Like a shimmering of the dark air

Important cat health update (with companying common sense trigger warnings for the subject): Grey has been diagnosed with renal disease. This has been an extremely scary two-month long trek through veterinary hell, but we are hopeful that she may have finally turned the corner with the aid of accurate(-ish) diagnosis and a hospital stay while on fluids to flush the (probable) kidney stone from her system that was causing a blockage. We've had to be trained to administer said fluids ourselves and tomorrow will be our first attempt to do so, so wish us luck.

Grey is home and displaying all her worst coping mechanisms for the extreme stress she's under, namely pulling out all her fur. But fluid and food intake is so important right now that the vet agrees that a cone would be more harmful than helpful, so we've just got to monitor and try to mitigate/treat any resulting injuries.

Things are looking a bit more hopeful now, but the last few days were a dark time. Work has been very understanding of my need to take calls and step away from my station, which has been most helpful. Thankfully, it's the weekend now and I am finally allowed to cry.

Unfortunately, this is all at the worst possible time because I am still supposed to be preparing for a move. My progress towards which has vacillated between slow and nonexistent this week.

If there can be said to be an upside to this nightmare, I've been consuming a lot of books/media.

Possibly the most important of which was Chain of Thorns, the third and final installment of the Last Hours trilogy in the Shadowhunter Chronicles series. Reading that book was An Experience(TM), which I still have not completely processed. It's definitely Cassie's most mature work to date. Other books I might like or love better, but Chain of Thorns is just possibly the best. Anyway, that lead directly into a Dark Artifices reread, of which I have completed Lady Midnight and am partway through Lord of Shadows.

I've continued my trend of reading copious amounts of BL. I've read through all of what is currently available of Black or White, which I am enjoying a lot as it develops past its growing pains. I've also read Midnight Rain, which I loved, and Toritan, which I did not. Midnight Rain, in particular, has been living rent free in my brain ever since I read it. It's definitely flawed, but it hits that crime BL subgenre nerve just right, and it is certainly A Whole Mood.

I am also slowly exploring danmei. I finished the donghua of Heaven Official's Blessing, which was lovely, as well as the first volume of Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, which was rather a miss for me. After that I read the first volume of The Husky and His White Cat Shizun, which I like better than Grandmaster at least (not least of which due to the vastly superior translation, at least in terms of a smooth reading experience), but is still somewhat uneven in quality. But it's interacting with tropes I like (supremely almost cartoonishly evil and explicitly textually queer main character, yes please), and exploring tropes with Grandmaster overlap but in a way that I, personally, prefer (by that I mean HELLO DARKNESS MY OLD FRIEND. Like, the book breezes past the moral event horizon within its opening chapter and never looks back). That said, pacing is probably going to be my enemy as I explore this genre. Slow burn is absolutely Not My Thing and it seems to be pretty baked into the territory, if I may horribly mix metaphors.

P.S. Lana Del Rey dropped a new song, which is now my personality. I don't make the rules.

Life very much sucks right now. I'm recovering from working the holidays, which has taken a considerable toll on my body and mental health, plus the deep freeze over said holidays, PLUS the cat was sick over the damn holidays.

[TW: gross and scary cat health details]

Grey had stopped eating or using the litter box, so we were rightly Very Concerned. On the second(!!!!) trip to the vet, they finally x-rayed her and found that she had compacted stool backed up to her small intestine. So, they gave her an enema and kept her under observation for several hours. Afterwards, they did a second set of x-rays which were clear. However, upon releasing her back to us, the office gave us essentially no instruction for how to care for a post-enema cat or any kind of idea of what to expect, and what treatment plans we were given were contradictory. So, basically, thank god for Google, and also that first night was Very Scary.

Things have seemed to be on the up, but Grey is once again showing some early warning signs. So, we're going to step up treatment and monitor, because lo, it is once more a holiday weekend. D:

[/TW]

Oh! Also, we're getting ready to move. We put in an application at an apartment complex yesterday, so we're waiting for background checks to clear etc. I'm going to have to figure out how to wrangle paystubs out of my employer in this, the digital age. (Minor rant goes here about how nowhere gives you paystubs anymore, but housing still requires them)

Anyway. Media consumption!

Mom gave me the House of the Dragon bluray boxset for Christmas, so I just finished rewatching S1 last night. Some general notes on the bluray release: HBO has clearly tried to color-correct some episodes to make them more watchable, but unfortunately "Driftmark" is still unsalvageable due to already having been color-corrected to turn midday into night (side note: love watching all the actors squinting in what was originally direct sunlight, meanwhile the screen is so dark I can barely see). So, that episode remains damn near unwatchable, which is a crying shame 'cause it's one of the best ones.

S1 episodes listed from my favorite to least favorite:

1. 1x10 "The Black Queen"
2. 1x04 "King of the Narrow Sea"
3. 1x07 "Driftmark"
4. 1x08 "Lord of the Tides"
5. 1x01 "The Heirs of the Dragon"
6. 1x03 "Second of His Name"
7. 1x02 "The Rogue Prince"
8. 1x06 "The Princess and the Queen"
9. 1x05 "We Light the Way"
10. 1x09 "The Green Council"

The top five are, frankly, all so good that their positions are interchangeable, except for "The Black Queen" which is undeniably the best. However, from about seventh position downwards is a pretty steep, and ever-increasing, drop off in quality. That said, the only episode that is truly bad is "The Green Council," and even that episode has some (few) saving graces (mostly in the forms of Aemond, Aegon II, and Helaena, who should have been the focal points of this episode, but alas. We got totally 100% necessary things, like Larys wanking to Alicent's feet, instead. Sigh).

I also watched The Handmaiden (2016) over Christmas, which was fantastic. I've been a fan of Park Chan-wook's work for a while, but this might be my favorite that I've seen so far. It's messy but extremely productive in its explorations of racial imbalance, imperial colonialism, cultural appropriation vs. assimilation, female sexuality and rage amidst patriarchy, and in particular I think this might be my favorite interrogation of the "evil lesbian" trope. There's something very Rebecca-esque in the first half of the film especially, and just. I felt profoundly seen by this film, which is both deeply unsettling and soothing at once.

On the books front, I've been consuming some BL manga titles, while still crawling through Snape (not for reasons of quality, but rather lack of spoons), and somehow I also read Ocean's Echo and reread Chain of Gold in there.

For the BL titles: I've read volume one of Love Nest by Yuu Minaduki which is a standard forced-proximity gay guy/"straight" guy romance, and the first two volumes of Black or White by Sachimo which has been an unexpected delight. It features an established relationship between two men who already know they're queer, which is rare enough, but it also includes them working through sexual dysfunction, a nearly nonexistent theme in romance, all amidst needing to remain closeted for their acting careers. So far, it's been a much more layered and productive approach to the genre than I'm typically used to.

I'm hoping to get to the second and last volume of Love Nest and volume three of Black or White today, which might be overly ambitious but whatever.

Ocean's Echo by Everina Maxwell was somewhat disappointing. I loved Winter's Orbit, but this second book in the universe just wasn't it for me. There's nothing really wrong with it, it's just not really "for me." The trope of mind-sharing was so tiptoed around that it felt very much scifi lite, and like the narrative was trying not to scare the reader. Which for someone else might be fine, but for me I don't need the training wheels. I also didn't love the ending, and felt it was somewhat cowardly. This wasn't bad enough, or indeed even objectively bad at all, for me to lose interest in future work from Maxwell, but this particular book just wasn't to my taste.