2025 In Review

Feb. 3rd, 2026 04:06 pm
elyusion: (Default)
[personal profile] elyusion
One month later...

Album of the Year



CAKERA (翔~カケラ~裸) - LAPUTA

I wanted a music category because I love music, but I don't listen to (new) albums much. Need to change that. Anyways, Cakera won out since it's the album with the most amount of songs I like and listened to this year (Jesus, Virgin Cry, Refrain Limit/Drug Habit...), but hopefully in 2026 I can find a new no-skip album that's not B'Day or Thriller or Aku no Hana. The only runner-up for this category is Koi no Yokan by Deftones.

Game of the Year



RHYTHM TENGOKU (and Gold)

To be honest, no game I played this year left me a different person. So let's pretend Rhythm Heaven GBA + DS are one game so that I can give them both first place. I <3 rhythm games. I think I should try playing more of them rather than JRPGs.
Runner-upsGrandia, Chrono Trigger, and Final Fantasy IV DS. All great, but they don't have rhythm games, so... I also didn't play a lot of games this year because for the entire first half I was struggling to make myself finish Harukanaru Toki no Naka de. I would've put Where Winds Meet as the winner if I could actually play it orz

Show of the Year



BREAKING BAD

Pretty tough competition, but Breaking Bad wins because I was so hooked I was watching it in bed and in the school library and shit. Normally during in-between time (like between wake and sleep, or between classes) I read stuff or play on my (3)DS(i) while listening to music, not watch things. It's also a popular show, so now I understand jokes I didn't understand before and have full context and everything, so that's awesome. Will I ever watch Better Call Saul? Find out next time...!
Runner-upsPLURIBUS!!! But special mention to The Legend of the Galactic Heroes as well.

Movie of the Year



THE LEGEND OF HEI II

Beautiful animation, great fights, Nezha, good found family, blatant lesbian bait, tanking (U.S.?) missile strikes in slides, an airplane crash, this movie truly has it all. It's just as good if not better than the first movie :3 I love everyone so much. If anything ever happens to Xiaohei I will blow up at least 2 major cities.
Runner-upsSet It Off, the Mononoke movies, and Ne Zha 2. This almost went to Set It Off until I remembered I watched Hei this year. Ne Zha 2 I think was good, but I so viscerally remember the vomit jokes more than the actually moving scenes... But I also think it's really funny how many times Nezha is called ugly throughout the film and this is resolved not by everyone deciding it's vain to care or by him developing self-love, but simply by him gaining a form that is beautiful. #China

Book of the Year



THE COLOR PURPLE

I feel like this one needs no explanation.
Runner-upsHow Do We Relationship (complicated yuri), Princess Jellyfish (just plain fun), Bongchan Story (porn with plot), obligatory Basara (adventure shoujo sweep). Didn't read much because most of the year I was focused on forcing myself to read Elric of Melniboné. Coulda spent that time reading Lenin or something...

Various Wrapped™s



Last.fm says my top five artists were BUCK∞TICK, Deftones, Aretha Franklin, and Michael Jackson, while my top fives songs were Ice Cream, Jesus, It Never Rains (In Southern California), Meteor, and DARLIN'. You should believe Last.fm; Spotify be lying for reasons we don't understand yet (and also Last.fm includes songs I listen to that aren't on Spotify).

Didn't use my Switch that much last year lol. My 3DS' activity log says I spent 148 hours and 56 minutes playing last year. 61 of those hours were on the PlayStation emulator, which was definitely 60% Suikoden, 30% Haruka, and 10% other random bs.
Read more... )

(no subject)

Feb. 3rd, 2026 03:34 pm
kradeelav: (Masks)
[personal profile] kradeelav
still mulling over on this line of thought for a while, and there are parts of this i won't share, but doing this zihark doujin At This Particular Time as an extension of me creating art for the Muse as an act of worship - strikes me as quietly... necessary? urgent? to be mindful of as a north star?

