halfcactus

Most of these I've been reading on and off for 3+ months and only just finished. I also accidentally closed all my tabs in my mobile browser, so my reading list got even cleaner. ^^;

Burning Houses & Hush Harbor by Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta

Two poetry collections compiled in one volume.

This made me feel extremely un-literary but it did make me slow down and take my time reading each poem and enjoying the rhythm. I posted some of them here: Crust of Bread, and Such—, Gilding, Landscape, Phototaxis, Stay, Temper/7 Down

-

Water Moon by Samantha Sotto Yambao

Romance/fantasy novel set in modern-day Tokyo. The FL is the heir to a mystical pawnshop that trades in forfeited choices, and the ML is a Japanese-diaspora scientist who stumbles upon it. Together they traverse the fantastical twists and turns of Other Tokyo in search of the FL's missing father.

I wanted to like this because the author is Filipino and the "magical shop" concept seems hard to mess up, but...
( Read more... )

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The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry by C.M. Waggoner

Fun, quirky, sweet, and occasionally dark f/f romantasy about a petty criminal from the slums with a knack for fire magic. Faced with the threat of eviction, she joins a team of ladies who are tasked to escort and protect a soon-to-be-wed noble. Among the recruits are a motherly necromancer, a daughterly shapeshifter, an uptight magician in wizarding school, and the love interest—a posh half-troll, half-human illusionist/combatant named Winn.

The MC is a prickly bi disaster with a lot of flings and the FL is cheerfully warm, easygoing, and socially adept in most situations, but sheltered, shy, and prim when it comes to romantic relationships.
( Read more... )

tl;dr - Great protagonist, great ensemble cast and character voices (this would be great as an audio drama), great angst, with a well-paced romance arc with interesting conflicts. Made me feel things. And Buttons the familiar is amazing.

Recently read/watched and too lazy to write about:

Webtoons: Marry My Husband; The Remarried Empress (dropping at S4, which is ongoing); 穿越成反派要如何活命 To Be or Not To Be / How To Survive As a Villain (DNF)

TV: 女世子 The Heiress

Movies: 不說話的愛 Mumu (2025); Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy (2025); The Quiet Girl (2022)

Books: Burning Houses & Hush Harbor
( one last poem from that collection )

Current Music: Chappell Roan - Casual

Just found out from this post that Andrea Gibson has passed away... I don't listen to a lot of spoken-word but I remember them being one of my introductions to it, alongside Sarah Kay. More importantly theirs were the first poems I've read that were about gender, and I think that changed me, in a way.

Anyway, I reread Take Me With You last night, so here are some passages from it.

( Read more... )

Gilding

Some darkness practicing on a tomcat. —Isak Dinesen

Anything dear requires a bit of shine:
Relic and surface, mirror and frame.
What's common as dust desires its burnish.

A poem is a public photograph in gold.
Pounded to leaf, a hard emotion
Is both delicate and strong,

Turns whisper-thin, and shines.
Handled with bare hands, it can tear
And collapse, practically, into thin air.

When I kiss your cheek, I let the blur
Into the flame; I let the flint inside
The skin; I lead the groove into the swelter,

And let you in. Love practices on us
Like darkness on a tomcat, turning us fine

As gloss bristled on wood. See how
The surface shines and will not hold?
See how we tear like burnished gold.

Landscape

In love, the landscape changes. Bridges are half-
way points. No one knows where they begin or end.

The sun cuts through a mesh of beams
And suddenly, one walks into light as one might

Walk into perfume; knows the exact moment
Lilac bleeds into orange, and after that, musk.

Language finds its tongue in want, and there are
Many words for absence: acute, wild, and night

Perpetual. But when we speak of the end of love,
We might as well speak of the end of language,

The way specialists tell of a dying English: words
So quickly on the move, their meanings change.

Dirty, for one, and then, arcane.
What survives are words so old, we speak them now

As in ancient lore: one and two, and later, four.
Staying words every clock keeps, at any time.

