halfcactus

Recently read

Joe Sparrow, "Fishing"
A comic that compares the concept of creativity, inspiration, and struggles to execute artistic ideas to fishing. Concise, well-communicated, and good choice of colors that differentiates what's above and below the water.


Snowlattes, "Grief Log" & Fatima Wajid, "Prism"
Both of these artists are ESL and could use a friend to help them copyedit (though I firmly believe that most amateur artists who get into comics need to run their stories with writing/editing and reading friends anyway); it still feels like a privilege to be entrusted with such personal and beautifully illustrated journals—one about grief and loss, the other about getting high with old friends. Fatima Wajid’s art and worldview are so marvelously depicted I got all emotional lol.




Megan Abbott, "The End of Everything"
The mystery cdramas I've been watching have me raring to read mystery, but unfortunately this... was not the type of crime/mystery I wanted to read. /o\ It's grooming and sexual harassment/assault framed in a missing persons case and told in the PoV of teenage girls who have daddy issues and are navigating school and sexual experiences. It's more interested in the psychology and the emotions than the crime and mystery, but the psychology and feelings aren't very interesting and the final twist is very standard.

The prose is attractive and the scenes of girlhood would fit really well in a coming-of-age novel. It has a writing style that I associate with fanfiction and amateur writers, ie. a lot of made-up verbs and "smelled like x and y and z"s but the word choices, at least, are quite logical and not just running on vibes. They still get a bit much sometimes though. XD

(I have a Kanae Minato novel lined up as my next mystery/thriller read, we'll see how that one goes since I've never read any of her work before.)

Recently sampled (then dropped)

Elizabeth Hand, "Wyldling Hall"
I... simply don’t have the brain to read a story written as a documentary/series of interviews. Also not sure how much horror is in this?

priest, "Stars of Chaos" (Sha Po Lang)
Sampled the first chapter of the first volume because I saw people in cnovels talking about how smooth the translation is and... well, the first chapter does read very smoothly. It's a lot less distracting than MDZS and Little Mushroom. But I still bounced off it because of a couple of oddities, and because I'm likely familiar enough with priest's writing style to feel the disconnect. And then I got distracted about my personal thoughts about what I like to see in a translation VS what other people like to see in a translation and the kinds of conversations I wish we could have about translation. I don't know how to talk about this without sounding ungrateful and nitpicky!!!

Anyway for this novel I might have to either cross-reference with the raws or supplement with the audio drama which is too much work and defeats the purpose of reading a translation. Stepping back for now and coming back in my own time, unprompted by any concurrent discussions.

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Drama-wise I'm now at the final episode of Tender Light and trying hard not to laugh at the recent plot developments. Setting aside the issue of the plot not plotting, it's just really funny that there's this entire Devotion of Suspect X plot development when the author of the original novel has been accused of plagiarizing Suspect X in a completely different canon a couple years ago. I never watched Better Days but I would argue that Tender Light's setup is closer to Suspect X. I did hear that Tender Light deviates a lot from the original novel, which is allegedly plagiarized from a couple of other things, but I'm not interested in reading the original novel and checking. ^^;

I've been watching Tender Light (formerly Gone with the Wind), a drama with crime/thriller and coming-of-age elements, and major domestic abuse and rape storylines (multiple scenes of both).

Eps 1 to 9 were great at depicting coming-of-age bits with the younger characters (as well as the younger versions of the women), but not so much with the main storyline and its characterization of both the adults and Qingshui Town. It does nail down the right notes for a small town where the sun hits exactly right and you can feel the heat settling in in various ways while the darkness festers, etc. But the storytelling was rough, and the parts that surrounded Nan Ya's abuse felt, though obviously having a destination, overblown.

The crime stuff picks up at at the end of episode 9! It's getting twistier. The POV flashbacks are more immersive and functional rather than gimmicky and distracting. The (adult) characters still feel more contradictory than complex, and I'm still not sure if the dubious plot points will be sufficiently explained, but we'll see when more things come to light!

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Misc:

sighyam: essay on Thai language & trans culture: about a certain slur and the Anglosphere misconception that it is broadly acceptable to use in Thailand just because sex workers refer to themselves with it. I'm adjacent to the SEA side of Twitter and have been increasingly seeing people, even non-Thai SEAsians, use the word casually with the assumption that it's socially acceptable, so it's great to see it addressed.

English translations of Shirahame Kamome's (Witch Hat Atelier mangaka) TCAF 2024 Q & A sessions: Day 1, Day 2

capturedwarmth: Free self-care wallpapers (lettering / illustration) | Translation of second image: "Take it easy / Life's not a race / Who says I have to finish first?" (BINI song lyric)

Comics by daruma_tatsuma: The Many-Many-Happy Collection of My Elder Girlfriend: My girlfriend is a lefty / My girlfriend is right-handed


Also I have... once again... made a vid... of a Cdrama G4G prompt... This one was not claimed by or assigned to me, but it was Justice in the Dark (Modu) and I had a song in mind for it and all. I'll cross-post it to Youtube AO3 Tumblr etc at some point (I hope my computer doesn't die before then lol), but for now:

Fanvid: Murderer!Fei Du (Pei Su) (Twitter link)

New trailer for 微暗之火 (Gone with the Wind), drama adaptation of a problematic age-gap novel by Jiu Yuexi starring Tong Yao as a woman trapped in an abusive relationship and Zhang Xincheng as the younger boy who wants to save her. IIRC the ML has been aged up a bit for the drama? But it's still a questionable dynamic.

CW: themes of domestic violence and abuse, sexual assault, suicide


T/N: The quote should say “Two roads diverge in a yellow wood”, not whatever… sleep-deprived mishmash I typed. There’s also some dialogue where I don’t know who is talking to whom which affects the correctness of the translation.

Zhao Haohong, who played Hong He in the Hikaru no Go cdrama and previously played alongside Zhang Xincheng in My Huckleberry Friends, is also in this. \o/

I might give this a shot if I have the spoons—it looks potentially bingeable but also very dicey.


Related videos that I've previously subbed:

Gone with the Wind x Glass Vision short last year, which has since been blocked on Youtube: part 1, part 2

We Will Grow Old Together (2022): 10-minute Vogue short film starring Tong Yao and Zhang Xincheng (this was my first translation project ever lol)