A Song in the Trees

ficortreat

Allekha's Door

DW username: allekha

Light is on for: Anyone!

What's in the Bowl?
A ficlet for Yuri on Ice, the Morose Mononokean, or The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind - you can try me for Oblivion/Skyrim as well, but I'm the most familiar with the lore and characters related to Morrowind
Figure skating or rhythmic gymnastics video recs

Let Me Know:
For ficlets: Characters/relationships (shippy or gen), a prompt scenario of some kind (can be as short as 'first kiss' or longer), and if shipfic, let me know if you don't want something NSFW. If you'd like it to be gifted to you when I upload to AO3, please tell me what your username is.
For FS/RG videos: I've watched a fair amount of older videos for FS, so let me know if you're really only interested in more recent (or older!) programs.

Other info:
Open to writing works of any rating and relationship type; I'll let you know if your prompt is something I can't do, and you can ask for something else. I don't write omegaverse, daddy/mommy kink, or most setting/career change AUs.
For YOI: I'm open to writing many gen relationships and rare pairs. However, I'm not super interested in Otayuri, Chris/that guy, or Phichit/Seung-gil.

I watched one more film with my parents before I left for my home - The Orator, which I bookmarked at some point so long ago I'm not sure why I did so. It's the first-ever Samoan film, in Samoan, and you can watch it for free on YouTube with subtitles. Probably because it is the first-ever Samoan film, the editing was pretty rough, especially toward the beginning; my dad gave up on it after fifteen minutes or so because there are a looooot of very, very still and slow shots, and the editing during conversations at the beginning was a bit strange. The main character is played by someone who apparently had no prior acting experience, and... I thought he was at his best in the film's final major scene, but his earlier scenes feature a lot of staring away when people try to talk to him, including his character's wife. For most of the film, I was wondering why on earth they had married each other, because even if I assume Samoan culture is less romantically demonstrative, they didn't seem to like each other at all even as friends. In the last major scene, he gives a speech about her that makes his feelings come across.

One thing I thought was interesting was that it differed from the previous film we watched in how it presents the culture featured in the film. A Tibetan Dog assumes you won't be familiar with Tibetan culture and uses the pretext of the main character being sent to live with an unfamiliar relative to specifically introduce the audience to aspects of it, too. (The film is also set in the past, which helps facilitate this; nowadays, most Tibetan children in China are being sent to residential schools with little access to their culture and language that aim to Sinicize them.) In The Orator, nothing gets explained; it's simply a film set in Samoa with Samoan culture. So if you aren't Samoan, you pick up on what you pick up on and have to go along with the rest.

At home, I had received a coupon for movie tickets in exchange for giving away my blood, and the cinemas have their summer Ghibli line up going on, so Z and I went to see Only Yesterday, which I think was the one Ghibli film left that I hadn't seen. (Earwig doesn't count.) It's quite different from a lot of their lineup not only in being very mundane, as it's about a woman reflecting on her childhood during her vacation in the countryside, but also probably less welcoming to a child audience as it's probably their most emotionally mature and subtle film. Poor Taeko, that scene where she listens to her family talk about how she's probably brain-damaged from falling on her head as a kid because she's struggling with a single math concept (that nobody will sit down to explain to her! even when she wants to understand how it works!) which even her sister only knows as a rote formula - I feel like that could mess you up a bit. I also liked the scene where her love interest - who doesn't formally get together with after 10 days together, that was nice - explains that the "countryside" scene they are looking at is very much artificial and the product of human management. Definitely recommend this one.

I returned to my parents just a couple weeks later. The first night, my mom and I watched rhythmic gymnastics Worlds; the all-around final was excellent, with lots of solid performances, though I was happy that Dasha prevailed in the end to win her third consecutive title 😃 Now the two of us are in DC.

This is apparently not really the best time to visit because some weird race is going to happen around the National Mall? Which means fences are up EVERYWHERE and, of course, there is no signage to help us or any of the other confused tourists figure out how the heck we get around. At least the Library of Congress, where we're doing some research tomorrow (the main point of our visit), is not affected. But we added on another day to go see the National Museum of the American Indian, and afterward we wanted to go to the botanic garden, a two-minute walk away, only to find that the construction had closed off the route we came in by. Took a 20-30 minute detour instead.

Anyway, we enjoyed our visit at the museum. I was hoping to eat food I hadn't experienced before at the cafe, but they were sold out of several vegetarian options by the time we got there - the frybread was v. good though. The exhibits they have on right now are:

• A century of paintings by Native artists - this was the favorite for both of us


• An exhibit on treaties - not very cheerful but of course important history, well-presented. Ends with a section on how activists have been able to use the treaties in more recent legal cases.