No one but the lover knows the oldest words are
The first to go: I, for one, and the brevity of you,

In an arcane bar, the words dirty with longing.

From Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta's Hush Harbor:

Crust of Bread, and Such—

Neither the risen dough, or the plush
Square with its savory load, drip
Of marmalade or butter—I want the morsel,
The plate peppered with crumbs, the crust
Of bread. I want the edges, jagged where the knife
Kneads its urgent imprecisions, the scrawny
Bit on precious China. I want a small heart,
The color of old quarts and burnt rust.
Let stars do their work on an opposite sky,
Constellate the impossible shape
Of a far boy. Which is to say, I'm through
With want, as a cleaver to his crust.
I'm done the way rain is done
With its tinny shudder crossing glass;
The way the heart is done doing time
In a hard place—a clear shimmer of sky
Begging the same question, What?
What do you want?

Phototaxis

It's all the same with fire and flame,
The yellow rim of the brightest
candle. See how they hover and start
in wild flight without cause or aim,
pursue the yellow folly. A woman tells me
love is buckle on skin, whisk of a whip
at its hardest shake. The bright blue gash
on her inner thigh as he presses her
against the wall, saying sorry, sorry—
give to any plum wound
a dark arithmetic, and it evens out love.
Two moths around a hollow shoot,
lit by a thin saber of light. Science tells us
they think it's the moon, but it won't be long
before the low plummet down.
Like moths to a flame, we say, but we call
only half the story. It might be the light
we know is the light by which we fall.
It might be. Come here.

Added Burning Houses & Hush Harbor by Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta to my reading rotation because I realized I could acquire it through Shopee. \o/ I've only gone through a few of the poems, which made me starkly feel that I was not smart or literary enough, but Temper/7 Down has sat in my brain for days and days and maybe that's enough. It's part of a section that's formatted as a series of crossword puzzle hints, so I guess it makes sense for me to still be trying to follow the emotional threads.

Here's the full poem, which I worked hard to format with html.

Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta, "Temper/7 Down"

Hellions in your novels balled fists Inside trouser pockets. You never let A belt lick welts on a child's thigh.
	Barroom rakes, at the slightest libel Dream of triggers and knives. You never put a wife in place
With a shake or a sharp word. Stones were paperweights for Memos. Knives were cameos
	Mounted on walls or tucked In a safe. And pity the man You would not hate, him you'd
Consecrate with your indifference. Best was how you taught a child To spit her rage like a catcher
	To his mitt, and hurl with all Her bile and length, Neither glass nor stone,
Only the brittle shells Of eggs her throw Broke against the wall.
	Temper: to see in red, To lose control. But also This: to curb, to hold.

I made a Justice in the Dark gifset based on the last three lines:
jitd gif: temper

+5 more gifs

Also on tumblr

Creation notes:

I used a ripped paper texture for the big paper background, but for the paper strips—I was playing around and found that Resolve has a Paper Edges effect omggggggg

For the fonts—I was looking for a suitably distressed font and suddenly remembered Eduardo Recife's Misprinted Type. I wondered if his website was still up and it is! :D I've never really been able to incorporate his fonts/textures into my fanwork, but for this I used his Misproject font.

Here is the first flush of May
And soon I will discover whether birds of the summer
Fly in circles or just fly away
(A Fine Frenzy has been making a comeback in my playlists lately; I always associated Bomb in a Birdcage with a period in my life that I've left behind, but now I associate it with now too.)

+ A poem from The Invention of the Darling that seems quite relevant to my current fandom:

"Radiant Abyss" by Li-Young Lee

Come inside
this blizzard of falling apple blossoms.

It's light in here.
Let me look at you.

Surrounded by all of this brightness
flying apart, shining
dismantled to make room for more shining,

one of us should say something.
Or we should both say something, something true
before we were born, true
while we lived and true
after we're gone.

Nowhere long, these petals fall
out of one realm
and into another, state after state.

