halfcactus: an icon of a manga shiba inu (Default)
I meant to keep this short but I kept remembering things I wanted to add lol oops




+ Logged on to my fansubs account for the first time in idk how long to post a subbed trailer... let's see how long it takes for TPTB to come down with the merciless hammer of copyright blocks haha:

BREAKING:

Jun. 16th, 2024 08:32 pm
halfcactus: starry-eyed baby marcille (bb marcille)
I HAVE FIGURED OUT A WORKAROUND FOR MAKING GIFS / GIFSETS WITHOUT PHOTOSHOP (or screencapping frame by frame)!!!!!!!!!!!!!! With thanks to Rookie (2023) for motivating me hehe I am going to be so insufferable:

Ace shielding her eyes against the sun and glancing down at Jana
Ace bringing up her hands to make a shade for Jana, who is sorting prom tickets
Two girls in Catholic school uniforms sitting on a ledge. Ace has her hand around Jana's shoulder, holding her close, while Jana is swinging her legs


(Still processing my feelings for this movie, which for all its imperfections elicited reactions from me and made me feel things.)

I also found out that for some mysterious reason my Jiangzuo Alliance x Leverage animated posters for Nirvana in Fire Exchange 2017 are getting a fresh wave of notifications on Tumblr, which makes me feel sad because I can't make this kind of thing anymore, for creative and tech reasons... But it still makes me laugh seeing the places where I "animated" elements frame by frame with no regard for logic haha

I miss my youth 🥲
halfcactus: an icon of a manga shiba inu (Default)
She Belongs to Me


I feel like this book could have been 50-70% shorter? Love that the women are both competent, but apart from the general romance and Wen Nian, not a single storyline is justified... It feels more like snippets about someone's OC than a full novel. Scenes are perfunctory, abruptly dropped as soon as their purpose is served, and there's no sense of continuity or thematicness, and consequently, no momentum.The author doesn't seem actually interested in the characters—all the side characters are props and even the main characters themselves don't feel quite like people. Jiang Ci is a piano tuner and a scuba diver but you don't really see any of this affect her worldview in any way, so all these elements feel very artificial.

In terms of reading difficulty, the abruptness and lack of context-building made this pretty difficult for me to read and follow (as a non-native reader who's still learning Chinese :P)...

Vocabulary log:
nozzle, diagonal, photo album
antler, headbank, cookie, draft, stockings


Tried to make a graphic out of my doodle (with the vector tools in Affinity Designer) but it doesn't seem crisp enough? Maybe I messed up my export:
vector graphic of a reindeer headband

More Affinity notes:

  • Affinity Designer is meant to be an Illustrator alternative in the sense that it's a vector drawing program, but I can't find the Pathfinder features, which really limits my already basic shape manipulation abilities ;___; This is potentially a dealbreaker, but idk, I'll need to try it out some more and also try out the desktop version in case the commands translate more intuitively there. EDIT: Affinity Photo seems to have a Geometry feature under the Layers menu which has Add/Subtract/Intersect commands; I'll try finding it in Designer.

  • I'm having a hard time working with layers on Affinity Photo. Layer via Copy and Layer via Cut with the marquee selection tool aren't available, so you have to rasterize layer, make selection, and then duplicate. Similarly, to crop to selection, you select your crop area with the marquee then click on the Crop tool.

  • I probably just need to play around some more, but: Affinity Photo's paintbrush tool is ridiculously jagged at 100% hardness?? There's no anti-aliasing at all and there's no option to turn on anti-aliasing which ??? Do I have to draw with my phone/tablet's native photo editing app or—

    -

    In other news, my phone's having problems charging and I fear it's a hardware issue. :') Fingers crossed it's resolvable because I can't deal with the anxiety, especially because I basically live on my phone and don't even carry cash anymore ajk;jdapf;
  • halfcactus: an icon of a manga shiba inu (Default)

    Hunger (2023)

    hunger movie poster

    Aoy, a young woman who runs her family's pad see ew joint, enters the high-stakes, high-pressure world of fine dining and gets a front seat view of its decadence and absurdities.

    The cooking showdowns and menu concepts were artfully done, and the soundtrack was very effective. Half the time I was convinced that we were two seconds from a gruesome murder just because of the music haha.

    The gap between the cinematography and the script was too wide to bridge and the film took itself a bit too seriously to glide over the ill-fitting parts, but it was still really nice to see a Southeast Asian movie take on this format. There was definitely a specificity to some of the shots it took that went over my outsider head. What stuck with me was the undertone of a cautionary tale: that an eldest daughter's lapses into ambition will only drive home the reality that her true place is at home, supporting her parents and her younger siblings. If she was a more well-written protagonist, this wouldn't have been an issue for me. Instead she was just a vehicle between two worlds without a strong sense of self or purpose, so the ending stung for me and my sensitivities.

    Personally I feel like they could have given Aoy more cooking/sports anime protagonist energy too. XD


    作りたい女と食べたい女 She Loves to Cook, She Loves to Eat (S1)

    she loves to cook she loves to eat promotional image

    Jdrama adaptation of a GL manga of the same name: Nomoto, a hobby home cook, feels her cooking options are limited since she lives alone. She also resents how society reduces her passion to a marriageable skill, and yearns for an audience for her craft. One day she gets carried away and makes too much food for herself. Gathering her courage, she seeks out her neighbor who lives two doors away and is conveniently the perfect patron for her art.

    Season 1 was a really cute, short, and low-stakes show at 15 minutes per episode. I haven't read the manga so I was worried that the topic of sexuality wouldn't be addressed, but there's an entire lesbian awakening arc that happens quite naturally and is very nice to see in a woman who's in her twenties/thirties (age is unclear).

    Daisy pointed out that it was nice to have a "one cooks, one eats" romance where both characters are actually pretty competent and self-sufficient, it's just that one of them pursues cooking as a hobby, and... yeah! The dynamic also changes when they become more intimate with each other, and their individual preferences become more apparent both to themselves and the audience. The food they make is very attainable and homey, but with personal or regional twists.

    I personally enjoyed how Kasuga's stoicism and Nomoto's little anxieties are only aspects of their personalities that don't define them any more than their interests; they're both well-socialized introverts with baggage. And on top of that, Nomoto's co-workers are refreshingly... normal. Annoying without being obnoxious, curious without being nosy... just people with their own lives working together.

    Overall, a quick, sweet watch with enough substance to sink one's teeth in! Season 2 is still airing (20 episodes this time!!!), so I'm waiting quite a bit to get into that. :)

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