小🩸:)

early thoughts on mo li: i love that you can tell this director is experienced and self-assured from seemingly minor choices that actually have a huge impact. no sound effects, background score, or urgent cuts during conversations, especially dramatic genre-staples like the fl outsmarting her evil stepmom in the family hall? unheard of in today's dramas. this is a director that expects the audience to do the bare minimum — pay attention + form an opinion — instead of letting heavy-handed cues immediately dictate how the viewer feels.

i'm also really enjoying bai lu's character. it's 100% her wheelhouse, CLASSIC bai lu:

nothing for her to stumble over yet, and i'm excited to learn more about her mountain trauma/apparent secret survivor org spy role?

cheng lei so far... is hot? no concerns, he already feels settled in the skin of this character and i'm sure he can handle however his writing unfolds.

as for the romance, it's coming along nicely i think? they've already given us some budding sexual tension in a pool:

and he seems to be baffled and grudgingly intrigued by her at every turn, which is an early-stages trope i ADORE:

also love the setting — this very somber, derelict-in-spirit manor — for the romance to unfold in; there's a sort of secluded, outside-of-time quality to it that feels nicely intimate and refreshingly unusual.

Amaka Umeh as DEE PHARMA

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

Nav: Photoshoot Duo/Esther/Tara // Shoot & Styling Background // Macaron Design Background // Ferghana Design Background

aka

Ni Howdy: A Doomed Yuri

(there's two more shoot presentation posts with the individual pics in them bc of tumblr's image limit, this post has all the gay duo pics)

Happy AAPI Month from Cloud9! 🐎 For this Year of the Horse, we wanted to tell a story of diaspora and cultural remixing: across grasslands, oceans, cultures, and nations.

The two looks featured in this shoot, Ferghana (君馬黃) and Macaron (馬卡龍), draw from the historical exchange between the Central Plains and the Eurasian steppes: horse-riding nomads from the northwest frontiers like the Xianbei (鮮卑) peoples, Central Asian motifs from Persian and Greco-Bactrian trade, garment evolutions adapted for a life on horseback, Ferghana horses, and more.

As Bay Area born-and-raised natives ourselves, we wanted to reimagine the rolling steppes of Northern Asia in the grassy hills of California, mirroring the cultural exchange of East and West. Whereas these hanfu silhouettes arose from the intermixing of West/Central Asian and East Asian influences, we sought to incorporate some of the American “West” in our looks as well.

We paired cowboy boots, blue jeans (famously patented in SF during the Gold Rush), a cowboy-weimao (帷帽) hybrid hat, both modern and traditional bows, swords, and of course horses 🐴 with our styles from the steppes to bring in the spirit of California’s western frontier.

Each of the amazing collaborators in this project carries their own diasporic heritage and hails from California’s SF Bay Area; both models and our main photographer were even born in the Year of the Horse! For this AAPI month, we’re hoping that this photoshoot reflects what it means to inherit many histories, live between worlds, and create something new from all of them ✨

"So do we kiss now, or..." - Tara