• Indians in American culture - this covers both a few landmark historical events that are well-known and widely referenced in general American culture, as well as a buuuunch of merchandise with random Indian branding


• Exhibit on a contemporary sculpture artist - his work generally did not grab me, with the exception of a few pieces, and the exhibit notes were pretty repetitive.

We did also enjoy the little time we had in the botanic conservatory and then spent some time in the outdoor gardens, since they're open later. Lots of walking, so my mom is probably looking forward to sitting down much of tomorrow, haha. She's worked with the LoC before and been inside the staff areas, but this is her first time in the reading rooms, so she's excited about that, too!

For the first time in the history of my AO3 account, I received a comment worth reporting to Abuse as harassment. Not upset or anything, but I'm curious to see if they handle it any faster than the usual. So far: response slower than the last few 'art scam' spammer comments I reported, though I hear there's a big sporting game on or something.

In better news, the zinnias and dianthus I planted are starting to bloom 🥰

I'm also getting back into using flashcards for Japanese, and I fiiiiiinally switched over to Anki like everyone else did a decade+ ago lol. Mnemosyne worked a lot better for me visually, but the latest version is quite slow and development seems to have ground to a halt, and it turns out Anki now has plugins to make it look nicer than a prison wall, and a better algorithm too. Since I needed to make a new deck anyway... Anki it is. It's been about three days, and with some colors poured into the UI, it's not so bad. 語彙力を高めなきゃ😤

Went on a work trip and just got back. I do prefer working remotely, but it's nice to see people I'm collaborating with in person once in a while. I also helped my parents pull a bunch of weeds, then came home and had to pull some of those same weeds out of our yard. These durn invasive thistles >(

Z and I had to replace our mailbox recently as it was falling over, and while we temporarily taped the old box itself onto a new pole, it looked ugly, so we sprung for one of those cute ones that looks like a little house. After three attempts, we figured out how to install it onto the mounting arm the right way. It's so much better! Our mail carrier even wrote us a note saying that it was a lovely replacement :)

After that, we started getting the garden set up. Had some issues with driving in the poles to put the chicken wire on - I think it doesn't help that soil in the area we are using is heavy on the clay - but there are plants in the ground and protected from our deer (and hopefully the rabbits and whatnot). Next is to plant the flowers out front, though it's hard to get much done when the air is so hot during the day and full of mosquitos in the evening. Then we need to get some woodchips delivered to go with those, and sooner or later we're supposed to be receiving our plans for the septic system. Once we have that estimate, we can see what else we can get fixed up this summer. We had to tape over a set of front windows because they were letting in awful drafts in winter, then retape some spots again this week because they were letting in those annoying, tiny beetles that are attracted to light, so it'd be nice to go for those next if we can afford it soon.

The heat pump we installed last year is making us quite happy, though - we feel so spoiled having central AC now that summer is firmly here.

I recently finished a big writing project for work, so till the next one starts, I have some writing energy left for fic again. I want to get around to doing some of those Every Strand side stories and wrap up that mostly finished YOI fic sitting on my hard drive. Also want to go skating more! My boots do seem to be stretching out - they still hurt, but certainly not as much as before. Hopefully I'll get them to zero pain.

A couple of random recs:
All Worlds Left Behind by Iona Datt Sharma, a portal fantasy short story about diaspora.

Castle in the Sands, a short VN that I bought for the Vibes and pretty art. To be honest, the story is not much to write home about, and it clearly wasn't edited by a native speaker, but it's the dev's first published game so I was feeling forgiving about that. Hopefully they can work on the writing more in future games. The art and UI customization is very pretty and delivers the Vibes - much nicer than the usual This Is Clearly A Ren'Py Game (or the Unity equivalent) - and the dev seems to have actually done some research about North African cultures (not that I am an expert).

Spring felt like it came on very suddenly this year - one week the grass turned green, the next the trees started putting out buds, and now there's dandelions everywhere. Not quite warm enough yet to start putting my plants in the ground, though.

Yesterday, Z drove me 2.5 hours to the Graf fitter, to whom I had shipped my skates for more adjustments. The plus side is that they did fit better. The negative side is that they needed yet more tweaking - the fitter was very apologetic about not being able to give me the skates back yet. Apparently, he took them off the stretcher because he was worried they would stretch too much, and on seeing me try them on, he realized that no, I do need as much space in the front as they can get me. He also told me that I wasn't lacing them right (not tightening the front), which affects how well the heel gets locked back, and gave me some tips to break them in even further on my feet once he ships them back. It was a bit disappointing to leave without them, but I'm glad he's putting so much time/effort into getting me the best fit possible.

