May media log + photos

[halfcactus]

Games:
The Cyphstress; Book Reprocessing Machine 5; Six Cats Under.
Thoughts in this post.

Books:
Ada Limón, "The Carrying"; Agha Shahid Ali, "The Half-Inch Himalayas". Both poetry collections.

Ada Limón

CONTRACT SAYS: WE’D LIKE THE CONVERSATION TO BE BILINGUAL

When you come, bring your brownness
so we can be sure to please the funders.

Will you check this
box; we’re applying for a grant.

Do you have any poems that speak
to troubled teens? Bilingual is best.

Would you like to come to dinner
with the patrons and sip Patrón?

Will you tell us the stories that make
us uncomfortable, but not complicit?

Don’t read us the one where you
are just like us. Born to a green house,

garden, don’t tell us how you picked
tomatoes and ate them in the dirt

watching vultures pick apart another
bird’s bones in the road. Tell us the one

about your father stealing hubcaps
after a colleague said that’s what his

kind did. Tell us how he came
to the meeting wearing a poncho

and tried to sell the man his hubcaps
back. Don’t mention your father

was a teacher, spoke English, loved
making beer, loved baseball, tell us

again about the poncho, the hubcaps,
how he stole them, how he did the thing

he was trying to prove he didn’t do.

from NOTES ON THE BELOW (full poem here):

Tell me what it is to be the thing rooted in shadow.
To be the thing not touched by light (no, that’s not it)—
to not even need the light? I envy; I envy that.

from AFTER THE FIRE

Funny thing about grief, its hold
is so bright and determined like a flame,
like something almost worth living for.

* * *

Agha Shahid Ali

POSTCARD FROM KASHMIR

Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox,
my home a neat four by six inches.

I always loved neatness. Now I hold
the half-inch Himalayas in my hand.

This is home. And this the closest
I'll ever be to home. When I return,
the colors won't be so brilliant,
the Jhelum's waters so clean,
so ultramarine. My love
so overexposed.

And my memory will be a little
out of focus, in it
a giant negative, black
and white, still undeveloped.

THE DACCA GAUZES

. . . for a whole year he sought
to accumulate the most exquisite
Dacca gauzes.– Oscar Wilde/The Picture of
Dorian Gray


Those transparent Dacca gauzes
known as woven air, running
water, evening dew:

a dead art now, dead over
a hundred years. “No one
now knows,” my grandmother says,

“what it was to wear
or touch that cloth.” She wore
it once, an heirloom sari from

her mother’s dowry, proved
genuine when it was pulled, all
six yards, through a ring.

Years later when it tore,
many handkerchiefs embroidered
with gold-thread paisleys

were distributed among
the nieces and daughters-in-law.
Those too now lost.

In history we learned: the hands
of weavers were amputated,
the looms of Bengal silenced,

and the cotton shipped raw
by the British to England.
History of little use to her,

my grandmother just says
how the muslins of today
seem so coarse and that only

in autumn, should one wake up
at dawn to pray, can one
feel that same texture again.

One morning, she says, the air
was dew-starched: she pulled
it absently through her ring.

TV:
Under the Skin
[livetweet thread, with comments from the groupwatch]

A 20-episode crime drama starring Tan Jianci as Shen Yi, an all-around artist most known for his age regression drawings. Due to the trauma of having his art used to commit murder, he has decided to become a cop and aid in investigations using his artistic superpowers.

Overall, not a good crime show, but very good for art shenanigans. The first half is frankly bad at both crime writing and tying the episodes together; cases were abruptly dropped with no sense of closure, jumping straight to the intro of the next case, which was very confusing. It was also very hard to tell characters apart, which I think was a big flaw in a show where face recognition is crucial.

I had huge problems with the way this show treated women—in its attempts to be empathetic to women, to criticize sexism and patriarchal systems, and to explain why crimes against women are unreported, the show unfortunately comes across as quite gratuitous with sexualized violence. superborb mentions in her post that the show also comes across as unintentionally sexist when it casts two men as the main PoV characters and investigators.

However, I did love Shen Yi's art montages and superpowers, and the art-related comedy. I loved them a lot!!! And I think Shen Yi's process is executed especially well in the second half, in the bomb case. The payoff for that case was very good. (Other fav scenes: Shen Yi confronting a criminal in the only way he knows how in episode 16; Shen Yi pulling an extremely funny and extremely effective power move as an audience member in the final episode).

I didn't care about the bromance/subtext because I disliked Du Cheng (the angry cop), but it is otherwise very shippy. They look married in the end. ^^;


This show contains: multiple rape and sexual assault cases (one of them badly handled, imo); CSA; cute but sad girlfriends (x2); gratuitous domestic violence—the scene goes on for much, much longer than it has to be


Podcasts
I'm still not in a podcast mood, but I tried a couple: the first was The Beef and Dairy Podcast, which was... an experience... The other was Hari Kondabalu's episode on Feeling Seen, a Maximum Fun podcast, which I think is about connecting to movies/media?

. . .part of the experience of being a POC is that, out of a sense of necessity, we have to see the humanity in whiteness. . . . the reason why i think this is some weird homework assignment is that i’m the only one doing the homework

aartichapati also recommended Kondabalu's Code Switch episode: Sometimes Explain, Always Complain. Haven't listened it yet but I really enjoyed hearing his PoV about race and representation, so I'm putting it here for bookmarking purposes lol.



Misc.

cuuuuuute art about cats vs new boxes!!! by kyuryuZ who draws the cutest comics about being a cat owner

Frankenstories: a collaborative writing game. Bookmarking for my writer friends because Gartic Phone is getting old. XD

Japanese Man Spends £12,480 To Look Like a Dog (he commissions a very expensive costume)


Lastly, a collage of personal photos from May, which was kind of eventful:

may 2022 in photos. it necessitated 4(!!!) collages. heavily featuring zxc ofc. love stanning a celebrity that resurfaces during a deeply demoralizing month pic.twitter.com/JzZaBXMOhh

— Amanda (@halfcactus) May 31, 2022

Thanksgiving Rally (Friday the 13th)

Would you believe Zhang Xincheng dropped a song at noontime that day and I was genuinely trying to figure out if I could sub it during the rally.

My brother's birthday

We did one night in a hotel (where I watched Venom) and the following night in a nice AirBNB. The host left us a carafe of calamansi juice with honey, I almost single-handedly drank all of it, it was so good.

ZXC and cake day!!!!!!!!!!!

Low-key celebrating my birthday with Zhang Xincheng LMAO. Literally got home just as the stream (in Elizabeth Arden's Taobao page) was starting. \o/ The chocolate cake was so nice and moussey and so satisfyingly tiny, the only problem is that I accidentally left it unattended and my older brother ate the last chunk ajskdlf;sajf;ajsf;a (the mini tiramisu was meant to be the decoy)