halfcactus: an icon of a manga shiba inu (shiba inu しばいぬのあたちたち)
journal photos: food, jitd vocabulary
april monthly spread featuring a lot of food drawings









various justice in the dark vocab represented by drawings and stickers

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 [tumblr.com profile] 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)
  • halfcactus: an icon of a manga shiba inu (Default)
    A bunch of badly taken photos (I really should learn how to take better ones!) of my journal from the first quarter of the year. I'm using an A5 Laconic planner with a little snake on the cover. :>

    JanuaryFor some reason I slapped these on a paper background, idk???





    February






    March








    I was so deep in my manhwa brainrot I didn't have the space to write about them and was already planning to get a Hobonichi for 2026 haha! It's evening out though because April has been a very empty month. I've temporarily moved back to my Field Notes to make my little lists (especially since I just had a bunch of little fandom projects spinning around in my brain and it was kind of driving me crazy) because I'd otherwise just be stuck in my head and bedrotting. I also just got a set of carbon ink refills for my Platinum Preppy, which was how I found out that the reason my writing was so thin and more prone to skipping was because I had been running out of ink this whole time? 😂
    halfcactus: an icon of a manga shiba inu (Default)
    priest - 默讀 Silent Reading ch 181-183 (roadtrip extras):
    五迷三道 bewildered, 骰子 dice, 大款 billionaire/tycoon, 自駕遊 road trip, 下流 obscene

    Zhang Xincheng - 安慰獎 Consolation Prize:
    積攢 accumulate, 鳴謝 formal thanks, 容納 accommodate, 頒發 to confer/award, 槳 oar/paddle

    光·渊 Justice in the Dark eps 9 and 10:
    組織 organization, 實習生 intern, 自由散漫 undisciplined/slacking off, 大尾巴狼 hypocrite

    -

    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: [tumblr.com profile] lalage's Look Back fancomic ; [tumblr.com profile] atmo_draws's Flik and Viktor costume art; the FFXIV Journal tag on Bluesky (I've never played FFXIV but I've been enjoying [tumblr.com profile] mss3ng's FFXIV journal spreads and I think it's very cool that there's a dedicated tag for it!!!)
  • halfcactus: an icon of a manga shiba inu (Default)
    1.
    [community profile] snowflake_challenge #6: Share your favourite piece of original canon.
    I don't have a favorite anything anymore since I have a very short memory and tend to move on from interests... But here's a list of favorites from the last five years:

  • the movie Legend of Hei: there's supposed to be a sequel in the works and I'm worried Xiao Hei will spend less time in his cat form in it. I think his human form is cute too but I have cat bias. XD
  • the manga Witch Hat Atelier: the art, design, and paneling are insanely good, and I cried almost every volume. Not very sure the anime format is for me but I'm excited for it nonetheless!
  • the baihe youth comic 她們的故事 Their Story: Found out recently that there's some controversy(?) around it, but I still love it and it continues to be a comfort reread.
  • the Yoruneko comics, which are about the daily (well, nightly) life of a cat owner: this is also a comfort read and the main reason I still check Twitter, as the artist posts there. There's an animated series too.
  • the webtoon Like Wind on a Dry Branch: I paused at around 100 chapters in (it's ongoing with 200+ chapters), but it was the most invested I was in a canon in a while, a rare occurrence. It has some of my fav tropes too, ie. hurt/comfort and demons raising a human child :'D

    I guess it's easier to say that my favorite medium is comics these days... I need to relearn how to read books without illustrations. ^^;


    2.
    Vocabulary list from the first chapter of 全宇宙最后一只猫 The Last Cat in the Universe (which I'm dropping because I'm looking for shorter or maybe less webnovel-y reads):
    journal photo: vocabulary from The Last Cat in the Universe chapter 1

