moonbaths | Reading

Dear Creator

Thanks for writing for me!

Prompts, where offered, are only one idea - please don't feel bound by them if you have a different idea you're enthusiastic about!

General Likes:
- power imbalance (whether institutionally, by experience, or by strength of supernatural powers where applicable, including AU type settings such as omegaverse or BDSM-verse)
- age difference (best when one or both partners involved are into the age difference)
- size difference (height/general build)
- add-on AU settings: magical realism or supernatural creatures (especially fae or werewolves) in settings where they don't canonically exist, omegaverse etc

Smut Likes:
- bondage / restraints
- sensory deprivation
- hair kink / hair pulling
- dirty talk (including verbal humiliation / degrading dirty talk)
- orgasm denial / edging / forced orgasms
- bite / scratch marks / bruises
- penetrative sex in any form (vaginal / anal / oral / fingering)
- multiple penetration (in one hole / spit-roasting)
- oral fixation (also kissing / rimming / blowjobs / cunnilingus)
- coming over face or chest / cum dripping out of holes
- impact play / spanking / slapping

DNWs:
- permanent character death, serious injury or illness, including symptomatic Covid (anything equivalent to the end of season injuries list is fair game)
- gore / heavy violence / graphic descriptions of injury
- explicit references to infidelity (I'm happy to ignore real-life partners if not mentioned)
- spitting or vomiting (mentions of saliva, or feeling nauseous are fine but not the physical act)
- accidents involving cars or planes
- non-canonical setting AUs (including rule 63) [add-on AUs are good - see general likes]
- pregnancy and/or non-canonical children (references to the possibility of m/pregnancy is fine but no focus on this)

Requests: *in progress 14/Nov*

1. Igor Shesterkin/Ilya Sorokin
They should be enemies, repeatedly playing for rival teams (SKA/CSKA in KHL now Metro division rivals) but they're not - (interview here: https://en.khl.ru/news/2020/01/20/464864.html)
- Did I mention I can never get enough of goalie nesting 🥰
- Anything inspired by Russian mythology would be amazing

2. Roope Hintz/Jason Robertson
- They have such chemistry on the ice, I'd love to read more about their chemistry off it
- I love Roope and his individual style (though I am sad about his haircut)
- soulmates struggling to manage without their third (Pavs)

3. John Gibson (b. 1993)/Trevor Zegras
- I still can't get over Gibby blindfolding Zegras for the All-Star competition
- Zegras just looks like he needs to be wrecked and I'm sure Gibby would be great at it
- I love the goalie nesting trope
- Maybe combined with winner's room where Zegras comes back from being the forfeit and Gibby is tipped into nesting because he can't have *his* guy smelling like the other team
- Or something about coping with being on different teams
- (Happy for Jamie Drysdale to turn up so long the focus is on Z/Gibby)

4. Kirill Kaprizov/Mats Zuccarello
- They had immediate chemistry together
- Kirill signed his big contract but Zucc has been out injured for most of the season then, of course, they scored a goal together on Zucc's first game back
- I love age difference fics where both (all) people are into the age gap and the same with power imbalance looking at their difference levels of experience
- Kirill wasn't exactly a naive rookie when he came over to the NHL but still new to North America
- Anything inspired by Russian or Nordic mythology would be amazing

5. Lian Bichsel/Alex Petrovic
- Petro was Lian's AHL mentor and now they're playing together in the NHL
- I love age difference fics where both (all) people are into the age gap and the same with power imbalance looking at their difference levels of experience
- Particularly interesting here as Petro is an AHL vet who didn't have a lot of expectation for making it to the NHL with Dallas while Lian was always expected to be a top-4 D at least

6. Roope Hintz/Joe Pavelski/Jason Robertson
- They just had such mad chemistry together and I'm still sad we didn't manage to get Pavs a Cup
- The cultural differences of a Finn with two Americans / Pavs + Robo having to interact with the Dallas Finns

