Pandemic life
( Colds and so forth. )

Previous poll review
In the Plaguefic poll, 46% of respondents were okay reading about Covid and related subjects, 52% didn't mind mentions, and 28% like it when characters mask sometimes, while 22% said there are aspects of the pandemic they avoid, and 22% prefer their reading matter to avoid the subject entirely.

In ticky-boxes, hugs won with 74%, followed by wallabies at a disco with 48%, and battery acid and protest signs with 36%. Thank you for your votes! <3

Reading
Audio: Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer, read by Candida Gubbins. This continues to be fascinating and put present times into dryly alarming perspective, in a "thus has it ever been" kind of way. Most of the names and all the dates are in one ear and out the other, but Palmer spins an excellent yarn and kindly gives key figures nicknames (Battle Pope!). I'm up to Lucrezia Borgia, ie, about halfway.

Library book: A Lady for a Duke by Alexis Hall. I'm about halfway through this, too. Everything I know about Regency is from non-contemporaneous novels (Heyer), but still. These characters are clearly modern LARPers, but the central conflict is good.

Kdramas/Cdramas
I'm restricting my Nothing But Love rewatch to the exercise machine, to make it last.

Other TV
We finished Bookish. I came around to it in the end; the flashback to Book's long-lost love was heartrending. Looking forward to season 2.

Nothing else. It turns out I don't watch much TV on my own.

Guardian/Fandom
I posted a poll to fan_writers about whether sharing is part of your creative process, and there's some great discussion there.

Upcoming in Guardian fandom: guardian_wishlist sign-ups open tomorrow. And the Slo-mo Drama Rewatch starts on sid_guardian next week. \o/

Audio entertainment
Writing Excuses. Letters from an American. More Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones (which aside from being really fun, highlighted this line from Archer's Goon: Mum always said that you could tell what people were like by their houses. So naturally now I keep thinking about Guardian through that lens and wondering what everyone's living spaces look like). I tried a local politics podcast (RNZ, equivalent of NPR), but apparently our political commentary has been reduced to economics, blah.

Online life

• I need to stop making discussion posts when my arms aren't great.
• I've found the frame-by-frame key in VLC, and nothing will stop my screencapping now, mwahaha!
• Randomly alternating my comments between Casual HTML and Markdown. What could go wrong?

Writing/making things
My DNW-kinkfic continues, as I turn 1625 words of zero draft into Draft 1.0. Ot1h, it's very freeing to know almost no one will read this; otoh, the zero drafting comes with that feeling people talk about with outlining, where the impetus starts to leak out of the balloon... I'm going to finish it anyway, and I need to hurry up so I can make stuff for Wishlist.

Life/health/mental state things
For most of my adult life, I needed 8 to 9 hours of sleep a night to function well and be healthy. A couple of years ago, I read an article about how people over fifty shouldn't get more than 8 hours, and actually 7 is better. (Cannot remember the reasoning.) My expectations and sleep needs immediately dropped to 7ish hours per night, for lo, I am profoundly susceptible to the power of suggestion. Except that this week while Andrew's been sick, I've been getting 8 hours, and I feel good actually. So much more energy. tl;dr: I am ridiculous.

Cat
Sometimes during morning on-the-bed strokes, Halle crawls between two layers of blanket, and I never know if she's calling time on the stroking, or if this is some hide-and-seek cat game I'm supposed to know the rules of.

Food
I cook mostly vegetarian when it's just me. I really want a burger.

Good things
Immune systems. Fresh fruit. Several days of sunshine. Guardian. Dreamwidth activity generally. Cat. Andrew. LWS Writers' Hour. This cover of Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights" (Youtube).