In the midst
of these petals hurrying
and our own falling and forgetting,

I look into your eyes
and spy over my shoulder
an avalanche of flowers plunging into an abyss.

rita dove - mirror (a poem in the shape of a mirror

Text version

Tried recreating the formatting with HTML and hope it displays as intended:

Mirror
take this
from
me:
my blasted gaze,
sunken
astonishment. Resolve
memory & rebuild; shame'll
dissolve
under powder pressed into
my skin.

Oh, avalanche, my harbor:
can I
look
over you,
pit & pustule, crease & blotch,
without seeing
you through you—
if all I am
(Am I all?)
is Woe is
me?

Mirror,
this take
from
me:
gaze blasted, my
sunken
resolve, astonishment.
Shame'll rebuild & memory
dissolve
into pressed powder under
skin, my

harbor, my avalanche. Oh
I can
look
you over,
blotch & crease, pustule & pit—
seeing without
you, through you.
Am I all if
all I am
is Woe is
me?

- - -
Finally finished watching the Link Click live action adaptation but unable to write about it because of computer issues that I have yet to troubleshoot. Gonna trying to do a clean reinstall of my OS soon, but am fearing the worst. Happy Holidays! I hope everyone got to enjoy good food and good weather.

Subbed this song last Sunday and only looking at it again today. I figured I should take note of my references so I can find them again...

Watch on YouTube

It's the promotional song for what appears to be a musical about... poetry?? Su Dongpo?? Even though I am, as

gixininja puts it, "out of the pit", I'm still very happy to hear ZXC sing this! He gets to utilize his toolkit as a musical actor more fully, which I like. I know I'm biased because I just read the lyrics, but I love the operatic flair in the verses and the way it genuinely evokes a sense of there being an audience to hear a recitation.

I'm still very ??? at the song because I don't read Chinese poetry, don’t know anything about Su Dongpo’s life, and have no idea how to read poetic language, and was mostly Googling phrases and playing connect-the-dots. (Never mind preserving the structure and flow when I'm still chewing over everything.)

Notes

一山一水一扁舟 / 一路烟尘一世游 / 一俯一仰一声笑 / 一轮明月一江秋

Reference: 一字诗 (陈沆)—this poem is borrowed almost word-for-word, and sets up the structure of the entire song (made of the character for "one"): "一帆一桨一渔舟，一个渔翁一钓钩。 / 一俯一仰一场笑，一江明月一江秋。"

缘来缘去 / 一程去留浑无意

Notes: The overall feeling for me is that fate comes and goes like the flowing river that appears in the first verse, and there's nothing you can do about it. It's still unclear to me whose 去留 is to be 无意'd. 一程 makes it feel like a crucial stage in one's life, maybe?

谁怨谁怕 / 一蓑烟雨任平生

Reference: 定风波·莫听穿林打叶声 (苏轼): "竹杖芒鞋轻胜马，谁怕？一蓑烟雨任平生。"

几时归去 / 对一张琴 / 一壶酒一溪云

Reference: 行香子·述怀 (苏轼): "几时归去，作个闲人。对一张琴，一壶酒，一溪云。 "

Recently:

Finished our groupwatch for The Makanai, which was like Midnight Diner but set in the bubble of a maiko house that seems quite untouched by time, external circumstances, and financial issues. The main characters are two childhood friends who left their home in Aomori to share a dream. Momoko, the older and peerless zombie-obsessed geiko who's sorely in need of a rival, is AMAZING.

We're watching To the Wonder next, the eight-episode drama adaptation of Li Juan's essays about living in Altay.

Got back into games by deciding to DNF FE3H—I was still in my first playthrough (Golden Deer route), but it just wasn't sparking joy anymore, in spite of my love for Hilda. I've instead picked up Eiyuden Chronicle as my new fixation. I'd Kickstarted it a while back in a fit of Suikoden nostalgia, but over the years my excitement fizzled away and I didn't feel a single thing when it was finally released a couple months ago. Now that I am playing it, I have SO MANY thoughts about it, and I really hope I don't lose interest after 20 hours... or after 20 recruitments...