7. Thomas Harley/Miro Heiskanen
- I know I've read a primer for this on Tumblr but struggling to find the link
- In short, Harls is weird about Miro (I mean, he's a weird guy and we love him for it, but he's especially weird about Miro - and WyJo but we're Finn lovers here 🇫🇮)

8. Wyatt Johnston/Joe Pavelski
- I know Pavs is retired but he keeps coming to watch games and Wyatt scores 🥰
- Somehow Wyatt was the first rookie Pavs has ever hosted
- They had a couples costume for one Halloween party (Wyatt was a golfer and the Pavelski's were his caddies
- (I have no preferences regarding the presence or absence of Joe's actual wife in fic so long as, if she exists in it, she's cool with whatever's going on between Joe and his rookie)
- I love age difference fics where both (all) people are into the age gap and the same with power imbalance looking at their difference levels of experience
- Or anything where they have to try and make things work despite the age/experience difference, including soulmates, omega verse or d/s verse type AUs

tinny

These icons are for the Haunted House challenge at

retro_icontest, and some of these turned out much creepier than I intended, lol. :D

Teasers:
ghost

( 12+4 Wu Lei icons )

Every single comment is treasured. All icons shareable! Concrit welcome. Check out my resource post for makers of textures and brushes I use.

Previous icon posts:

tinny

I made these in June (and before) and submitted them to locked contests at

land_of_art ...and then forgot about them. /o\ So those are from fandoms I was into in June. Oops? With much delay, here they are:

Teasers:

( 68 icons, mostly HPI, then Murderbot and My Lady Jane, Guardian and Parallel World )

Concrit and comments very welcome! Take and use as many icons as you like, credit is appreciated. If you want to know whose textures and brushes I use, take a look at my resource post.

Previous icon posts:

tinny

Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin
Remembrance of Earth's Past #1

I really need to get into gear with posting my book reviews - I read this in April/May and wrote it up, too, but forgot to post it.

I read this book in German, since I have to read a translation of it anyway, and the German one is supposed to be very good.

If anyone doesn't know the general gist of the novel yet:

Astrophysicist Ye Wenjie, in political exile in a secret military base and disilluisioned with mankind after the atrocities she witnessed during the cultural revolution and the destruction of natural beauty all around her, secretly broadcasts a message into space to invite aliens to Earth to settle its problems.

Years later, nanomaterials researcher Wang Miao is forced to confront an apparent alien conspiracy that has caused many scientists to commit suicide, and his own life seems to be on a (very short) countdown towards death, too.

I loved all the cultural revolution parts. It's not every day that a Chinese author honestly describes how terrible it was for the people involved. That was by far my favorite part of the book.

Everything "science"-related just drove me up the wall, though, so I had a very hard time finishing it, and basically just skipped the last third just to get it over with. I will not read the remaining books in the series. This is a pity, because I'd been looking forward to watching the addaptations. Maybe I'll still do that sometime...

spoilery (and ranty) thoughts

* Oh god the science, where do I start?

* Wang Miao sees a countdown superimposed over everything, even pictures he takes with his camera. When his wife takes pictures with the same camera, there is no countdown. This is not how science works. (It's like vampires having no reflection. That's not how light works.)

* The aliens prove their existence to Wang Miao by causing a change in background radiation, which should be completely impossible. (Duh, it is. There is no scientific explanation for this. I waited for one, but it did not come. Except for the "sophons", see below. I did not buy it.)

* One of the rounds in the three body problem computer game has a planet and a sun come so close to each other that people start to float from one to the other. Wtf this is not how gravity works!

* That Ye Wenjie is so disillusioned with humanity that she would want aliens to either save or destroy Earth is something I can accept. That the majority of human/Chinese scientists would commit suicide out of despair over an alien invasion is something I cannot. The whole drama aspect of Wang Miao's first few chapters just did not work for me at all.

