halfcactus

journal photos: food, jitd vocabulary

The vocab notes have been paying off as I go further in the show. \o/ But I've been too busy just trying to catch up with the episodes to keep at it. ^^;

Media

啞舍 Ya She: Modern-day supernatural donghua about an antique shop owner and a doctor whose fate is tied with his. Not really a fan of the way women were written here—to its credit there were a lot of female characters, but they lacked agency and I was especially annoyed with the subplot with the doctor's patient. Cases were pretty hit-or-miss; my favorite was the Tong Puppet episode. Overall, this was better as a buddy watch than a solo watch, especially with daisydiversions "translating" the dog over voice call. :P

Cheese in the Trap: Modern-day college enemies-to-lovers manhwa where the ML has done a host of truly unforgivable things to the FL, due to a lack of empathy, lack of interest in considering the ripple effects of his machinations, and his own disdain for the FL. He kind of spends the present timeline trying to make up for it, knowing he can't, and fearing he'd lose the FL now that she's entered his orbit and become his world. That the romance is on the unhealthy side makes it more interesting, as does its depiction of socio-economic differences (ML VS everyone else). But the personal conflicts are dragged out—this comic has a brand of wish fulfillment that has all the college drama hashed out over a series of public classroom showdowns and having the crowd pick a "side". IDK why these college students are so invested in each other's lives, to the point of getting involved in the drama?

The best parts were the family storyline—the FL struggles with the pressure of being the eldest daughter; when she changes and asserts her feelings, her family changes with her. I loved watching Inho being folded into that bubble. And I really liked that one of the story arcs was about a gay couple going through the roughest patch of their relationship because of financial stress.

xxxHolic movie:: Wrote about it here.

Fanworks roundup

Fanvid: "Wonderland" (xxxHolic | gen)

Fanvid: "Untouchable Face" (Justice in the Dark | Luo Weizhao x Pei Su)

Fanvid: "the unblooming flowers, the unreturning you" (Justice in the Dark | gen - character study about Pei Su and his grief for his mother)

Fanvid: "The Brightest Star in the Night Sky" (Hikaru no Go/Qihun | gen - everyone x Go)

priest - 默讀 Silent Reading ch 181-183 (roadtrip extras):


Zhang Xincheng - 安慰獎 Consolation Prize:


光·渊 Justice in the Dark eps 9 and 10:


-

Recently:

I've been nursing a minor caustic soda burn on the tip of my right thumb that I got from trying to unclog a drain... It doesn't affect my daily life very much but there's some discoloration underneath the nail, a lesson to have the sense of self-preservation to rinse unwanted substances off immediately. ^^;

Spent Sunday night retrieving my Evernote notebooks through a one-week trial because we were recently talking about xxxHolic and I missed the fic and then I found out that Evernote has been paywalled since I last logged in (2020)... Not sure where to back up these downloaded files haha my hard drive backups are so fractured now.

Summer is truly here. Every day I can feel myself being baked inside these concrete walls. Even wearing my lightest summer clothes hasn't helped at all, the air is so hot, and it's going to get worse for a while. :(

Have been opting to focus on mobility and gentle movement for my ~exercise~ this week so I've gone back to Yoga with Shaunneka's seated flows! She saved me from my back pain and the tantrums I would have pitched because I was hot and tired and cranky lol.

Random internet finds: lalage's Look Back fancomic ; atmo_draws's Flik and Viktor costume art; the FFXIV Journal tag on Bluesky (I've never played FFXIV but I've been enjoying mss3ng's FFXIV journal spreads and I think it's very cool that there's a dedicated tag for it!!!)

Songs: 一蓑煙雨 by Zhang Xincheng & Waltz About Death by Angela Autumn

---

My computer is broken again so it's gonna be another exciting weekend of troubleshooting attempts. I'm not optimistic that reinstalling my OS or restoring from backup will help. :( The silver lining is that I finally managed to send off a long-overdue family photobook for printing a few days ago, and I laid everything out on Canva, so the draft file is on the internet and nothing of value will be lost if I have to restore my computer from the last backup point. (I'm still worried that it will turn out so ugly it's ungiftable but at least it's theoretically reworkable in the future!)

In other news, the new Link Click donghua OP just dropped:


And this is what the band has to say in response to the mass wailing:

Recent fixations:




(Click for full view)

Image 1:
萬千花蕊慈母悲哀 by Collage, a song I've been obsessed with since August... I know it looks like I miswrote 人 as 入 but I swear I didn't!!! I just messed up the warped effect lol.