I also found out that you can track Switch sales through Deku Deals and spent some time scrolling through it while waiting for my battles to load (the Switch version of Eiyuden takes FOREVER for battles to load). I got Wandersong as a treat since it was on sale for $5 but I have nooooo idea if I'll ever play it. (I'm mostly waiting for Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective to go on sale, because I just played the demo version where I got to save a brave little doggie. ;___;)

My reading brain which had only just come back to life is now offline again. D: I'm hoping to be able to keep reading 1-2 chapters of 橋頭樓上 a week because I really don't want to lose track of the plot... It's the kind of book where you have to pay attention to the little details + I don't have a fantranslation to fall back on if I'm unclear about what's happening. Why can't I have more than 1 brain???

TV/Movies

Theater Camp (2023)
Musical theater camp mockumentary mainly following two seasoned teachers and an influencer who has no idea how to run anything. I didn't care for these three main characters but I did find all the theater jokes very fun and was thoroughly moved by the payoff in Glenn's storyline (+ the kids). Also felt that Ayo Edebiri's character was underused? I wanted to know more about the kids on their own as well.

An Ancient Love Song (2023)

A historian travels back in time and meets the Demon Queen he had written about in his book, which propels him into a quest to rewrite history in every way he can. (Daisy rightfully called this "method writing". XD)

At 14 episodes that are each 30 minutes long, this is a highly finishable drama that captures the feeling of the webnovel in a way that I think is refreshingly old-school. The main characters aren't particularly unique on their own, but they balance the story very well between their relationships. Production values are maximized and editing/directing are marvelously done—there's a strong sense of point-of-view, some well-timed comedy, and fight scenes I don't zone out of.

The FL has a role and arc that's usually reserved for MLs and I love that so much about her as well as for the actress who gets to play a character which such range. It is SO satisfying to get to the point where she's peeled back to her final timeline and layer. Also loved her brother's storyline is also about gender stereotypes/expectations but for boys.

Cons: I feel like they could have gone harder on the music + songwriting aspects between the two main characters, and I wish the conflict wasn't as centered on the prime minister + politics (which contains the flavor of nationalism that stereotypes the ~barbaric northerners~). But at least the plot is just a backdrop for a relationship-driven story whose weaknesses outweigh its strengths.

PS. All palace dramas should include a scene where the emperor gets an eggducation. XD

Books/Comics

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Enemies-to-lovers novel in epistolary format as two highly competent agents from opposing sides leave each other letters in the time war. I found the writing flowery and distracting at first, but it grew one me as we spent more time with the characters. Plot was self-contained but a bit too lean for me—I could have done with more meat and tendon.

Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza by Mosab Abu Toha

IN THE WAR: YOU AND HOUSES

You fight. You
die.
You’ll never know who won or lost,
or if the war ever ended.

They didn’t find a place to bury you.
They carried you on their shoulders,
wandered through the neighborhood,
stopped at your childhood school
and the old park.

The houses never saw you.
They’ve already packed their bags.
Dust has erected a tent in the corners.
Rust has landed with its worn-out clothes on the tap
and on the spoon.
It steals from the water its soft slide,
while you,
you sleep on moving sand.

(I got my copy from Publishers for Palestine.)

Winnie Chua, "A Walk in a Park"

some images

A gorgeous and moving meditation about not knowing how to live your life that landed on all the right spots for me since I too have been Going Through It this year and trying to do things to get out of my head—trying to find myself in the world around me.

Audiodrama extra where Lu Feng gets An Zhe to do a little teaching demo.