On the ride, I read most of the way through Island of the Colorblind by Oliver Sacks, which is one part travelogue to remote Pacific islands, one part description of disorders that are highly prevalent in the isolated island populations he visited. I had heard of achromatopsia before, though I didn't realize it also came with other visual issues, and I liked that while Sacks didn't downplay the disabling effects of poor visual acuity and light sensitivity, he emphasizes how the people describing their achromatopsia enjoyed visual beauty in their way and seemed to be better at seeing things in some circumstances (such as stargazing). The travelogue sections get a bit more personal than the usual 'descriptions of beautiful places I traveled to during my research' you see in a lot of nonfiction books, and they're fun for the most part, except for when e.g. Sacks relates his Chamorro guide talking about how it's difficult for locals to visit their own family graves because they're on land occupied by a military base. He really delighted in the ecology of the places he visited, and I also liked the section where he very carefully describes taking kava.

I have also been reading a Japanese book I received for my birthday. There's a section early on where the author describes a trip she took to another country. This was in the late 60s, and she says it was not typical for Japanese women to travel abroad at the time. Not only that, but her students, friends, and relatives were imagining what terrible foreign dangers she might face and worried that she wouldn't return. She was going to Denmark.

Z and I had a nice visit with my parents. He wasn't feeling great for a lot of it, unfortunately, but I wasn't exactly objecting to sitting around and watching hours of figure skating with everyone, or putting up some long Youtube videos. Since I am the one with the mystical knowledge of how to VPN into Canada, I also streamed other random events for my dad and Z, which was more fun than I initially expected. The one event where the skiiers look like they're jogging uphill much of the time seemed incredibly exhausting. Humans enjoy doing such weird things, haha.

(CBC has their own commentators this year instead of Belinda & Olly. They are better than Tara and Johnny - not to damn with faint praise - but they are also behind on rules that were changed in 2018 and think it's beautiful and romantic that someone with severe injury issues was basically told he had to come back to try to win a medal. I do find it amusing how much they kept hammering Berulava on his shitty lifting technique.)

The figure skating has sure been up and down with some surprises. I was so happy for Ellie and Danny in the pairs team event - landing those throw jumps! - and while they weren't quite as on fire today, the pairs free as a whole was great. Delighted for M/K, especially given how distraught Ryuichi seemed after the mess-up in the short! Now to emotionally prepare myself for the women....

Otherwise, we've been doing a few boring things around the house (had to chlorine shock our water, that was a process) and had a quiet Valentine's day with each other. I also bought the game Dead Letter Department and had to return it a couple hours later because it gave me a migraine, which is a first, even after turning off the annoying flickering in the accessibility menu. I think it was a combination of the effects + the core gameplay loop being to read a bunch of text that is often tiny and/or hard to read. Thankfully Steam let me have a refund even though I was slightly over the two-hour limit. To be honest, I was unimpressed with the ending I got anyway, which was basically a 'you lose' screen after struggling to read something that was intentionally made unreadable, so I don't think I would have played more even if it didn't turn out to physically pain me to do so.

Today, I celebrated Public Domain Day by uploading a few newly public-domain photos to Wikimedia Commons. Happy 2026!

I played a lot of video games I enjoyed this year:

• "The Roottrees are Dead" is a fun web-simulation puzzle game


• Oblivion (remastered) is very pretty even when disabling stuff to get better performance, improves on some problems in the original, and maintains that broken Oblivion charm


• "The Crimson Diamond", despite my issues with the ending sequence, was a great throwback adventure game


• I put a lot of hours into inventing farming and building community in "Roots of Pacha"


• I played "Expelled!" in one sitting (does get a bit tedious to replay the day toward the end), but the MC is so much fun in how unapologetically ambitious and ruthless she is


• Still haven't finished FFVII Rebirth, but there are so many games in the game!


• Just started playing the stat-building game "The Royal Alchemist", and while it's not perfect (easy gameplay, lots of typos), I'm enjoyed the royal intrigue and reputation-building mechanics


• And of course, I've been playing and modding Morrowind between writing way too many words of fanfic about it

Unfortunately, I had relatively bad luck in picking books I enjoyed this year. I DNF'd more than usual; the worsening editing standards in publishing are not helping, but I also happened to pick some that seemed interesting but ended up being a slog that I dropped or skimmed through after a certain point. After we started moving, I also did not do a lot of Japanese reading or watching, which I want to focus on more this year.

In skating, I finally received my new boots, which hopefully should fit better. I did a dance lift for the first time and passed a dance test, my upright spins are now much better, we fixed my bad-leg spiral, and my edge work is also improving. We even got me a baby Salchow that my coach immediately said I was doing wrong lmao. Onward and upward.