thoughtline influenced by: 

++ what i previously mentioned about Creating && avoiding "metrics existentialism" ages ago
+ rahaeli mentioning religion studies doing far more for T+S/moderation work than anyone thought. (likely: faith, rituals, how people craft those, instinctively or deliberately....)
this post about general insecurities of the new guard of selfshippers (i say 'new guard' because how all of that is worded is completely new to me even though i do recognize some of the adjacent feelings in my 20 years, even though they're not a concern to me anymore * )
+ general social media posts by art peers clearly hinting at existential angst about art not getting the views/clicks online that it used to even a few months ago (even on algorithim-less sites).
+ when a doujin circle member mentioned long ago that the people least likely to be affected by LLM existentialist fear are the ones with an internal calling for their 'outsider' art, however form that may take. (isolated selfshipping, furries and comickers creating elaborate worldbuilding for themselves offline, etc. )

mostly highlighting the 'act of worship' part since as absolutely corny as that sounds on its face, it's a protective veil in terms of ... process? that negates so much of the negative externalities of the above. - hell, maybe one of many reasons why religion/spirituality is so powerful, since it has a habit of getting in between social power structures of the day and individuals, when they choose to believe in something on a smaller scale.

( *it would have been a little mean to me to respond to that post about my personal advice of thinking of it as an active act. creating something, whether art, writing, a fanshrine, etc - as a pilgrimage of sorts. evidence for you and the fates. spirituality has a way of coming in the edges around that, when you give it a home. )

and just... it's funny.

i would be surprised at the coincidence of somehow ending up drawing this doujin precisely when existential anxiety around art was at its highest, but...  there's so many of these little "coincidences" around this Muse that have happened over the decades .... nudges, if you will. where it just fell into place that clearly I was meant to do X thing at Y time that's so blindingly obvious in retrospect.

i just don't question it, not anymore.

man, i am so relieved i'm working on this. for so, so many reasons. feels like coming home.

Picnic Under the Stars

Feb. 3rd, 2026 03:57 pm
orangeblossomteas: (Default)
[personal profile] orangeblossomteas
Figured I might as well post this here since I didn't manage to write anything else for the event.

Rating: G
Characters: Jounouchi Katsuya
Word Count: 212 (AO3 says 199 and I have no idea why)
Event/Prompt: Jounuary 2026/Week 1 - Stars

Read more... )

(no subject)

Feb. 3rd, 2026 01:20 pm
kradeelav: Satou, Ajin (Satou)
[personal profile] kradeelav
i have a low opinion of short form sites like bsky/twitter, but -imo, knowing what i do about private investment circles- this is an exceptional succinct thread explaining a lot of corporate stupidity right now. bolded part for emphasis.

‪@robot-bastard.bsky.social‬

> But that's the thing, in modern capitalism the "users" are not the "customers". The professionals you mention are just the income stream, but the *customers* are the ones you've got to please or they'll shut you down, and in this case the customers are the stock traders.

> "well why do we care about them" because most of these big companies are running on loans, and every year they have to roll the loans

>So if your stock price tanks because you aren't doing what the traders want, then your valuation drops, and you might not be able to get a big enough loan to pay off your current one, and that means you immediately go out of business.

> Therefore: the stock traders are your customers. The people who actually make things with Animate, they're just *users*, and maybe they'll grump and grumble but in the end they'll just switch to After Effects, so it really doesn't matter what they think...

edit: looked at adobe's stock across their whole public existence and: lol. lmao. kek even.

tomodachi life plans

Feb. 3rd, 2026 12:27 pm
asuraid: A drawing of Sylvie, an original Genshin character, with a thinking expression. (thinking)
[personal profile] asuraid

more for my own brain sake to know wtf i’m doing

  • turn one of the relationships that isn’t my ocs/parents (no idk why i made them years ago) into kavetham
  • start migrating some old ocs from ppl i don’t talk to into fictional faves that i don’t mind in ships (elsa x jack energy)
  • find out how to take screenshots to send to PC
  • try to swap out some of the room themes cause why the hell did i give them to ppl…