    3.
    Recent bookmarks:
  • Public Domain Archive: you can filter by style, time period, and tag!
  • Ellipsus: supposedly a Google Docs alternative.
  • halfcactus: an icon of a manga shiba inu (Default)
    張新成 - 一蓑煙雨 "he lingers on be like butter on toast / i wish he could see i love him the most"

    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:
    BaishaJAWS 15h agoThanks so much you guys for liking this OP! We are sobbing but we still stand firm on the previous statement that this song is not a tear jerker. This animation is just too good to not cry a little bit. We never saw the visuals until today so apologies for not thinking about it all the way through. We love you guys, thank you for supporting Link Click and us!
    halfcactus: an icon of a manga shiba inu (Default)
    Reading log + discussions:
  • Chapter 1-2
  • Chapter 3-7
  • Chapter 8
  • Chapter 9
  • Chapter 10-12
  • Chapter 13
  • Chapters 14–15
  • Chapter 16
  • Chapters 17–18
  • Chapters 19-20
  • Chapters 21–22
  • Chapters 23–24.5
  • Chapters 25–26 ([personal profile] dayadhvam_triad shared a link to the timeline of novel events) (major spoilers)
  • Chapters 27–28
  • Chapters 29-32 ([personal profile] dayadhvam_triad shared a 50-minute Bilibili review)


    Vocabulary log (compiled on Tumblr)
    forum, serialize, data, internet mass hunt, negativity, turn oneself in, flustered

    crab, author, keyboard, pond, customer service, multitasking, bear the consequences

    drawing of a newly poured cup of tea with the caption "a euphemism for interrogation"



    No brain left to talk about any of it, but I finally managed to cross things off my reading list:
  • 桥头楼上 End of the Bridge, Top of the Tower by priest (fiction, mystery/thriller, ~120k words)
  • Halo-Halo Manila by Jimmeh Aitch (nonfiction comic, 80 pages)
  • 陰間沒有珍奶嗎? Is There Boba in the Underworld? by 接骨木花 (fiction, m/m romance with supernatural elements, 10k words)
  • halfcactus: an icon of a manga shiba inu (Default)
    Recent fixations:


    Journal page - 萬千花蕊慈母悲哀
    Journal page - Fallen London
    (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...
    halfcactus: an icon of a manga shiba inu (Default)
    Originally meant to read two chapters / week, something I managed to do with the two other cnovels I finished this year, but my ability to focus on anything has been in shambles. I'm lucky if I even finish a chapter a week. /o\

    Reading log:
  • Chapter 1-2
  • Chapter 3-7
  • Chapter 8
  • Chapter 9
  • Chapter 10-12
  • Chapter 13


    Vocabulary log

    Chapters 1 - 7:
    QTLS vocab  (chapter 1-5)

    QTLS vocab (webnovel things)

    Miao Miao chapter and onwards:
    QTLS vocab (Miao Miao chapters)



    Anxiety / attention / dysfunction things
    I'm trying to get back into journaling for the 398740340th time so my brain can calm down, but once again I'm lucky if I even manage to take down my (work) notes and to-do-list... for the past week, I've been going rogue and starting new unrelated and unimportant tasks that I've been procrastinating from for years... and once I stop, I never continue any of them either. So now my workspace is just a map of my distractions. Here are the papers I was shredding before I got up to answer a call, there are the pile of files I was sorting.... Here are the objects I meant to move to a more logical place when I was cleaning out a drawer, there is the folder I moved so I could have a smoother workflow to finish that 10-minute task. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    Meanwhile I'm barely keeping up with the more "important" aspects of my work... I can project the illusion of working hard and getting big stuff done, but there's so much that has fallen under the cracks and that I've shoved away from view, in the hopes that future!me will feel like picking them up. 😂

    Similarly, I spend all my free time trying to read/watch ten minutes of something new and inevitably I give up and get stuck in a loop of trying to figure out how to optimize my "fun" time. I've been having sleep issues again too, so I think... my anxiety has come back to take over my life. XD I spent most of July avoiding all thought and sleeping as much as I can, and maybe that helped a bit, because my insomnia and intense midnight hunger pangs haven't been as bad as they were in the first half of the year... But I'd really like to be able to just relax like a normal person haha.
  • halfcactus: an icon of a manga shiba inu (Default)
    She Belongs to Me  chapter 5 vocabulary log