Watch on YouTube

Watch on Dailymotion | Watch on Tumblr

Poem: 偶成 by 戴望舒

Poem translation by Rita Wong & Andrew Wong (link below contains translation notes)
https://modernchinesepoems.blogspot.com/2016/03/dai-wangshu-lines-completed-by-chance.html

如果生命的春天重到，
古舊的凝冰都嘩嘩地解凍，
那時我會再看見燦爛的微笑，
再聽見明朗的呼喚——這些迢遙的夢。

這些好東西都決不會消失，
因為一切好東西都永遠存在，
它們只是像冰一樣凝結，
而有一天會像花一樣重開。

If spring in life arrives again,
The old, stale and stagnant waters would thaw, and thaw into streams;
Thence, I would see again, the beaming smiles,
Hear again, the clear, cheery calls----ah these my distant, distant dreams.

These things bright and beautiful, surely, could never be gone,
Because all things bright and beautiful, do forever exist, survive;
They are, like water turned ice, just frozen,
And someday, like flowering trees, they shall blossom again and thrive.

Cross-posting from Little Mushroom Reading Club because I like keeping track of links and resources.

This is the poem that Bai Nan writes from memory in an exam, with these passages quoted:

"你们的身体
还挣扎着
想要回返。"

"而无名的野花
已在头上开满。"

Translated in the licensed English translation of the novel as:

Your bodies
still struggle
to return.

And yet the nameless wildflowers
have bloomed amply upon your heads.

FULL TEXT:
〖森林之魅〗
The Charm of the Forest

Chinese text source:
http://www.shigeku.com/xlib/xd/300/4004_mudan.html

English text source:
https://www.bannedbook.org/en/bnews/lishi/20180810/983731.html

在阴暗的树下，在急流的水边，
Under the gloomy tree, by the water's edge of the rapids,
逝去的六月和七月，在无人的山间，
The passing June and July, among the deserted mountains,
你们的身体还挣扎着想要回返，
Your body^[1] is still struggling to return,
而无名的野花已在头上开满。
And the unnamed wild flowers are already full on the head.

那刻骨的饥饿，那山洪的冲击，
That bitter hunger, the impact of the mountain torrent,
那毒虫的啮咬和痛楚的夜晚，
The bite of the poisonous insect and the painful night,
你们受不了要向人讲述，
You can’t bear to tell people,
如今却是欣欣的树木把一切遗忘。
Now it is Xinxin's forest^[2] that has forgotten everything.

过去的是你们对死的抗争，
The past is your struggle against death,
你们死去为了要活的人们的生存，
You die for the survival of the people who want to live,
那白热的纷争还没有停止，
The white-hot dispute has not stopped,
你们却在森林的周期内，不再听闻。
But you no longer hear it during the forest cycle.

静静的，在那被遗忘的山坡上，
Quietly, on the forgotten hillside,
还下着密雨，还吹着细风，
It was still raining, and there was a gentle breeze,
没有人知道历史曾在此走过，
No one knows that history has gone through here,
留下了英灵化入树干而滋生。
The heroic spirits were left to grow in the trunk.

^[1] Some versions of the text appear to have 你的身体 (your body) instead of 你们的身体 (your bodies)
^[2] I think this just means a flourishing forest, but what do I know lol

Happy Mid-Autumn!

Spent a fair amount of the weekend with family because relatives had flown in for a wedding the following day (my cousin's cousin). Also read 繁星, Bing Xin's collected poetry fragments, because Zhang Xincheng was doing a reading for the Mid-Autumn Festival Gala... ended up subbing it myself and reading the English translation (book link: A Maze of Stars and Spring Water), a worthwhile exercise since the original text was still pretty fresh in my head and I could follow along the translation choices. Posting the original text + translations here for my reference!

My translation:

Watch on YouTube

Idk if this makes sense, but I consider myself more of a subber than a translator, so generally I don't think my "translations" hold up in text form haha. I love how the video format allows me to disregard form and line breaks, because as much as I enjoy reading freeform poetry I have nooooo understanding of the craft.

I don't really have any notes, other than me giving up on finding synonyms for "deep" so I subbed it with words for distance, and that the line 灿烂光中的休息处 is very much open to interpretation, so I went with the image that was in my head when I was reading it.

