I've been busy lately with several things on the go - doing HR art for the ICE OUT donations challenge, recording a long SGA podfic for the Podfic Big Bang (And Hope by Sihaya Black), and trying to fit in recording a couple of shorter ones for Romancing McShep and Romancing SGA, as well. Oof. Plus a lot of HR fic reading. I've accepted that it's impossible to keep up in any meaningful sense, and just surf along reading stuff I see reccd or authors I know I like a lot, and the few WIPs I'm following. Eventually I guess I'll catch up with numerous gems in the fandom that I missed in this avalanche of new fics, many of them extremely good.

In terms of reading very good authors, I had an exceptionally obsessive episode today where I started a story by one of my fave HR writers and couldn't read it. Because (unlike in ALL their other fics) they'd chosen to do all the Ilya POV narration in Ilya-speak, with most of the articles dropped. Russian doesn't have separate articles, I gather, because the distinction between "a ball" & "the ball" is done with word order - which is why in English, Russians often drop their articles. An example:
1. Девушка читает книгу. (The girl is reading a book)
2. Книгу читает девушка. (The girl is reading the book)
In both sentences, the meaning is nearly the same. However, in Sentence 2, the placement of “книгу” (book) at the beginning, before “девушка” (girl), highlights the importance of the book and implies a specific book.
The parts of the fic where it was Ilya's dialogue were fine because that portrays his actual speech, but the narrative (for me) is his thoughts (internal narration) in tight 3rd POV and there's NO WAY he'd be dropping "articles" in his thinking in Russian. It made him seem stupid, which he very much isn't, and I couldn't bear to read it. So I just now copied it into Word and betaed it, adding back in all the articles from his narrative POV parts. If you recognise the fic, hit me up in a DM and I'll share the edited version. It's a bloody good fic otherwise, 9000 words.

Life's been quiet apart from reccing, writing, arting and podficcing, and I'm looking forward to a dinner out with friends this Wednesday. Also enjoying sweet corn, and the start of the stone fruit season, with gorgeous nectarines. My garden is blowsy and straggly now, in late summer, and I need to take some time (ha!) to trim it back a bit. It's still warm here, about 22-24 degC highs, usually, and drier of late so I'm still watering the entire garden by hand every 3 days.

One bloody annoying thing that happened was that my credit card was hacked back at the end of January (picked up via notifications coming up on my phone from my banking app asking me to approve a bunch of things I hadn't bought). Luckily all smallish purchases (kids? An unambitious thief, anyway) and I think the bank will refund them. But that meant cancelling that card and them mailing me another (a process I last went through several months ago). And then the mailed card never arrived (presumed stolen from my letterbox) and I got another couple of false transactions on the new card that I hadn't even seen yet! So yet another card cancellation and this time I got it mailed to my bank. I was very glad that after the last debacle several months ago I'd arranged a second credit card via my other bank (I have accounts at 2 banks for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture).

Anyway, in terms of recs:
- I'm reading all Evilharlowe's HR works on AO3 - they really are a fantastic writer.
- Happened on a great short edit that sets Shane and Ilya's tuna melt hiatus to a Chappel Roan song (The Subway - amazing song) - heartrending edit, very well done, but man, I wish it were a full-sized fanvid.
- Bringing to your attention this workout video by Hudson Williams. Leg day and his skincare routine are really paying off! (CN for casual mentions of eating extreme diets or 'not eating' to make his body fit acting roles. Which is worrying but probably routine for actors.)
- there's a LOT of HR podfic by now and every day there are 1 or 2 new ones. It's a great way to revisit fics I read and loved while I do art. For example, cathexys podficced Magneticwave's Clear to a Hedgehog. This link gets you HR podfic on AO3.

Enough for now. Waving at you all - hope things are going as well as they can.! 💗