    She Belongs to Me chapter 6 notes

    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: [profile] tanjiu9's most recent art (4-page comic):


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



    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.
    halfcactus: an icon of a manga shiba inu (Default)
    (I can't write 屬 aksdja;kfa)

    (I also keep meaning to post my vocabulary journaling for Little Mushroom and My Five Elements Lack You from 2023 but _(:3」∠)_)

    she belongs to me chapters 1-2 vocabulary log

    she belongs to me chapter 3-4 vocabulary



    Trying to retain more longer phrases / idiomatic expressions... let's see how long I keep at it haha.

    Reading notes: chapter 3
    halfcactus: angry yanyan (yanyan >:()
    Letterboxd Wrapped - 2663 minutes with comedy as the top genre and Fallen Angels as the top movie

    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



    WIP of a watercolor Aurora
    2023 journal cover with a mushroom sticker placed on top of a watercolored aurora
    2023 in journal pages )
  • halfcactus: an icon of a manga shiba inu (Default)
    photo of a cup of Sunsoya instant matcha latte
    a cup of instant matcha latte with the words 'Hot Drink Weather' drawn and written with colored marks

    I want to make a journaling journal but I can't quite figure out which platform / approach is best for it. ;__; It probably should be Tumblr, but I haven't been in a Tumblr mood recently. Still have some spreads from (or for) 2023 that I've been too lazy to post here...
    halfcactus: an icon of a manga shiba inu (Default)


    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
  • halfcactus: an icon of a manga shiba inu (Default)
    I really wanted to unwind and recalibrate my mind, and thankfully there was a Calvin Klein event that Zhang Xincheng (among others) participated in. It was mostly just him promoting the product, interacting with fans, and playing unremarkable games onstage and streaming on Taobao, so I just put that on the background and did a little journaling hehe. It was nice! There were musical acts before he showed up, so it kind of felt like going to a friend's gig, hanging around the venue and doing other things while waiting for their set to start. :')

    (Images hotlinked from Twitter.)




    I don't actually know how to watercolor, I just followed this watercolor aurora tutorial on Youtube haha—didn't quite succeed, but it works for what I ended up using it for. :D

    PS. The Niangzi Is Rio mug was a gift from [tumblr.com profile] umichii, and too large/heavy to drink from (unless soup), so it's a watercolor mug now hahaha.

    I (FINALLY!!!) finished Little Mushroom novel, so I'm free from reading obligations for a while; I had some other books I was in the middle of (a Ted Chiang anthology + A Gentleman in Moscow) but I kind of lost my ability to read, oops. I found out that some manga IS actually compatible with my Kindle, and while I can't actually afford to buy several volumes in one go (which will only be a problem till I catch up on a canon), I'm still really excited to be able to read and properly look at the art in e-ink, especially since majority of my hobbies involve a heavy amount of screen time. I got the first volume of Witch Hat Atelier, and it was worth every penny. The art is beautiful and it spends a lot of time on the sigils, which is fun! The downside is that there's no Table of Contents to help you navigate through the chapters, and I can't add notes either (just unnamed bookmarks), but it's a small tradeoff to get the same visual experience (and lack of eyestrain) of a physical manga without having to own it physically.

    + Movies that are on my to-watch list (so I don't forget):
  • Marry My Dead Body: Taiwanese supernatural, LGBT-adjacent comedy that just came out. Might pitch this as a groupwatch (since we're on a Taiwanese media streak), but I'm still a bit tentative, haha. This one has Greg Hsu as a cop character who's forced to help a gay ghost with his unfinished business so he can reincarnate.

