halfcactus

1.
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):


3.
Recent bookmarks:

Public Domain Archive: you can filter by style, time period, and tag!

Ellipsus: supposedly a Google Docs alternative.

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:




Miao Miao chapter and onwards:

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.

From chapter 13:

姜瓷越听越不能苟同：“那照你这么说，这世上就没有日久生情了？”

霍蓁蓁：“你指哪个‘日’？”

Currently at chapter 18 and things seem to be picking up. This novel occupies an odd in-between space where it avoids devolving into typical romance drama but still uses the same framework. I'm unexpectedly relieved that some drama is happening now + intrigued by the direction of Wen Nian's storyline.


Chapter 7-12 vocabulary log

Recent

TV-watching attempts (a.k.a DNFs):

Handsome Stewardess (Gagaoolala)

6-episode 2019 Taiwanese GL drama about a butch Taiwanese bartender who decides to become a stewardess so she can stay with her Singaporean martial artist girlfriend. I saw two episodes but had to stop because there were too many transphobic jokes (and callous and continuous use of words I consider slurs)—it's the same joke each time too, and drawn out for too long to ignore. This type of humor is always bad, but when the show attempts to start a conversation about LGBT communities and gender expectations it feels wrong in a much more personal way. How can I take its stance on gender expression seriously when the script punches down at the trans community?

More thoughts

I might pick it up again when I'm in a more forgiving mood—it is so short after all, and I'd like to have an informed opinion. There were mentions of Thailand when I stopped, so maybe??? Character growth and exposure to other LGBT communities???? I'll brace myself for the worst, though.

But Hsiao Man really is as handsome as advertised!!!!

* * *

Can't Buy Me Love (Netflix)
2023-2024 Filipino romance drama about a, uhh, rich and messy Chinese-Filipino business family (a stereotype), the competing stepchildren, and their enemies. There's a central murder-suicide mystery about the main character's birth mother and multiple crime subplots. Although the romance arcs are interracial, it's primarily class difference and family drama that divides the pairings, and racial or cultural differences don't even factor. I personally thought that was pretty nice.

Dialogue within the Chinese "community" is occasionally interspersed with Hokkien (the dominant Chinese language of the Filipino Chinese community), but none of the cast is Chinese, so the results are... interesting. XD

More thoughts

The dialogue in the first episode was actually quite passable and plausibly Chilipino! I for one co-sign "gua (我) bahala lo (了)". :P

The kinship terms are preserved as they should, and I loved the detail where the older brother was simply saved as "Ahya" (阿兄) in the main character's contacts. But every now and then characters will break out a phrase in Hokkien and the pronunciation progresses from somewhat comprehensible to total gibberish. ^^; I know the target audience is mainstream Filipino viewers and not Chinese-Filipinos, but having seen Mano Po (a Filipino movie franchise about Chinese-Filipino families with a non-Chinese cast), I know they can do better.

In terms of watchability, the first arc (20+ eps) is highly bingeable, but I don't know what the other 100+ eps are for. XD Maris Racal and her character are excellent! She radiates more personality and main character energy than the actual main characters and delivers her lines convincingly, so I can easily forgive her when she dramatically but unintelligibly calls someone a hoe.

(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」∠)_)






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

Reading notes: chapter 3

SBTM ch3

- omg what is happening 😂 the students gushing over JC’s sensitivity to pitch/tonality… the power & precision of her wrists that they can only dream of (maybe in filthy ways)…

- i need JC’s piano tuning adventures to get the sports animanga treatment

. . 可是你看她，有史以来破格提拔的最年轻的首席，简历上说她才25岁！”

“嗳，她对音准的敏感度，和手腕力量的精准度都是我们望尘莫及的。”

“……你真的没在开黄腔？”

“什么黄腔？我是这样的人吗？”

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)