🏮

Feb. 3rd, 2026 12:12 pm
asuraid: Sylvie, an original character, kissing Zhongli of Genshin Impact on the cheek as he's grinning. Visible age lines are under his eyes. (zhongvie)
[personal profile] asuraid
sprawls on floor. lantern rite babbling and crossposted from my tumblr

Read more... )

Drabbles (&More) for a Good Cause

Feb. 3rd, 2026 08:02 am
kalloway: A blond knight from the mobile video game Lord of Heroes (Lord of Heroes Johan)
[personal profile] kalloway
Fuckit, I'm going to do this-

Listen, the world sucks right now. It sucks a lot! But there's also a lot of good and people doing good. If you are out there doing good, I would like to do something for you. It's apparently been like six years since I've managed to put one of these together but here we go:

If you have made a financial contribution to a good cause* between the beginning of 2026 and now, the moment you are reading this, or any point during 2026 thereafter**, I'd like to do something for you.

However, I am fully aware that not everyone can do financial contributions. So if you have volunteered, signed petitions, contacted your representatives***, protested, trained, networked, etc., I would also like to do something for you.

Details Under This Cut )

Comments are screened, PMs open, thank you for being awesome.

*seriously, I'll leave 'good cause' up to you and that can include community arts programs, museums, little pantries, conservation, etc.
**unless I get absolutely buried which would be great but also would make me need to pause things til I caught up a bit
***not just US reps
****we'll sort by category if you claim this, lol, and if I'm working on a project for an event, 'next' means once my desk is available
*****likely either illustrated with terrible doodles or public domain art

I Want to Try It Too

Feb. 2nd, 2026 11:27 pm
elyusion: (purr)
[personal profile] elyusion
The "3 Things Make a Post" thing. For posting. Yea. <3

I feel bad making posts when I haven't checked my reading page nor cleared my inbox, but I have a policy of not reading my reading page until I'm done with everything else I need to do on here. Which is just writing that last Snowflake Challenge post...

1. Yesterday I found this post by the studio that handles the Luoxiaohei series. So much cute art!! Found the account for Luoxiaohei itself too and even more art. But there's probably so much more hiding from me that I can't see because I don't have a Weibo account :( I don't really want to make one because it requires giving out your phone number and I hate doing that, but maybe it's a small price to pay for Hei? It's so tempting now.

💡 Wait.

Holy shittttttttttttttt.

Well, that pretty much takes care of that for now xD There's definitely more on the Weibo, but this will do for now. After I write this I'm changing my phone wallpapers. (End of an era... Goodbye Felix.)
kamisama kiss + stuff ive been working on )

butter chicken save me

Feb. 2nd, 2026 09:08 pm
brutalbunny: yellow cartoon bunny going ":D" in front of a lesbian flag (Default)
[personal profile] brutalbunny
today started off bad and ended up...!? fine?! it often turns out like that, i think
the zipper to my hoodie broke off (it was giving me grief already, so it's expected, but ARGH)
(also i can probably replace it but ARGH)
(it just occured to me that hand-sewing a zipper would be a massive pain in the ass and i don't know how to use a sewing machine, ARGH)
and, also, i have this little bear-shaped tape measure that i kept on my carabiner, and it just like,
exploded
?!

