The weather this week has been, strangely enough, half summer, half rain. The mornings are unforgivingly hot but become cooler and wetter throughout the day (it's 7:20PM and raining now). The entire month has been really busy and stressful for multiple reasons, but!!! As luck would have it, Zhang Xincheng has released two songs, one week apart. XD

Recently

Played a couple of games to distract myself from election tension and post-election grief:

The Cyphstress

(Played with lunatique, superborb, umichii, and yjthecat. Playtime: 1 hour for chapter 1, and around 2 hours for chapter 2.)

Marketed as an online escape room, this is really more of a puzzle adventure game, with little room for online and team play, and unreliable subtitle functions. The labyrinth puzzle (and the entire second chapter, actually) was extremely difficult to maneuver since you had to rearrange and rotate a PDF file. However, this game seems infinitely replayable since the code doesn't seem to expire, and the succeeding puzzles happen on fixed webpages. XD I'd recommend this more as a game to play with a group that's physically together and has a printer on hand. It did have a very strong and cool introduction puzzle that was fun to sort of collaborate on (through screenshare), and pretty solid variety of ~cipher-based~ puzzles.

I personally prefer Deadlocked's Movember Escape Room, which was a much smaller and easier heist game (I played it with Luna, it was the perfect number of players for its scope haha) with environmental puzzles in the second half. The Movember Escape Room is newer and I feel that they successfully managed to refine the user experience and design and accessibility features for it; and I really loved Joey and the choose-your-own-adventure aspects. Also you get a completion certificate for the Movember game, which I like for the ~memories~ haha. The Cyphstress just gives you a cutscene. XD

Book Reprocessing Machine #5

This is a poetry exercise similar to blackout poetry, but you gather your words by rolling a dice and counting the number of pages and lines. You're meant to end up with 50 words to rearrange into a poem but AS IT TURNS OUT, I CAN'T COUNT. And I didn't have the energy to roll and count some more so I gave up and this was what I got lmfao (the book I used was Nation by Terry Pratchett):

he said
come over.
no.
any-where but the tubers

could she believe then
the poor cry that inspired dead
to know of very wonder
and at water imagine
stone arms that attract
like word

a first case she wanted to have, yes
it was said

Six Cats Under

Playtime: 10-45 mins (depending on how bad you are; I was VERY BAD hahahaha)

A very cute and short browser-based point-and-click puzzle game where you are crushed to death by a bookshelf and your ghost has to set your cats free from your apartment. This was adorable and funny and a really good quick pick-me-up.

Currently

Reading

Under superborb's influence:

琅琊榜 Nirvana in Fire

for cnovel reading club. Reading Nirvana in Fire in Chinese has been my ~lifelong~ goal since I watched the drama in 2017, and WHO KNEW that I was closer to getting there than I thought. I nearly gave up when the first chapter hit me with grand 4-character phrases at the second line, but IT TURNS OUT!!! I CAN READ (with the help of Pleco's pop-up dictionary)!!! Mostly because I'm already familiar with the characters and plot, and can easily skip the parts I find tedious and unimportant, but it's surprisingly readable and I'm no longer scared of this book. I cannot imagine reading this uninitiated, though, so kudos to the people who did and are doing that. XD

Dracula (via Dracula Daily)

Get the classic novel Dracula, emailed to you in real time as it happens.

This is an extremely fun way to read Dracula! Which I have never read before. And this format/pace is really ideal for both the novel and my attention span, because I seem to have genuinely lost the ability to read books. /o\ I guess the cons are that I hate reading books on mobile, but it feels wrong to do my designated reading on my Kindle haha.

Watching

We started groupwatching Rainless Love in a Godless Land, a Taiwanese urban fantasy drama featuring Amis folklore, or appears to. So far (...2 episodes in) I think it's solidly and tightly written, and beautifully directed, but here are some notes that I think are important to know moving forward (with thanks to embleciel for doing the legwork):

I had a hard time finding any comments from the Amis community while it was airing, but I think that speaks for something too. What I found severely disappointing was the lack of representation in the cast + writing team (as dramapotatoe pointed out in their blog).

— 🌸 (@embleciel) May 15, 2022

I remember seeing (in the credits? in an interview?) that the folklore at the beginning of each episode were mostly fictionalized. That reeks of cultural appropriation to me, especially given the environmentalism themes in the story--I will not speak further 🙊

— 🌸 (@embleciel) May 15, 2022

This is how I felt by the time I finished Rainless! I loved the gods and stories but afaik they were heavily edited to the point where only the names were borrowed. I still loved the drama, but the prod team could have done filled in the gaps with interviews outside of the drama.

— 🌸 (@embleciel) May 15, 2022

It's hard to say though, because I don't live in Taiwan and I'm not from any of the indigenous communities. I am only speaking from the pov of someone who learned a lot because the drama. Would local viewers have similar criticisms? What about indigenous groups? 🤷🏻‍♀️

— 🌸 (@embleciel) May 15, 2022