Waaay back in, oh, I don’t know. Call it 2017, when Harry Potter fame started being questioned (and Rowling in general), Earthsea series was put forward as an alternative.

So let me tell you: Wizard of Earthsea is nowhere like Harry Potter series. It’s telling Harry Potter reader to read better fantasy series.

Which is fair enough. So let’s get back to Wizard of Earthsea.

Wizard of Earthsea is about Ged; a unusually talented at magic youth from basically backwater island. He’s headstrong and prideful, and learned magic from local Witch - before his home is invaded by nearby empire. Using his magic, Ged, not yet named Ged at the time, managed to fend them off. But he went into comma, until Ogidon, a mage, found him, healed him, and take him as his apprentice, and giving him the name Ged.

What do you see beyond the viewfinder? Death, apparently.

It’s almost complete coincidence I picked this nonfiction. I was just done reading Watanare, which is a fiction, so I picked nonfiction next, and my eyes just went to this book, and I was like, hey. Why not? I don’t know the synopsis or tags or whatever the book is about, beyond the author and the title.

It’s certainly heavier read than Watanare. What is it about? Well, it’s about photography, and death. Specifically: war.

Yesterday I finished volume 7 of Watanare light novel - the latest one published in English, as of this writing. Combined with watching Cosmic Princess Kaguya yesterday, it made me think.

I don’t plan on making this review spoiler-free, but neither it is synopsis of whole series. This will be the last warning.

When you searched Watanare in your favorite search engine, you’ll find accusation that it is male gaze. This is wrong, but not in that way. Let’s know the main character: Renako Amaori.

The first Vocaloid songs I listened was Koi wa Sensou. Back then I knew it as Love is War, a translation that now considered inaccurate. As I know little Japanese, I can’t say if it’s right or not. That was in 2008. What followed was a slew of Vocaloid classics; of which you’ll hear some of them in Cosmic Princess Kaguya, sung by the VAs - both Japanese and English dubs, a rarity.

So it has come to this.

There are many things I want, need, to write. But I didn’t write them. So now I can’t do anything else much and blocked from everything else except the absolute minimum. It’s really annoying. I should fix this soon.

It’s neat reading about history. You’ll see that people in the past struggle with a lot of same thing nowadays, too. Sometimes even highly-specific ones: imposter syndrome, pursuing deadline, pulling an all-nighter, and of course, procrastination.

Tomorrow is a Dungeon and Dragon session, and I confess, I’ve lost touch for some time. I just can’t connect with my character. And not because I grew disenchanted with the character, no.

I think it’s because I grew disenchanted with me. That’s one of reason why I try to get back to writing: my creativity suffers, and not being able to write creatively might not be so bad; but it also affect work and personal connection, too. It’s maddening, being conservatively protective.

In around the last two weeks, the season became visibly changed. Now, normally at this time of the year, we’ll be entering a rainy season, and in some way, that’s what happened - skies are cloudy more often, rain happened all the time, and so on. But what’s interesting is so does the sun - if it’s not cloudy, or even when its cloudy but you can still see the sun, the heat of the sun inexplicably hotter.

The first thing I did when I finished transferred one of my domain was figuring out how to make it usable as bluesky handle.

This is pretty straightforward. Hell, you probably already knew how to do it, too. But there’s a catch: I don’t want to use apex domain for it. I want to use a subdomain.

This, too, is pretty straightforward. Oh yeah, for reference to me in the future or to anyone else: Go to your bluesky app (hopefully, by the time you read this there are more of them), click Settings on lefthand menu, click Account, click Handle. There’ll be a window pop-up. Click ‘I have my own domain’ (I assume you do have your own domain), and there’ll be a bunch of stuff you need to add to your registrar. Add your domain name, follow the direction, and you’re done!

Alright, I suppose it’s been a while!

Today, after long last, I decided to transfer my domains from a local registrar to an US registrar.

There were many reason for the change. First and foremost is of course cost; even with currency exchange, it’s still cheaper to use US registrar - and by US registrar, I mean Porkbun. It’s about same price for everyone else, really. Second, the DNS record management of local registrar depend on a hosting package with cpanel. Problem is, I’m also soured on the hosting package - it’s pretty expensive, for one, and I mostly use it for email hosting anyway, and since I moved to Protonmail for email hosting, I don’t really want to bother with it anymore.

Last year I decided to myself to reduce reading web fictions and start reading more published stuff. Web fictions doesn’t necessarily mean web novels, to be clear, but also stuff like fan fiction, and the like. And I don’t limit what sort of published stuff I read: so long it’s published, I’ll read it.

Well, there’s one limit: it must follow fiction - nonfiction - fiction, and so on. And I generally avoid self-help; I don’t mind reading self-help, sometimes they can be enlightening, sort of lens of viewing human experience. But they tend to be a touch too self-contemplative to me.