the behest of fellow former Team 4 member and fresh lemon, Ichikawa Miori, and the original team was disbanded in October, Annin continued to win hearts, appearing in the media senbatsu for 2012’s summer single, Manatsu no Sounds Good!, a single I remember excitedly pre-ordering and then feeling very embarrassed about because of the cover.

Annin remained in Team A for ten years, almost her entire career in the group, which I am quietly amazed by. In April, she was one of the members selected to perform in Washington D.C., and this, dear friends, is the reason Annin is such a significant figure in my memory of the group at the time. Though I never got to go to the Paris, New York, or Washington concerts, the names of members who were marginally popular but not significant heavy hitters at the time became ingrained on my heart because they were our AKB; Iriyama Anna and Team 4 became the AKB we felt we had most in common with because we felt included in the celebration. A cursory glance at the remaining videos still present on youtube reveals the enthusiasm with which overseas fans and Japanese students studying abroad committed hard.

Upon her return, Annin was selected as a member of AnRiRe, joining Sashihara for her second solo single, Ikuji Nashi Masquerade. The year after, in 2013, she appeared in the media senbatsu for Sayonara Crawl, the beginning of what became a pattern of her on-off inclusion in the senbatsu for singles continuing until Jabaja in 2018. Both Iriyama and AKB48 were at the height of their popularity during these moments.

In 2014, during a handshake event in Iwate Prefecture, a 24-year-old man, Umeta Satoru, smuggled in a foldable handsaw modified by attaching boxcutter knife blades to the side, and, driven by what he described as envy during the trial later, attempted to stab both Annin and Kawaei Rina, succeeding in wounding both girls and a member of staff who attempted to intervene. The event left everyone stunned and horrified, and, as with the attack on shoppers in Akihabara in 2008, I remember feeling a sense of dull disbelief, a feeling that I had been an idiot for papering over the cracks with feelings for idols, that the world was a dangerous place, and, for a moment, I had turned away and forgotten this. In all the excitement, I sobered suddenly. For a while after, I stopped listening to idol music.

I don’t know if this was the right thing to do, there was a lot going on at that point for me. Maybe Kawaei Rina felt the same as she announced her graduation shortly afterwards, saying that she understandably could no longer attend handshake events after what had happened. We were all left in a kind of stupor, and it felt like AKB, which had grown so big up until that point, began to diminish itself slightly, to recoil, as if fearful of what more attention might bring. It made all of us question what we were doing. Yet if Annin ever felt like that, she never seemed to express it in public, remaining in the group, pushing ever forward with her dreams until her graduation in 2022

Annin is still active, you guys! She has a popular youtube channel in which she blogs about life in Japan and Mexico, one of her videos from 2023 is even about lucha libre, and she continues to appear in TV and movies! I buried the lede with this one, I feel, as she hardly appears in the Shoot Sign video, but I’d been wanting to talk about Annin for a long time

Annin!


Every time I write one of these entries, I get closer to the point where I only have new members left to talk about, and that feels a little daunting. Next week: back to the anniversary single hype!

FIC: AKB48 - Fresh Salt

Jul. 15th, 2025 07:14 pm
sonofgodzilla: gamer (kashiwagi yuki)
[personal profile] sonofgodzilla
Title: Fresh Salt
Universe: AKB48
Prompt: not wanting the group to end because then heterosexuality kicks in
Character(s): Kashiwagi Yuki, Yokoyama Yui
Rating: U
Warnings: N/A
Summary: It was hard to think of Yokoyama as being in her 30s, because to do so was to accept her own age, to accept the decisions she had made, the relationships that had never happened, the stages she had danced, danced, danced her heart out on. If there had been two of her, if she had been twins, one to embrace being an idol, one to enter womanhood, wouldn’t that have been kinder?
Length: 951 words
Author's Notes: Merry Christmas in July! #8. HAPPY BIRTHDAY YUKIRIN-SAMA!! 🎉 🍰 🎂 🎁 💖 🎊 Written for Teacher Teacher Fes and also bleak idol bingo. also: external link.

