My sun, my dear dear sun

I've been saving all the tracks I've listened to so far - and liked (which is the vast majority) - to a playlist on Youtube, but since most of these tracks are on one channel, if something happens to that channel I'm screwed.

Also, I want nice legal mp3s for all these tracks but they are so hard to find!

06/03/2025: Finally "finishing" (for now) this post which I began on June 13th 2023 (good times, still!) at 21:55. I haven't been listening to trance much since 2023, but who knows, one day I might still add to this list. 

( Here goes )

One obscure, irrelevant (in the overall realm of music) and cheesy song that is very meaningful to me is Believe by Housenick in the remix by Dimitris Athanasiou.

It encapsulates all of my sensations and memories from winter/spring 2023 (as well as the Luis/Tony shipping).

I've literally spent all of my free time today trying to come up with names, mostly Sindarin names, and while going through canonical names I was (once again) struck by how there's not a single name of any random elf associated with the Feanorians.

Random elves pop up here and there in the various versions of the legendarium, there are names for relatives of Thingol, all the houses of Gondolin, assorted elves attached to Finrod & Nargothrond, there are even discarded names for Fingon's children!

Then you look at East Beleriand and there's nothing. A completely barren wasteland. Almost makes you think the Sons did everything by themselves! It's almost like they're there just to be antagonists. 

Some of the people whose RoP videos I've watched, some commenters too, said that the only character they didn't actively dislike and/or found somewhat interesting was Adar, and I have to agree!

( Cursed fic idea )

After much digging through boxes and searching for old emails, I think I have now tracked down all of the yarn I bought from Elvincraft on Ebay a decade or so ago (I mean, most I've already turned into shawls, but I was unsure which yarn was which). 

Now I wish I'd bought more! A lot more.

Particularly of the homegrown, rustic Scottish wools.

Like this beautiful North Ronaldsay yarn.

Which I can't get because a) Elvincraft doesn't ship to my location, and especially b) what are those prices. Ten years ago 38 € would have gotten me two skeins + shipping. =/

I failed to remember earlier but this year marks ten whole years since I created my AO3 account and started posting fic.

I've not been active at all, of course, for a long long time, but every once in a while I do log into eldvarpa and check things (so I know I have a ton of comments to reply to...). My favourite ship tags are still kinda bare. *sigh*

Lately I've also started re-reading my own fics. Some I didn't even remember writing! Some (mostly the oldest ones) saw my English falter a lot (which is understandable), and I do plan to fix that (leisurely, I'm not gonna dive in and correct every unidiomatic bit of English at once). Some are actually really really good, if I say so myself. Like Orcs' Brew, I love that fic!

Actually I started thinking about Orcs' Brew again after that one thing with the RoP orcs (which was hilarious, ngl) - it reminded me that I had a whole backstory in my mind about the orcs that follow Maedhros (very much unwillingly at first, there was a lot of torture involved), which I did hint at in the fic, but I would have loved to expand on it. 

The other issue with Ravelry since March 2022 is the absence of Russian designers, the true providers of lacy shawls. =/

Okay, there are other people from other countries that have beautiful patterns for lacy shawls, but I miss the novelty and the activity with Russian ladies publishing their new designs, and there's a wealth of past designs that I have no access to right now and it's just... sad.

"I'll buy these patterns later" and then...

As I've mentioned before I've been listening to a lot of music and I think it's time to discuss Bands. We'll start off with Dir en grey because they've been one of my favourite bands for a long long time.

I've already ranked Diru's albums once on this blog, here. I've not edited that post, but my opinions have changed a bit.

There is now one Diru album I would NOT save from a fire with my bare hands.

( Really! )

I would never have imagined "Too Much Music" would be a problem...but it is a Very Big problem right now, I want to listen to sooooooo many albums by a variety of artists, and I also want to keep savouring what I've already listened to and fallen in love with/grown to love.

Like, it's crazy for me to think I haven't listened to any trance classics in the past few days because I've been too busy with the hard rock/metal.

Not to mention all the comment reading on YT wasting my time while also leading to new discoveries...

I've been learning for a few weeks now and I can say it's both good and bad. Or, that it really depends on what you need to learn.

I'm not sure you can learn a language using Duoling only.

I've been trying not to overdo it and I'm only learning three languages for now: Hindi, Scottish Gaelic and Japanese.

I'm mostly new to Hindi, I did attempt to learn both the Devanagari script and some grammar some five years ago but never made it too far. Duolingo is working, in that I've learnt most of the script and am also learning a good number of words and some grammar. The fact that you need to figure out the grammar by yourself isn't the best, as far as I'm concerned. I don't feel completely lost because I do have a Hindi course and can look stuff up in it if I'm too confused, which I did once. That one time I was pleased to see that I'd covered five units, and yeah, that felt super good.

Wrt Scottish Gaelic, I've tried learning the grammar more than once since I was a teen and I do remember a lot of what I've learned, I just need the practice, especially to learn new words and their pronunciation. Duolingo is working great for that, plus each lesson in Scottish Gaelic is relatively short (or feels shorter), so I have no problems with this course (for the time being at least).

Japanese, on the contrary...ugh (egg!). Here too I mostly need to practice new words, especially new kanji, and I also need to actively use Japanese, since I've mostly only ever read it. I was skipped forward a few units when I started, but even so this course is incredibly slow for me. I have indeed learnt some new kanji, but I am so fucking tired of repeating the same sentences over and over and over again. I end up losing my patience, which results in mistakes and even longer lessons! I'm not excited to learn, because it doesn't feel challenging at all. Hence I've finally lost it and successfully skipped a whole unit, in hopes that will lead to some amount of challenge.

So yeah, I would recommend Duolingo but with a few caveats.

I'm also tempted to try learning a language that is a) entirely new to me, b) I don't have any supporting material for, to test just how well you can actually learn relying exclusively on Duolingo.