  • Before, Now, and Then: historical Indonesian movie set in 1940 and 1965, and seems to be about women. Highly recommended by [twitter.com profile] dramateaque, who loves Kamila Andini's direction and has given me most of the information and warnings (...or non-warning haha; I was afraid it'd be violent) I need to hopefully proceed with watching this someday. It's kind of artsy and beautifully filmed, from the screencaps that I've seen.

  • Polite Society: an [twitter.com profile] aartichapati rec; looks like a fun family-centric (sisters!) and high-energy comedy about a British-Pakistani teenager who does martial arts and aspires to be a stunt double.

  • Filipino movies that have been on my watchlist for a while: Ang Larawan (movie-musical, historical, based on a play I haven't read lmfao) and Saving Sally (romcom, animation)
  • halfcactus: an icon of a manga shiba inu (Default)
    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)
    halfcactus: an icon of a manga shiba inu (Default)
    It's weird to think that I used to be glued to Adobe software to the point that I felt fused to them, and now I can go half a year without creating something new--in this case, it's not really by choice, because ongoing tech issues... But I do spend every successive year trying to chase the drive and hyperfocus of my younger self, which I guess is my version of romanticizing my youth! A lot of the stuff I used to make were really ugly LOL but at least I was adventurous and knew how to do a lot of things. These days I feel like I'm restarting from zero.

    Dreamwidth was originally planned to be a casual low-pressure art/fanworks blog but guess what sometimes life gets away from you and suddenly you're a Zhang Xincheng bot. I really wanted to get my life together and hustle but here I am, wrestling with technology and losing gracefully by making my favorite celebrity a means for content creation.

    Anyway here's some stuff I did this week (...in a span of 4 days), either because I was testing my problematic computer or because I'm trying to learn to do stuff without a computer (ie. video editing on my tablet and my newly acquired pink wireless keyboard that I bought off a friend). Desktop computer is still my battleground of choice though, as unwieldy as it is. I'm just not hip enough to learn mobile/tablet technology. :(



    a Nobuta wo Produce (now on Netflix!) throwback ♥


    +3 process photos, from an unrelated journal sketch to Photoshop )


    Zhang Xincheng things (all done on mobile/tablet!)

  • Subbed: 仟 Qian, a Zhang Xincheng original song (you can download an mp3 rip here)

  • Subbed: Zhang Xincheng's performance of an original song that then transitions to Jay Chou's Chrysanthemum Bed: This is a much older video, during his My Huckleberry Friends days. Vocals start out a bit flat, and his piano chord choices in the last bit sound debatable to me... but Chrysanthemum Bed is my favorite Jay Chou (+ Vincent Fang) song ever, so just hearing my favorite actor sing it makes me happy. XD He certainly deserves bonus points for basically remixing the song and having the original verse tie into the feeling of the chorus. And it really is a joy to know that he's improved so much vocally since this video, which was a solid performance featuring piano-playing and catchy composition. ♥

  • Subbed: Zhang Xincheng's douyin where he has to uphold his reputation of being a Jay Chou fan.

    I kind of feel like I've been transitioning to video-based fanworks since last year, and maybe I should do a post for... apps (desktop and iOS)... because I've tried quite a few, with needs that are both too specific and casual haha. I've been really impressed with how technology has advanced enough that I can do basic editing + subbing on my phone (even though it makes my phone get hot), and I'm fascinated with the features in mobile apps. A lot of them annoy me because they're more cosmetic effects than function, especially when it comes to captioning/typesetting features... I can see why, and I even think it's cool that they exist, it's just surprising to me that subtitle tracks aren't a thing in iMovie (iOS) and Adobe Premiere Rush (iOS)... though I suppose I haven't used either of those even in desktop form, so I'm not sure if you could have done that on desktop. I did all the editing and captioning in last year's fanvids in Da Vinci Resolve... which sadly does not have a mobile version. Its features were pretty ideal to me. :(
  • halfcactus: an icon of a manga shiba inu (Default)
    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 [twitter.com profile] 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.

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