yukiyui

Fresh Salt )

I am the costume police

Jul. 15th, 2025 12:16 am
crantz: Cthulhu stands in the water. (lovecraft)
[personal profile] crantz
I went to Winnipeg for a celebration of life of a cousin of mine for what would have been her fiftieth birthday and had pretty good conversations with my father's side of the family who I don't see much of because they view coming to my city two hours away as going to the godforsaken boonies where they will be picked off by forest people and eaten in stew but always expected us to drive to them at six am on fucking christmas morni--ANYWAY BACK ON TOPIC. It was a lovely celebration of life at one of my favourite places (a plant zoo called The Leaf) and I did not expect to show up in so many of the photos they were playing on the display.

So my relationship with this cousin was very much a 'and then we were adults and got along' but the fuller context is that I am the oldest of my siblings and the oldest of my local cousins and sometimes this cousin would come to stay with us for a week and she was ten years older than me and it was the closest experience I ever had to having an older sister or someone who pulled age authority on me and let's just say I didn't exactly handle the situation with grace.

Anyway, I miss her! She was great. I dream of her all the time.

The other thing we did in Winnipeg was go to the anime convention Ai-Kon under the initial idea of seeing a favourite voice actor of mine, SungWon Cho/ProzD before I remembered I have next to no interest in speaking to celebrities (no offence to Cho, he seems very cool but I have no idea what I'd say without a stronger pretext) so what we did instead was wander around in artist alley and go broke!

It was great! I got lots of nice art and stickers and some fun little plush toys.

Mom was determined to get a gift for my brother and all she knew that he liked was One Piece but she didn't know what anyone in that show looked like so she only zero'd in on the words 'One Piece' so I twice had to deter her. Once from buying a statue that was just Nico Robin in a very tight towel (she hadn't looked anywhere but the words One Piece) and the other time a knockoff Labubu of Luffy 'I don't think my brother would like that', I said. She did get a cat Luffy sticker and a One Piece cookbook because I had surrendered by then.

What I DIDN'T like about Ai-Kon was I was minding my own business trying to escape before I spent more money and this person walked right up to me in a fucking Harry Potter costume and much to my horror I made an audible 'UGH' noise that they heard and they looked genuinely hurt.

I'm working through my guilt by reminding myself that they were off topic anyway, as a British Book/Live Action Movie isn't exactly a Japanese Cartoon and I was ambushed. AMBUSHED where I thought I was safe to only have to wrestle with 'is Arcane an Anime? Are these all Genshins?' and a general 'read the room, jesus christ' as one of the things I noticed about Winnipeg is I couldn't turn a corner without seeing pride flags.

Turned out we knew some people with a booth there too! Did some visiting, saw other people we knew, la la la my province has 10 people in it.

Did I mention the other day that in the same breath I complained about Americans sometimes frustrating me about being overconfidently wrong/underinformed about my country (IT WAS ON TOPIC) an American called them Providences at me?

Turns out I can't wither someone to death with my tone, but I can try.
morgandawn: (Default)
[personal profile] morgandawn
 Fandom History: Persian/Farsi Speakers Needed
In late 2019, TV, movie, anime, gaming, celebrity, music, and book fans assembled to save Yahoo Groups after Verizon decided to shut down the mailing list service. Approximately 300,000 fandom groups have been saved. The Yahoo Gedden project is working on identifying the fandoms of Persian language mailing lists and can use your help. We need people who can read Persian/Farsi natively* right now to help us identify the Unknown groups. You can work at your own pace and it is a low time commitment. Work is done on Discord, just reading the group description and a few messages and summarizing the messages in English, maybe answering a question of clarification ("is it talking about X or Y?"). No software or other tools needed besides your phone/computer and access to Discord.


*We're not certain if these mailing lists are using a specific dialect or standard modern Farsi 
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