ALSO, banking issues. i think i messed up my direct deposit info, so i got a paper check again.
and my bank does mobile deposits for checks, but will hold it up to 10 business days because "mobile check deposits have a high rate of fraud"...
so i need to go in person, BUT THE BANKS CLOSE AT 5, OBVIOUSLY, or go to an atm, which i'm not entirely convinced it'll be quicker but
ARGH
MY MONEY 
😭

...
it is a sizeable paycheck though.
LOL
once i get my direct deposit fixed i don't think i'll be complaining. this rules
work was fine, and i felt better once i got some quiet zoning out time.
when the weather warms up and i can go back to riding the bus, not having to rush around all the time...
im sure i'll have something else to complain about. LMAO

i started sculpting something a day or two ago! it's a gligar!!
right now it's only a head.......... but it's so cute i love gligar it's so cute gligar is my favorite ever wiwi.
i also got a container to hold my excess beads in. and some cute stickers to decorate that container. :3
and i'm waiting for another order of beads.. bc... i ran out of a color immediately, again. 😭

us politics )
what a Day. i am so tired. goodnight foreva

snowflake challenge 2026 #15

Feb. 2nd, 2026 08:57 pm
brutalbunny: yellow cartoon bunny going ":D" in front of a lesbian flag (Default)
[personal profile] brutalbunny
two log cabins with snow on the roofs in a wintery forest the text snowflake challenge january 1 - 31 in white cursive text


Challenge #15

How Did the Fandom Snowflake Challenge Go?

💃💃

good!!! it's! my first snowflake challenge! 👯
and, why i started using dreamwidth! well, kind of. my friend was doing snowflake and i was like,
waittt, that looks kind of fun, so i decided i'd check it out! i thought it'd be a good way to get used to posting!
^_^

i did skip a few challenges but it's like fineeee. i really appreciate the sort of freeform lackadaisical approach to things. i cannot force myself to do anything, at all, so if a challenge didn't appeal to me, it was nice to go "well i don't have to do it!" or drag my feet if i was too tired to think of something lol
as opposed to just... having to bullshit it, or drop out alltogether, you know...
also, i could have done better on commenting on others' posts, but ahh it's haaard. thinking of words is hard enough when i'm writing my own posts LOL
i found myself wishing i had a like button just to show that i appreciated someone's words but didn't have much to share...
but what a fun introduction to the community it was, you know?! i love to lurk and i read so many interesting thoughts!!
and i got to meet some cool new people, too, so that's a success to me!!! :D

since it's my first snowflake i feel like anything is good, you know?!
like maybe next year i'll engage a little more,
but i'm more focused on making sure i'll be here next year! (like here on dw, that is.)
this is just the beginning..... daily/regular posting is easy when there's a challenge to look forward to.
...
.....

maybe i'll try and find another challenge to follow. :p
thank you for hosting snowflake yayyy ^_^
and if you're here from snowflake then hi!! i hope we enjoy each other's company!! :D

(no subject)

Feb. 2nd, 2026 08:36 pm
kradeelav: Zihark, FE10 (friendly)
[personal profile] kradeelav
three shows i did the main logos for a few years ago are coming out on netflix \o/

don't actually care about netflix itself but getting to that level of visibility is a long way from where $org was. wild to be there to see it happen all the way.

also i had the most absurdly kind thing happen today where an unnamed euro sales agent (i work with sales a lot and get along with them fabulously) literally sent me a video recording of him saying how grateful he was that he never has to chase me down / that i treat his team well, via my boss. (an extra kind gesture, since now my boss knows too).

T_T  i always do try to go above and beyond for the international folks considering they get done dirty a lot but damn. kind of thing that genuinely warms my jaded heart...
autumninpluto: Yor looking embarrassed ([sxf] embarrassed yor)
[personal profile] autumninpluto

Totally fell off the Snowflake Challenge halfway through, but I'll be trying to participate in this month's 'Stuff I Love' challenge by [personal profile] dreamersdare :)

This week's theme/prompt is standalone media. I tried to think about it for a bit, but I realized that a lot of the things I like are inevitably sequels, or were created for the intention of turning into a sequel. Honestly, the definition of 'standalone' is a bit confusing to me. Is something that's adapted from a different medium a standalone, even if it has no sequel? Or does that not count?

Here, you'll find 8 movies, and 2 animes. In some cases, I have stretched the definition of 'standalone' to something that's more convenient for me. The challenge said this isn't meant to be a rec list, but rather for me to squee. I tried my best, but the idea of this being seen by others + the fact that I don't have the proper vocabulary to actually express what I specifically liked in something means that this will still subconsciously pan out like a rec list.

