halfcactus

1) You Are Error by Aftermath: a podcast I picked up because of

geraineon's rec here, about details that videogames usually get wrong. So far there's only one episode out (about Arabic, and Islamophobia, and Palestine), but I'm looking forward to the next ones! It sounds like there's gonna be one about horses. XD

2) Wicked (movie): I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected, but act 1 was paced like it was 2 whole acts and I really needed an intermission. (ᵔ́∀ᵔ̀) The best number was What Is This Feeling? by a mile. Defying Gravity on the other hand felt underwhelming for how overdone (and overly long) it was.

More thoughts

I thought this adaptation made Glinda a sharper character, and her relationship with Elphaba more challenging. In the musical version her act 1 moments tend to be reduced to comic relief, but in the film version they come across as far more earnest but also far more dangerous. It's hard to watch this and not think about how white performativeness and conditional allyship are so easily rewarded, retracted, and insulated from consequences while marginalized people get punished and demonized for just daring to speak out, a point that the movie loudly makes but I'm not sure it'll fully follow through on.

Needless to say I got secondhand tired from watching Elphaba advocate for issues that affect her personally but are blind spots for everyone else. :')

And when I was discussing this with

daisydiversions she wondered if there were going to be plot changes in the second movie, particularly for Nessa, since it seemed like the actress, a wheelchair user herself, had some input on her character... I'm cautiously interested but still very much afraid haha.

3) 廚廚動人, originally known as U Kill, I Cook and later on serialized as Kitchen Goddess and the Assassin on Tapas: martial arts + comedy manhua about a ditzy cook who becomes the personal chef for a boneheaded assassin. The translation is localized in a way that tries to preserve the wordplay at the cost of its sense of place, but I thought it was an interesting effort, even though it made me look up the raws to reorient myself. The English seems to do more food puns too, though I don't think the energy is sustained in later chapters. XD I'm at around chapter 26, and have put it in the backburner for now.

CW: sexual harassment + threats by minor villains in the first few chapters

Images shamelessly hotlinked from Bluesky:

1) 洞房: (My) butte hole

"Butte" and "butt" aren't pronounced the same way but I suppose this works well enough 1) in text form, 2) when the ML is canonically kinda stupid and very bad with words

2) 言雎: Sol Crest
盐焗: Salt Crust