My partner and I bought a house, which was a pretty big deal. Moving was not at all fun, but we do enjoy being away from our landlord. There is still a lot to work on; however, we have managed some improvements already like replacing the furnace with a heat pump, and Z wants to learn more about plumbing and carpentry so he can do more on his own. I found out that the library system has thermal imaging cameras available, so I have one on hold to help find out where else we can improve our sealing.

Z's nasal surgery was successful; he had the stents removed the day before we left for Lake Placid, and I sat in to watch. Hoo boy I had no idea they were going to be that big. How did they fit??? He still had some stuffiness thereafter, but after a few weeks, he was pretty much recovered. He is able to breathe properly now :)

We had a great time in Lake Placid and Skamerica. It was actually a little weird to go online after and see the negativity, some of it felt like people were looking for a reason to be mad about the location, like when people claimed that nobody in town knew it was happening (you could hear locals talking about it everywhere, and there were tons of signs) or were freaking out about how a town in the Adirondaks was going to get a few inches of snow the day after the competition and how that was going to cause broken legs and stranded skaters. Can't remember ever seeing that before about other competitions. (There was one vaguely sketchy road going out of town; the highways were entirely clear.) I saw people begging for it to go back to Boston, but as someone who wrote a long email to the Boston organizers about the safety issues and baked-in ableism we faced at the event to zero reply, Iiii can't say I'm eager to ever return to that arena. Norwood was okay, but you couldn't walk to the event very easily due to its location.

Anyway, I will try to do a separate writeup about it, but the arena was cozy, very well-lit, and easy to navigate. The security people were nice and made no fuss whatsoever about my camera. I said hi to someone from my skating lessons. None of the seats would have had a bad view. I'm not usually a big skater-spotter, but it was hard not to see anyone in such a small town - I think I saw Alysa grabbing lunch one day. Overall, good experience! Lake Placid being quite expensive was the main downside. We also explored the town a little, and they have a beautiful public library with a reading area set on the lake.

This week, we were planning to see my mom again, along with my dad and friends at home. Unfortunately, Z developed a sudden case of vertigo, and even with medication, he's not up for that long of a car ride, so we're putting it off until he is feeling better. When will that be? We have no idea. He is scheduled to get PT on his vestibular system the first week of January, so we are crossing our fingers that will help.

So we have tried to have a cozy little Christmas here; we put his itty-bitty Christmas tree (it's about six inches tall) on our cat tree and put our presents to each other under that. We bought a log cake from the grocery store that we knew would not be as good as the bakery version, and it turned out to be pretty bad lol, but I baked some other sweets instead so I'll just have those. His parents came by today to say hello and bring us some food. One upside is that since washing dishes makes him dizzy, we finally got to work on the dishwasher the people who renovated the house left half-installed, and now it's working.

We also had the holiday show at my skating club! My coach and I did a variation on the Dutch Waltz with some original choreo thrown in, including a lift. Even made a bit of a costume this time with some net and a leotard. I biffed it on the spiral of all the things, but we ended on a good note, and I had fun :)

Been a busy week for Z and me. First, my old computer chair broke down - technically, I could sit it in, but it required a delicate balancing act and would drop me to the floor five times a day - so we went and got a new one. The nicer-looking one with actual colors was only $20 more than the greige version, and I happily went with that.

Then Z had his surgery on Halloween to help open up some airflow in his nose. We were joking that it was spooky enough for us every time we had to swap out his bandages until the bleeding stopped. Nobody else had the dedication to get real surgery for his costume, he joked. He's doing pretty well, except for a lot of post-surgery congestion that we're told is normal. Once he was asleep after that, I booted up some random indie horror games to play. I'm not sure if our new neighborhood does trick-or-treating; there's no sidewalks :( and it's not that quiet in terms of cars, so people might take their kiddos elsewhere.

This week, I had a couple of doctor's visits of my own. Vision is good! PCP asked me to get bloodwork which came back as indicating my thyroid is under-active. Still waiting for the doctor to call me back to confirm, but it would explain a couple of things, and when I texted my parents about it, both of them said they had a parent with thyroid issues, so. Thanks, genetics?

I have turned in the final final FINAL version of my project proposal, which was a bit stressful for various technical and contradictory advice reasons, but it's in! So now I can not think about it for a few months. That's meant a bit more time for keeping up with the GP series, haha.

And speaking of figure skating, I'm taking off most of this week, and my mom's coming up for a road trip to watch some real life figure skating with Z and me. Z's parents also came over today to say hi. We made them pad thai, and his dad made us a vegetarian version of a Ilocano dish that is basically fried vegetables, usually made with patis (fermented fish sauce).

Tonight I made myself do some more cleanup from the move; we still need more shelves, but my office at least looks more organized now. Step by step.