Without further ado, in no particular order:


1531 words )
asuraid: Yippee creature Sylvie dancing. (yippe)
[personal profile] asuraid
old indeed cause i think the last time i genuinely played was like 2015-2016 ... i have my parents there, my irl friends, a shitload of OCs, mako and haru from free! for some reason, and ... i decided to add sylvie, zhongli, and two of my newer ocs to celebrate getting back into it LMFAO

i also found out there's a puzzle and dragons spinoff for the 3ds and that's sick as hell. ive been playing the mobile game on and off for years now so it's nice to have a game for it that isn't 'pray to god you don't get shit pulls and need to have premium currency to rerun a dungeon where the boss insta-nukes you because you don't have a good enough team'

Sleepover Crushes

Feb. 2nd, 2026 03:15 pm
ravensilversea: Katekyou Hitman Reborn Sasagawa Kyoko hugging Chrome Dokuro from behind. Chrome is blushing and a small pink heart hovers between them (9596)
[personal profile] ravensilversea
Fandom: Katekyou Hitman Reborn

Relationship: Chrome Dokuro/Sasagawa Kyoko

Rating: G

Tags: Slice of Life, Pre-Relationship, Crushes, Sleepovers, Sleep Intimacy, Non-Sexual Intimacy

Originally Posted: July 1, 2022

KHRrarepairweek 2022 Cloud Day: Sleep Intimacy | Painter/Model AU

Summary: Is it gay to share a couch with your maybe-crush during a sleepover with your friends?

Ao3


The living room seems so much darker and so much quieter after the TV is shut off. Shadows of furniture and open doorways seem to hide dark figures leftover from the horror movie marathon they had been having until- Kyoko cranes her head to see the green numbers of the oven clock in the kitchen- a little after two in the morning. She settles back against the pillow, closes her eyes, and breathes out slowly, and Hana snores a bit louder on the other couch.

It takes a moment for Kyoko’s heart to stop pounding from the sudden noise. The fear slowly fades away from where it was lurking in the back of her mind like a leopard in a tree. She shifts into a more comfortable position on the couch and stretches out her legs, knees aching from being in a cramped position for too long.
Read more... )

pretendo friend code

Feb. 2nd, 2026 02:50 pm
asuraid: A drawing of Sylvie, an original Genshin character, with the asexual flag as a border around the icon. (Default)
[personal profile] asuraid
what a niche ass post but i finished setting up pretendo for my jailbroken 3ds and wanna find ppl to friend!!!

1171-5030-2258
vriddy: Kagari and Fujimaru from the volume 2 cover, both looking at the viewer (kagari-jin)
[personal profile] vriddy
K-9 author posted super cute chibi art of Kagari earlier this year, which led to conversations about what his hair colour even is anyway. This is my answer!!


Suits like a charm | K-9 | Fujimaru/Kagari | <500 words | rated G

Summary: Fujimaru dyes Kagari's hair for him.

Read it on Dreamwidth or on AO3.
overmore: (Hangover)
[personal profile] overmore
Right now I'm kinda going back and forth on whether I should have a seperate community for tcg, as I'm kind of thinking of joining more of them. Having it flood my main account does not go in my favour since it's fandom oriented, but making another acc just for that is a hassle with logging in and out. The best case scenario would be this.

This also makes me think of having all the tcgs hosted somewhere else other than my site, and by that I mean a site only for tcgs. I cannot get a domain on my own like a lot of people in the space can do, so free option seems to be the best for me. Since having to log in and out of neocities is a hassle and for personal reasons i will not use nekoweb, I'm not sure what my other options are. There seem to be free hosting for a lot of tcgs but I just can't seem to find a way to get to them since a lot require an invite of some sort. Oh well. I guess I'll have to keep searching for more until I find something.
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