*The Trisolarans develop "sophons" (minuscule supercomputers embedded in single protons) in order to arrest Earth's technological development by interfering with its scientific experiments. Ostensibly, them being light particles, they can travel at light speed, but they still contain information somehow and can expand into computers... um... no. Nope. That's not how astrophysics works. He tried to explain the multidimensional aspect of it, but it didn't sound believable to me.

* Let alone the assumption that the Trisolarans would know exactly how to stifle our development from ... a few communications a few decades back? Not bloody likely.

* The Trisolarans (in the computer game) also develop a computer made out of people. This might work in Minecraft, but not on a scale like this, with every person being a logic gate by lifting flags they have in their hands. This is so utterly ridiculous. People aren't reliable like that. The accumulated errors would throw off every calculation. Although if you want to look at it as a "the Chinese army is so reliable" metaphor, that's another story.

* There are several comments on society, stating that most of the users of the three body computer game are older people, educated Chinese, for example. I'm not sure if that was intended as a political dig, or whatever. It wasn't consistent enough to make sense to me, anyway. There were several throwaway generalizing statements like this in the book instead of having them evolve organically from the narrative.

* So. Metaphorically, I can see what Liu Cixin did, and there might be some merit in it, especially in looking at the mindsets of the characters involved, and getting more thoughts on how people live(d) in China. But I've talked to people who have read the remaining two books, and I've been told that it's just more scifi and less personal/societal consequences. I can accept a scifi premise as the means of analyzing human behavior, or throwing light on specific societal constructs, that's absolutely a reason I read scifi/fantasy, but there has to be at least a minimally logical basis for everything to rest on, and this book just doesn't have that for me. I was just ranting at the scientific impossibility of it the whole time.

* As I said, I really like how he described the cultural revolution, how different people dealt with it, and how extreme the wounds left in everyone's psyche were. It was worth reading the book for that, but the "science" parts just made me angry, and subjecting myself to more of that is absolutely not worth it.

1 star - Interesting and harrowing descriptions of the Chinese cultural revolution, but the rest of the book just wasn't for me.

1 - 5 stars - Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky The Final Architecture #1 [DW link]
2 - 2 stars - Miss Merkel: Mord auf dem Friedhof by David Safier Miss Merkel #2 [DW link]
3 - 4 stars - Once Broken Faith by Seanan McGuire Toby Daye #10 [DW link]
4 - 1 star - Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin [DW link]

tinny

Here's the next Wu Lei drama picspam! From Amidst a Snowstorm of Love, a 2024 drama starring Wu Lei and Zhao Jinmai. This drama has so many kisses! \o/

here are my thoughts on the drama itself (mostly spoiler-free)

Amidst a Snowstorm of Love, a 2024 cdrama starring Wu Lei and Zhao Jinmai as successful (i.e. impossibly competent) billiard players. It's on viki. It was filmed in Finland, replete with lots of night scenes and snow everywhere (the BTS about that is funny because apparently it did not snow nearly enough and most of the snow is fake). It's based on a webnovel by MBFB, the same author who wrote Love Me Love My Voice, which was so low on drama it verged on boring, but I sat through the whole thing last year.

Wu Lei's subtle expressions held my attention here too (and he's soooo pretty), but his character is the older one in the relationship, and he's very stoic, which just isn't Wu Lei. (Which is funny because the leads are the same age and they both said that this made the shoot easy for them because they got along very well.) Plus there are some tropes I don't like - and I recognize them as typical for the author: both leads are hyper-competent, they seem to have an inhuman number of hours every day to do their multiple jobs and travel for six hours on top of that, there is a lot of eating/food conversation going on, the man does implausible romantic things for the woman while keeping important things secret from her, all the side characters are in favor of the romance and constantly commenting on it. I went into it expecting pretty much all of it, so it's not too bad. It turns out that watching characters play billiard tournaments is much less interesting than watching people cook (which is what Love Me Love My Voice did), but really enjoyed the BTS material, especially the featurettes on the leads getting proper training in the sport. (Otoh, I have also been watching a ton of Dongji Rescue BTS material, and learning to freedive >> learning to play billiards, just sayin. ;))