Image 2:
Fallen London (The name of my Salt Weasel is Radish btw)
Note:"The Reader" tarot sticker is from Scout Craft on Shopee... I originally wanted to stick it on my Kindle case but it didn't really fit with my other Kindle stickers... The rest of the stickers are miscellaneous freebies from small local stationery sellers.

---

My worst journaling habit is that I always start small on the upper left corner, which messes up the composition when I want to build up the page aksj;ajdfapa;.

ETA: Fail Better Games admin has reposted but they were kind enough to ask for permission first...

Chapter 5: mostly uneventful but at least the cover art is beginning to make sense

Chapter 6: Mid-autumn + stormy night hurt/comfort chapter... Jiang Ci really needs to get one of those cat body pillows... A little Xiao Hei nightlight... Or one of those color-changing cat lamps... (Basically everything I can't justify getting for myself because of space + practicality issues lol) (I have a perfectly respectable bolster pillow that I do really like even though it's not cat-shaped)

Somewhat related: tanjiu9's most recent art (4-page comic):

Enjoy a blissful lie-in on weekend morning~ pic.twitter.com/zAv6Zp8xnH

— 坛九 (@tanjiu9) March 9, 2024

They also recently posted Marcille / Falin fanart (2 images)!!!!!

#ダンジョン飯 Growth pic.twitter.com/khEZ8aav0F

— 坛九 (@tanjiu9) March 5, 2024

Lastly, I Ship My Rival X Me manhua, a.k.a. my comfort manhua, has been licensed physically in English and is scheduled to come out in November 2024. The existing translation was readable from what I've read of it, and I expect it's the same team, so... good news to everyone who wasn't able to read everything before they pulled the plug on Bilibili International.

Technically this should be a "top 2" because only Fallen Angels and Leonor Will Never Die made me feel connected from start to finish (Spider-Man: AtSV was also a 4.5/5 movie for me, but took a while to reel me in).
( 2023 movies, books, TV )

Tools used:

Letterboxd Wrapped (3rd party year-in-review generator)

Lastboxd (3rd party collage generator)

StoryGraph Wrapped

Last.FM Playback

---

( 2023 in journal pages )

1) I upgraded from one secondhand phone (iPhone 8, 64GB) to another (iPhone 11 Pro Max, 256GB), and it's been a surprisingly tedious process! Migration took a couple of tries. I was told the battery was still fine but I decided to replace the battery anyway since diagnostics marked it as significantly degraded, and I think it was a reasonable decision???

I also spent some time trying to find a new budget app since the app that I was using to log my expenses has been defunct for years. Ended up with an app that's quite simply called Budget. It's not a super seamless experience but it's close enough to what I need (logging and categorizing).


2) After a solid month of indecision, I got a new planner, one that conveniently starts in December. After going with dateless planners during the pandemic, I'm back to the regular dated life. I went with a Laconic (A5, vertical left), which has an hourly layout on the left and a free grid layout on the right. So far it hasn't fulfilled the fantasy of solving my productivity/laziness issues, but it's nice to be able to block out time visually. Again, not the perfect experience (the allotted daily sections are too small for writing notes, which I like on my dated spaces), but overall it has a lot of nice features.

Months have built-in tabs and every page has a mini-calendar for the quarter. Monthly spreads have ample space for writing on and/or decorating if I ever feel like it. It is, however, 3x pricier than my previous go-to planners (Midori and Muji), so we'll see how much I use it in 2024.



3) I have no photos of it, but I got a new case for my Kindle! My previous one was one of those very cheap China ones (literally shipped from China lol) and the print for the design was SO bad but not worth exchanging. I put up with it for more than a year but I couldn't take it anymore, so I got a no-nonsense clear one this time (though frosted at the back), one I can decorate with cute stickers. ♥ I actually got curious compliments when I took it to a screen protector stall hehe

4) Lastly: got a new personal Instagram account even though I'm not particularly active, because my original one was created for our dog that died a year ago. Not sure if making a new account was a good idea—in some ways it feels like self-erasure because I did have some travel photodumps on my old account, from a much different time that I'll never get back. But I managed to download the data/archive of my original IG, which feels reassuring because a lot of the photos/videos were taken 3 (or 4?) secondhand phones ago.

Reading recently:

Xi Zixu, My Five Elements Lack You: I'm not sure if I'll finish this this year because my ability to read disintegrated again, but I'm at chapter 80+! It's a wildly uneven book and the main romance sucks tbh (though the chapter 81 confession was hilarious) but I'm really fond of Lin Jue, the thirty-something jiejie who has truly weird and scary hobbies and was recently revealed to be grieving a long-term relationship.