( My translation (line by line with the original Chinese text) )

Published translation (it's unclear who translated it):
Source: A Maze of Stars and Spring Water
( 'A maze of stars glistens...' )

Art recs (mostly Mid-Autumn related)

washanapple: Happy Mid-autumn Festival

[Legend of Hei] The Legend of Hei Mid-Autumn 2022 art

[Legend of Hei]

naconaco757: The Legend of Hei Mid-Autumn (behind the scenes)

[Qihun]

dcbananagirl: Shi Guang and Yu Liang

[Qihun]

wwKjjaww Chu Ying :(((((((

Yoruneko anime: Mid-Autumn art

[Legend of Hei]

Eurya8 cute GIF of Xiao Hei and A-Gen!

[comic]

onenhillion: notes on happiness: Happiness used to feel like a coin toss

Games:
The Cyphstress; Book Reprocessing Machine 5; Six Cats Under.
Thoughts in this post.

Books:
Ada Limón, "The Carrying"; Agha Shahid Ali, "The Half-Inch Himalayas". Both poetry collections.
( some excerpts: Contract Says: We'd like the Conversation To Be Bilingual; Postcard from Kashmir; The Dacca Gauzes )

TV:
Under the Skin
[livetweet thread, with comments from the groupwatch]

A 20-episode crime drama starring Tan Jianci as Shen Yi, an all-around artist most known for his age regression drawings. Due to the trauma of having his art used to commit murder, he has decided to become a cop and aid in investigations using his artistic superpowers.

Overall, not a good crime show, but very good for art shenanigans. The first half is frankly bad at both crime writing and tying the episodes together; cases were abruptly dropped with no sense of closure, jumping straight to the intro of the next case, which was very confusing. It was also very hard to tell characters apart, which I think was a big flaw in a show where face recognition is crucial.

I had huge problems with the way this show treated women—in its attempts to be empathetic to women, to criticize sexism and patriarchal systems, and to explain why crimes against women are unreported, the show unfortunately comes across as quite gratuitous with sexualized violence.

superborb mentions in her post that the show also comes across as unintentionally sexist when it casts two men as the main PoV characters and investigators.

However, I did love Shen Yi's art montages and superpowers, and the art-related comedy. I loved them a lot!!! And I think Shen Yi's process is executed especially well in the second half, in the bomb case. The payoff for that case was very good. (Other fav scenes: Shen Yi confronting a criminal in the only way he knows how in episode 16; Shen Yi pulling an extremely funny and extremely effective power move as an audience member in the final episode).

I didn't care about the bromance/subtext because I disliked Du Cheng (the angry cop), but it is otherwise very shippy. They look married in the end. ^^;

This show contains: multiple rape and sexual assault cases (one of them badly handled, imo); CSA; cute but sad girlfriends (x2); gratuitous domestic violence—the scene goes on for much, much longer than it has to be

Podcasts
I'm still not in a podcast mood, but I tried a couple: the first was The Beef and Dairy Podcast, which was... an experience... The other was Hari Kondabalu's episode on Feeling Seen, a Maximum Fun podcast, which I think is about connecting to movies/media?

. . .part of the experience of being a POC is that, out of a sense of necessity, we have to see the humanity in whiteness. . . . the reason why i think this is some weird homework assignment is that i’m the only one doing the homework

aartichapati also recommended Kondabalu's Code Switch episode: Sometimes Explain, Always Complain. Haven't listened it yet but I really enjoyed hearing his PoV about race and representation, so I'm putting it here for bookmarking purposes lol.

Misc.

cuuuuuute art about cats vs new boxes!!! by

kyuryuZ who draws the cutest comics about being a cat owner

Frankenstories: a collaborative writing game. Bookmarking for my writer friends because Gartic Phone is getting old. XD

Japanese Man Spends £12,480 To Look Like a Dog (he commissions a very expensive costume)

Lastly, a collage of personal photos from May, which was kind of eventful:
( photos )

Out here, there’s a bowing even the trees are doing.

Winter’s icy hand at the back of all of us.

