this story ends in light

been doing a lot of staring blankly at walls to cope with the eofy work horrors lately which hasn't given me a lot of spare time or energy to do basically anything else let alone read but here's a couple of reviews from may I think. spoilers for the cruel prince and the wicked king – holly black; sound the gong – joan he:

( why did they have to make a you when there was already a me? )

this is not a post about final fantasy in general, this is very specifically a compilation post of ff7 fmvs i have recently enjoyed(?) as a guy who has never played a single second of any final fantasy in my life (although my question still stands). i have read about a million words of ff7 yaoi though! all over a couple weeks back in october! i don't know what came over me either. and then i watched advent children and understood nothing <3 i don't know who half the cast is and i couldn't tell you anything about the plot except for the parts that involve cloud getting impaled by huge swords, but one thing about me is that i love elite military academies and superpowers and fucked up enemies and people dying when killed and people not dying when killed and DOOM. so i will now proceed to make bold assertions about ship dynamics in a canon i don't actually know while reviewing another set of moving images.

( who else up never being a memory )

recently purchased skincare makeup and perfume products roundup:

( almost no misses )

another few months another books roundup drafted in outlook on company time, literacy win... this ended up quite long i think because i had so many opinions about things these books could have done better but honestly overall not a bad crop this time. spoilers for violet made of thorns, daughter of the moon goddess, fourth wing, and omniscient reader's viewpoint:

( a hand of someone who had been writing stories for a very long time )

yes i am aware we are not even halfway through q2 but i do not really foresee myself reading anything else over the next 2 months or so, i'm in an illiteracy mood again. not really sure what has been happening to my spare time as I haven’t been reading but I also haven’t been watching anything other than magical girl lyrical nanoha over the past couple days or cultivating any hobbies so I guess I must have just spent all that time staring at walls or something.

anyway i only read one (1) book but it was good and i liked it so i wanted to post about it now:

( het high school au akam i love youuuu )

i don't want to make another skincare routine update post because i haven't really changed much since my last post except doing retinol every second day + FINALLY FOUND NON CLINIQUE MOISTURE SURGE MOISTURISER THAT WORKS FOR ME 🙏🙏🙏+ drinking 3-4L water every day + eating 2 vitamin c tablets a day. the last two i started doing this month to ward off illness but some combination of these factors is giving me the nicest clearest skin i've had for agesssss so hopefully it lasts... anyway here is a review of some recently trialled beauty products:

( who could say if holiday season sales are good or bad )

going to go through some exemplars of my favourite tropes, this is pretty much just a multifandom fic rec

( wait it's all love... again )

just finished my annual night world reread so i really want to talk about it... this is like half a review post half a rec post for my favourite ya series ever. NIGHT WORLD by lj smith is a ya supernatural romance series based on the premise that magical beings (vampires, shifters and witches) live alongside but separate from humans in a secret society known as the night world. every book is a loosely-interconnected standalone focusing on a different couple's forbidden romance when their soulmate connection kicks in, while in the background the prophesied apocalypse looms closer and closer, so you can pretty much read in any order, and they are all quite short and mindless.

this series is for guys who like TROPES... like i am not a soulmate trope liker but the night world take on it is soooooo delicious to me because so many of the soulmate couples are ENEMIES and even the ones that are not usually try to resist the fated connection!! and the soulmate thing only kicks in when skin-to-skin contact happens so there's a great element of physicality as well. there is a nice balance between friends to lovers soulmates and enemies to lovers soulmates so i truly believe there is a night world book for everyone. lj smith mostly writes 2 kinds of heroines (Determined Shoujo Heroine Girl and Jaded Battle-Hardened Girl), and 2~3 kinds of love interests (Genuinely Nice Guy and Bad Boy With Secret Heart Of Gold and Bad Boy Subtype: Cold Uptight CEO) and it slaps every time just trust me. i love repression and denial of feelings... i love enemies... i love elaborate cliquey social structures... i love magic... i love doom... and i love love.

unfortunately the series is a permawip, the last book has been pending for like 20 years so i don't think we're ever going to see how exactly the apocalypse plays out. other than the plot cliffhanger it's also a shame because from the previously released previews it seems that the last book's central romance would have been a girl with two soulmates, the guy who brought about the apocalypse and the guy prophesied to stop the apocalypse And They Were All Classmates which would have been very fun to see.

i will try to keep this as spoiler-free as possible!!

( one from the twilight to be one with the dark )

i actually consumed non-tennis media this month so i thought i might as well do a review post!!

( i didn't actually do that much but somehow this still managed to be long as fuck )