I also dipped my toes into the novel the drama is based on, trying to figure out if some of the relationship setup things were better in the novel, but it turns out the drama is very very close to the novel, often scene by scene, including dialogue. Which is probably a good thing, because there is only a terrible MTL translation available of the novel (the title is "During the Snowstorm"). I actually needed the drama to explain some of the book scenes to me, because the translation was pretty much incomprehensible. /o\ I did not get very far into the novel - no kiss scenes yet - but apparently the drama was heavily censored and stripped of eight episodes to meet the episode limit requirements when it aired last year, so I expect there are some differences.

Summing up the last third of the drama: the fact that he did his confession speech in English was very cool. Very unusual. My complaints center on two reoccurring things: 1) she keeps evading his kisses and 2) he tends to do surprising things with the idea of it being Romantic TM, and she always pouts and complains about him not telling her about it in advance. Rightly so, I guess, but it's grating to watch it over and over. Especially since I think the show is trying to tell us that he's in the right.

Overall, I'm in two minds about the drama, because I always somehow expected more from it than it gave me, but otoh it wasn't *bad*. The romance was very sweet most of the time, and I liked the many kisses especially.

Picspam List:
#1: Nothing But You
#2: Will Love in Spring
#3: Amidst a Snowstorm of Love

The selection of my favorite 40 pics separately downloadable in full size from this gallery: https://postimg.cc/gallery/tP5wg9r
Those 40 plus all 340 as zip files: https://www.mediafire.com/file/xckl8wg2qypbw0b/snowstorm_picspam.zip + https://www.mediafire.com/file/0mneuef0se82rcb/snowstorm_allcaps.zip

Enjoy!

( 40 pics - mostly of the couple hugging/kissing )

I've made thirty-six icons from these so far:

( 28 more )

x-posted to

cdramacaps

goodbyebird

+ Very heartening to see all the blue victories rolling in for the US. About damn time.

+ WE'RE GETTING A NEW MUMMY MOVIE! WITH BRENDAN AND RACHEL! DIRECTED BY RADIO SILENCE! That? Is a five course meal. A buffet. An absolute feast. Give it now.

+ I'm in Bangkok atm, waiting for my two brothers to arrive who told me "early in the morning", it is 11 now and I haven't heard a word. The tut tut they'll be having. Just glued to the window watching taxis come in, riveting stuff.

+ Did spend last night in bed ordering room service (it was raining) and sorting/coding some of the recs for Rec-Cember. And some folks have already joined in on the sigh-up post. EXCITE.

+ Ey we should have some more good news: Maldives becomes the first country to achieve ‘triple elimination’ of mother-to-child transmission of HIV, syphilis and hepatitis B.

+ I know there's a whole bunch of Murderbot fans around, so wanted to give a heads up that both Illumicrate and Broken Binding are doing a limited edition collected set. I'm leaning towards Illumicrate for the cohesive look and fun book boards, but BB has some very cool endpaper art I'm drooling over.

+ Reading Rainbow is back!

+ The Video Game History Foundation's digital library system is now available to the public. You could do worse for an ill-advised late night deep dive ;)

+ hah nothing like inputting a title to my post to remind me that oh yeah, I lopped off my hair! Went from waist length to sporting a lil bob. Feels mighty freeing. And now it's all my natural hair color, and it's going to stay that way ✨

Current Music: Bat For Lashes - In God's House

i'm your summer girl

the tears behind your dark sunglasses

Reading

Hockey Holidays 2025 - Dear Creator letter

12+4 Halloween-inspired Wu Lei icons for retro_icontest

68 icons for land_of_art

Book #04 Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin

Wu Lei Picspam: Amidst a Snowstorm of Love

Bits and bobs.

under the ice