Witch Hat Atelier, which I'm buying veeeeery slowly and I'm very grateful for because reading it makes me feel alive and present.

Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, This is How You Lose a Time War: finally picked this up for its 2023 virality, but the writing style and alternate history parts might not be for me, sadly. I'm invested in the main characters' relationship, though.

My Shortbox Comics 2023 haul......... I'm not even sure I'm 1/3 in. XD

But first, my vocabulary list/journal doodles~




小蘑菇 Little Mushroom is a post-apocalyptic novel about a future where gene contamination has caused inter-species mutation all over the world. And the more that humans try to keep their biological humanity intact and survive as a species, the less human they become.

I didn't expect this book to be as bleak as it was but in retrospect it's pretty thematic. It pursues the question of "how far are humans willing to go?" wholly and unflinchingly, and it allows you to inhabit an interesting emotional space as the events unfold before the eyes of a mushroom who has absorbed human genes but doesn't experience emotions or attachment the way that humans (and by extension, the novel readers) do. There is some comedy and humor in between all the horror, so it's not horrifying the whole way but it was still terrible, lol.

The visual aspects of the story are beautifully, vividly rendered, but the worldbuilding is pretty shaky so it was hard for me to predict which details would be plot-relevant or not because there were some aspects that seemed like they could be a cause for concern. I did get a better handle on the storytelling style and its themes in the second half (Roses), which had a longer series of intertwined mysteries and plot points that I was very invested in. I liked having the information spread out and revealed ~organically~, but I'm not sure I enjoyed having all the information slowly trickling in only for later chapters to change the rules.(But it's entirely possible that my perspective of time is skewed from only reading 3 chapters at a time...) The high points for me definitely were the action-horror chapters that An Zhe was a part of! They were horrifying, but wonderfully executed.

Vol2 ends at a really good place where it's not a sudden cliffhanger but still leaves you with all the unanswered questions that An Zhe wasn't invested in finding out.

The English translation does really well with scenery and visual details, because it really felt like I was being drawn to the picture that was in the translator's head, and I genuinely enjoyed the first few chapters. But the longer I was reading the more it felt like an initial pass that was meant to be revisited, with lots of the choices in the later portions feeling rough and cursory. It is readable but not the smoothest experience—I felt this most in the dialogue parts, because they were the parts that I found easiest to read in Chinese, but reading them in English didn't feel as easy?

CONTENT WARNINGS: body horror, gore, giant bugs and worms (horrifying), attempted rape, racism/weird depiction of racism at the beginning (not in the English translation)

Didn't want to lose these links to the chaos of my Twitter timeline:

1) "Chinese people playing Wordle like" [video]: so much happening in this video, I keep rewatching it lol

2) Twitter thread by bjrecio:

One of the things that commonly get lost in translation when talking about "Philippine Myths" to folks outside the country is the idea that they're not... actually myths to us.

(I think this is something that even our diaspora counterparts don't always get.)

I mean, sure, the tikbalang is a cool looking horse creature that haunts our campfire stories. What gets omitted sometimes is that the stories are often first or secondhand. You've either actually encountered a tikbalang before, or know someone who swears that they did.

Do I believe that this encounter actually happened? That's an irrelevant question, I think. What matters is that to our culture, these are real encounters.

I say tabi-tabi po when passing anthills, not out of belief in nuno, necessarily, but because that's part of my culture.

SO TRUE, for our SEAsian neighbors as well, it's also why I feel so strongly about Zen Cho's short fiction. The stories that feature Malaysian mythological creatures inhabit a really familiar space, even for someone like me who grew up in the urban parts of the Philippines. My classmate's sister has encountered a tikbalang (she didn't find out until she played a recording of their interview), my friends have lived near kapres... (I don't really hear these stories in adulthood anymore. Maybe they just don't come up in our conversations, maybe I'm lucky enough to have grandmother who vets houses for supernatural presences, maybe it's a provincial thing, maybe those with higher educational backgrounds don't believe in them--it's hard to tell because I have a hard "no horror or supernatural stories" rule unless it will directly and immediately impact my life lol.)

3) Found my old planners/journals while attempting to declutter, here's a short thread of photos and notes. This is my favorite find hahahaha:


I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to compile these so they don't take up so much space, one whole hardbound or springbound notebook a year adds up. A problem for another day.