Black bark, slick yellow leaves, a kind of stillness that feels

so mute it’s almost in another year.

I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.

We point out the stars that make Orion as we take out

the trash, the rolling containers a song of suburban thunder.

It’s almost romantic as we adjust the waxy blue

recycling bin until you say, Man, we should really learn

some new constellations.

And it’s true. We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus,

Draco, Lacerta, Hydra, Lyra, Lynx.

But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too, my mouth is full

of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising—

to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward

what’s larger within us, toward how we were born.

Look, we are not unspectacular things.

We’ve come this far, survived this much. What

would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?

What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.

No, to the rising tides.

Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?

What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain

for the safety of others, for earth,

if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified,

if we launched our demands into the sky, made ourselves so big

people could point to us with the arrows they make in their minds,

rolling their trash bins out, after all of this is over?

SO MANY UNCOMPLETED THINGS THIS MONTH

( the justice, our times, squid game, nodame cdrama, my huckleberry friends, deaf republic )

Stuff I did: a scattering of spur-of-the-moment drafts that I have no intention of finishing

遙遠的歌 (My Huckleberry Friends ED) translation
遙遠的歌 piano whatever (LH notes if I ever want to revisit: B F# D# B / B G# B F# / F# C# F# F#)
Couple of Mirrors OP - piano whatever (chords if I ever want to revisit: D F A / Bf D F / A C F / C E G, pretty simple)

Miscellaneous Finds

undemanding → halfcactus

I don't feel strongly about the name, but for now it's probably good to narrow my online identities to 2 main usernames haha. Have also updated the FFXV fancomics recs post because I had some unposted backlog.

Media I'm into these days:

我磕了对家X我的CP manhua is baaaaack with Vol.4 as of last weekend! So cute, so sweet, GYL so 委屈 and still happily pinching WYZ's cheek and patting WYZ's head. I don't follow a lot of manhua, but I think the ISMM one is extremely good. The art style is very pretty and the chapters dynamically rendered.

Legend of Hei S2 started this year and is about to end this Saturday! The ratio of episodes seems like half gaming mechanics dialogue (to fulfill Xiao Hei's mission, they have to play a VR game), half intense action sequences. Ep.39 was 12 whopping minutes of a fight scene, but so ramped up with tension I couldn't quite enjoy the cool assassin moments. There's so much I love about this season, especially Xiao Hei going full murder kitten who's adopted A-Gen as his older brother, and Shan Xin being the resident expert gamer. And there are, in fact, SEVERAL appearances from characters from the movie! Exciting times.

他们都说我遇到了鬼 (They All Say I've Met A Ghost): Reading this for

superborb's book club. I didn't enjoy the first 5 chapters very much because I found the MC's PoV hard to get into, but I'm enjoying it a lot more now, at chapter 12! It's a 42-chapter danmei novel featuring a buff MC who lives and teaches in a haunted school and vehemently denies the existence of ghosts, and an exorcist ML who sometimes has to break the law to proceed with his ghostbusting. The MC's first ghost encounters are so annoyingly stupid, but they turn sweet and then bittersweet.

我五官缺你 (My Five Elements Lack You): Stopped at ch16, but hoping to get back into it! I have it mentally tagged as "fengshui boyfriends": it's a 113-chapter novel about a completely nice and ordinary MC who gets transmigrated into the body of a vile swindler. He is captured and put to work by a blind fengshui master ML. The book contains folk horror elements and has very webnovel-y pacing. I'm liveblogging this one on Goodreads so hopefully I won't forget my thoughts haha.

I have a fuller list of media I'm consuming in my listography but I have a terrible habit of starting things then dropping them, so it's not super representative of my media consumption. XD

Recs, etc

[vid] Go Ahead | 他从来都没有忘记，自己是被寄养的
Good day it is crying over Ziqiu + Li Dad o’clock again

[vid] Go Ahead | 贺子秋在离开的九年里过的一点也不好
EXCELLENT He Ziqiu fanvid. All of his important lines are here, from the open wounds to the casual knifing.

