Hello! I'm alive!

[hils]

Well, apparently the last time I posted here was in 2017 which actually is more recent than I expected tbh.

Hi! How is everyone doing in these weird times? I've been working from home full time since mid-March and as far as I can tell will be continuing to do so until September at the earliest. The office is reopening at the beginning of August but only on a voluntary basis. A couple of people want to go back but most of us will be continuing to work from home.

It was rough to begin with. Depression flared up and there were days when I didn't have work where I couldn't bring myself to get out of bed, and totally random things would set me off crying. Doing a lot better now, though. I've settled into a routine and have found things to occupy myself when I'm not working.

As has always been the way fandom is what has kept me going. Hockey got cancelled (sorry, 'postponed') about 3 weeks after I got back from Denver to see the Avs play. It's starting to resume now but I really don't think it should be given that the pandemic is still very much ongoing. So mostly I am ignoring it and occasionally getting annoyed about it on Twitter.

On a whim, back over the Easter long weekend back in April, I decided to watch The Untamed which is a Chinese drama on Netflix. I'd seen a few friends talking about it and I didn't have much to do over the 4 day weekend apart from play Animal Crossing so I settled myself down and gave it a go.

I watched all 50 episodes, each of which is an hour long, in a week. I got totally hooked and it's the first time I've been this into a TV show in years. And it's not just me. There's A LOT of fic and the quality is excellent! I threw myself wholeheartedly into the fandom and haven't looked back.

I was well aware at the time that I was just looking for something to distract me from the nightmare that is this year but I've honestly had a blast.

And then, somehow, bonibaru convinced me to watch Guardian which is another Chinese drama. It absolutely broke my heart and I was an emotional wreck by the end of it but I don't regret watching it for an instant. And the fandom is SO NICE. Even while I was watching I had people I didn't know popping into my Twitter watch threads to say hi and to offer comfort when I got to the end. It's been a lovely experience, despite the pain.

And that just kind of opened the floodgates really. I watching HIStory 3: Trapped which is a beautiful Taiwanese gay romance and I'm currently just over halfway through SCI which is a Chinese detective show. I honestly had no idea there was a whole genre of Asian TV which is adaptations of gay romance novels. The Chinese ones get stripped down to intense friendship because of their censorship laws but, honestly, they're still way more romantic than a lot of western shows where the censorship laws don't apply.

So, that's where I'm at. Have dusted off my DW account because there's a few comms for these shows that I've had recommended to me.

The best thing is it's got me wanting to write fic again, which I haven't done in forever because I was too busy writing hockey articles for the blog I write for (my editor has been super understanding that I just can't deal with hockey in its current form). I've already posted one fic for The Untamed and I've fully outlined and written 6k of another, as well as having a couple of little short missing scene fics I want to write for Guardian and SCI.

So I guess that's one small positive thing to come out of this whole mess.

Hope everyone is doing well. I'm going to try and get back into the habit of posting more often, or at least keeping up with my Reading Page.