Calendars, am I right?

Photo by Windows on Unsplash

I recently discovered this wonderful thing called 'calendar'. But what's the great thing about this calendar, apart from telling you what period in time you are in, it also allows us (a.k.a. me, I'm sure there are more aware people out there) to jot down an event or a task we want to do. Isn't that wonderful? So this is what I did this week, I created tasks for myself. Some that I want to do daily, others once or twice a week, others once a month. 

What's great about this system is that it might actually work. I tried all kinds of versions and I discovered that I work better when I set a task to be done some time in the week, not in a definite time slot. It's more open ended, if you will. I also allow myself to not finish a task. That's okay, we all have bad days, or days when we just can't bring ourselves up to do something no matter how small. So I don't beat myself over for missing a task and I'm not punishing myself for not completing it. Unless the punishment is fun.

Beloved Enemy series

They don't look like that at any point in the series, but I kept seeing this image and I like it a lot.

Soooo, I watched Beloved Enemy, a 15 episode Chinese series made after a BL web novel. Light novel? Not sure, a novel of some sort. I recently joined a discord channel thinking it's BL novels focused, but instead I got BL series and I thought, why not. So off I go watching BL series. Beloved Enemy is not the first I watched, far from it, but it's the first time I, for some unknown reason, wrote down my impressions for every episode. I don't know why I did it and I had no idea what to do with it, but then I remembered I have a blog, so here I am. This post is going to be a massive spoiler. Like huge, the whole show is going to be spoiled, I am not leaving anything out. Except for the review, once I copy/paste every episode entry, it's going to be spoiler after spoiler after spoiler. Don't say I didn't warn you.  

This post is going to go like this: synopsis, perfectly innocent review, some series/novel spoilers, spoiler fest, and what I think/hope happens next. 

my reading journey

[art by Marta Milczarek]

Lately I've been reading a lot. With the lockdown going on and staying a lot at home, I've had a lot of time that I had to fill up somehow. So what better way to do that than reading? My preferred genres right now are LGBTQ+ (Romance), Mystery and Crime. I squeeze in other genres here and there (right now I'm reading a Slice-of-Life Fiction book), but those usually take more time to complete. I am, after all, taking a break from reading right now to write this while I'm only 23 pages in.

A while ago I started thinking about the books I used to read when I was little and then later in high school. I think those books helped shape my preferences for now. But let's go even further back. 

I think I always liked reading. When I was little my mum used to tell me stories at night and I still cherish those moments. If I think about it, I can feel the curiosity, the interest, and the warm comfort enveloping me in those moments. From then on, I don't remember ever not liking reading or wanting to lose myself in a made up story, being it by reading or imagining all kind of scenarios myself. 

I just nuked a bunch of my old posts

Maybe 'nuked' is a strong word, I merely reverted them to drafts. About 136 of them. That's a lot, isn't it? I have a few reasons for this. 

They are all old posts of mine. I kept wondering what was it that I didn't like about my blog, and I figured out it was those old posts. I used to be a fairly angry teenager and also still trying to find my feet on here, so a lot of those are me being angry, me talking gibberish or some very badly written reviews. Initially I thought I'd leave everything as is, but I really don't want that kind of negativity on my blog. That's the old me, I'm much more happy and comfortable with myself now so, there, I got rid of nasty reminders. 

I might or might not go through my huge list of drafts at some point and I might or might not re-write some of the posts, maybe some of the reviews. 

Louise Collins's non-series prison series

Is the title too confusing? I think it is. Let me explain. Louise Collins wrote three books where the plot takes place in different prisons. Apart from that they are not connected in any way, there are no common characters, they don't know each other, it's not even the same prison, but I can't help thinking about these books as part of a series simply because they are so similar.

The novels are, in the order they were published, The Freshman, The Psychopath, and The Rat. I first came across The Psychopath and I read that, afterwards I saw there were two more books and decided to read those as well, so I am going to go ahead and mix them up a bit next. 

Music Break #39

January's favourite books

[photography by Brandi Redd]

Watching films is not all I did this month, I read too, so now I want to write about some of my favourite reads. I'm not going to write about the ones I did not like, and this list might not be in concordance with the ratings on my Goodreads account. Thing is, sometimes it's more to a book that just being written flawlessly. I might have rated a book 5 stars, but that doesn't mean it will make it into my top however many books. A 3 or 4 stars book might be higher on my list based on a thing that I thought was brilliant, or something that I found to be unique or outstanding. Or simply because on the vibe of the book and how I think about it a while after I read it. 

That being said, here I my favourite books from this January.

January's favourite films

[photography by Timothy Eberly]

This year I really started strong on films. Last year I managed to watch 100 films, and I know that because I have a Letterboxd account where I log my films almost religiously. This year I thought I'd watch some more, and I really went to town in January. I don't know if I'll keep this up, I actually didn't think I would manage to watch one every day for the whole month, but here we are, 38 films later. 

I'm not going to list all of the films I watched, for that there is this, but I am going to write about my three favourite films I watched in January, and two least favourite watched in the same month.

In the kitchen: Cooking tips from an amateur homecook.

 When it comes to cooking and me, it's less cooking and more experimenting. More often than not I just mix together whatever I feel like eating, plus any ingredients I think would go well. So far I've had only one complaint. Of course, I cook only for myself most of the time, and that one complaint was me managing to somehow smoke some cabbage so badly I couldn't bear eating it so I dumped it all in the bin. That was a sad day. 

But wait, I cooked for my best friend before and I usually get positive feedback. Not always stellar, but considering she usually finishes eating what I put in front of her, I'd say that's a success. 

Now that you know where my cooking skills are at, there are some tips I kept seeing around and started following. The results have been amazing and since they make such a big difference I thought why not put them all in one place. So here goes.

Diary of B. High school.

[photography by Barry Zhou]

Following my dear diary post, that I might or might have not forgotten about, my next diary entry is about high school. High school was certainly a time for me to grow up, to learn more about myself, and to shape myself into what I am today. In my initial post I was saying that I don't know how to define high school, that I can only state a few things that I learned along the way. Now that there is some distance between me then and me know, I can actually define it. 

High school, for me, was a time when I only started to learn about myself, when I only started to actually gain some sort of shape. I was still far from me now, but it was an important step in my journey. I can't say I am thinking fondly about it, and I can't say I miss it. It is what it is. 

Stop ruining books!

Woah, I have this in my drafts since September, how did that happen? I have some ideas, but either way, I think it gathered enough dust and it is about time I post this. But first let me just mention from that start that I am not yelling at the authors here. There are a lot of different topics and genres and unless the writing is absolutely awful, anything goes as far as I am concerned. Who I am yelling at is the readers, but more accurately the ones of us (yes, me included) who write opinions or reviews on various sites after reading a book. And I am so mad at some of the reviewers. I have pretty good reasons, too, I'd say. At least me concerned.