[vid] Go Ahead | 宠妹狂魔贺子秋，这样的哥哥来一个？
Compilation of pre-timeskip Jianjian and Ziqiu moments! I have this bookmarked to watch on bad days.

Still Dancing: An Interview With Ilya Kaminsky
I chose English because no one in my family or friends knew it; no one I spoke to could read what I wrote. I myself did not know the language. It was a parallel reality, an insanely beautiful freedom. It still is.

I want to give you something, or I want to take
something from you. But I want to feel the exchange,
the warm hand on the shoulder, the song coming out
and the ear holding on to it.

—from HOW FAR AWAY WE ARE

And I never knew survival
was like that. If you live,
you look back and beg
for it again, the hazardous
bliss before you know
what you would miss.

—from BEFORE

The hens do not love him. Neither do the oranges.

But they survive together: fuel for the future:

A picture of a feather without the bird,
A picture of an orange without the tree,
A picture of a shadow without a boy.

—from A TRICK OF THE LIGHT

When he drove me to school, we decided
it would be a good day if we saw the blue heron
in the algae-covered pond next to the road,
so that if we didn’t see it, I’d be upset. Then,
he began to lie. To tell me he’d seen it when
he hadn’t, or to suppose that it had just
taken off when we rounded the corner in
the gray car that somehow still ran, and I
would lie, too, for him. I’d say I saw it.
Heard the whoosh of wings over us.
That’s the real truth. What we told each other
to help us through the day: the great blue heron
was there, even when the pond dried up,
or froze over; it was there because it had to be.

—from THE GREAT BLUE HERON OF DUNBAR ROAD

Sometimes, you just want
something so hard you have to lie about it,
so you can hold it in your mouth for a minute,
how real hunger has a real taste.

—from LIES ABOUT SEA CREATURES

Isn’t it funny? How the cold numbs everything but grief.
If we could light up the room with pain,
we’d be such a glorious fire.

Clock: turn back, turn back—
everything you’ve dialed to black.

What was it I wanted?
The captain to sail safely? To land alive and, like survival, loved?

—LASHED TO THE HELM, ALL STIFF AND STARK

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Recent books
Such radiant resistance, such luminous fight.
I am the only boy I ever wanted to tear my dress off for.
Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta: "Gilding", "Landscape"
It might be the light we know is the light by which we fall.
To see in red, to lose control.
Gone is the pale hand of winter
Rita Dove, "Mirror"
Notes and references for 一蓑烟雨 (张新成)
Mid-Late December Log
[subbed] Little Mushroom audiodrama extra + more poetry
Little Mushroom EN 15-18 (CN 29-33): Mudan
Mid-Autumn + [translation] Excerpts from Bing Xin's 繁星
May media log + photos
Ada Limón, "Dead Stars"
October Media Log (a.k.a. Zhang Xincheng media log)
username change + media log
ada limón | bright dead things

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Entries tagged with poetry

Recent books

Such radiant resistance, such luminous fight.

I am the only boy I ever wanted to tear my dress off for.

Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta: "Gilding", "Landscape"

It might be the light we know is the light by which we fall.

To see in red, to lose control.

Gone is the pale hand of winter

Rita Dove, "Mirror"

Notes and references for 一蓑烟雨 (张新成)

Mid-Late December Log

TV/Movies

Books/Comics

[subbed] Little Mushroom audiodrama extra + more poetry

Little Mushroom EN 15-18 (CN 29-33): Mudan

Mid-Autumn + [translation] Excerpts from Bing Xin's 繁星

May media log + photos

Ada Limón, "Dead Stars"

October Media Log (a.k.a. Zhang Xincheng media log)

Stuff I did: a scattering of spur-of-the-moment drafts that I have no intention of finishing

Miscellaneous Finds

username change + media log

undemanding → halfcactus

Media I'm into these days:

Recs, etc

ada limón | bright dead things

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