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

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( 2023 in journal pages )

Rainless Love in a Godless Land (2021)
Omg I swear I had an entire post about this but Dreamwidth ate it. :(((((( tl;dr this was just an okay drama that is a bit of a cross between Good Omens and Goblin/Guardian, but had very, very, veeeery powerful cinematic moments (the entire intro, and then the Shi Shi performance in the middle, for example!) and a banger soundtrack. The soundtrack is really impressive to me--it's not only cohesive, but the lyrics are actually very relevant and used for maximum effect in the show!!! It's very purposeful about the music in ways that I found EXTREMELY satisfying. The Mayday song is used exactly once, in the end, and there are even some great BGMs that they saved until the later scenes.

I had and still have a lot of thoughts about its use of Amis folklore and I guess overall I appreciated the intention but ultimately I think it falls short. I wish they'd used their artistic budget to have short informative post-credits segments about the real lore and practices.

Other things I liked: Toem's everything!!!!!!! She is the single most interesting, and most well-executed character in the show. Best BGM, best styling (not just her excellent collection of earrings, but her outfits that play a lot with PoV), best storytelling. And generally I think this show did well with visual themes of dualities, reflections, and seeing people through reflective surfaces. I also loved that one scene where Hsieh Tienti compares prophecy with the experience of having to rewatch a movie and laugh at the same jokes again and again.


Midnight Diner (S1)
I've only finished maybe 7 out of 10 episodes, but I was enjoying this as a Sunday afternoon background watch! It's a slice-of-life show from the PoV of the diner's owner (known as Master)--his policy is to accommodate requests from customers if he has ingredients on hand. Each episode is centered on one customer and one dish, and dishes are usually simple, homey, comfort food, from butter rice to ochazuke to yakisoba.

Of all the food-related shows, this is the only one that genuinely made me want to cook and made me realize that I do actually enjoy food, haha.


Jay Chou, "The Greatest Works of Art" [album + MV] (2022)

This is the long-, long-,long-awaited Jay Chou album, though half of the songs appear to be re-releases of his older singles. I think it makes for a good workout album, and that Still Wandering and You Are the Firework That I Missed fit so well together, lyrically.

I really enjoyed the MV!!!!!!! Plot-wise it's a lot like his 2007 movie Secret (Jay really likes his magical pianos), but more artsy and glamorous and whimsical, and with an outlook that is more adult and less self-absorbed. There's a little piano duel in the middle (with none other than Lang Lang) that's actually fun, not just a directorial flex.

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 )

My current headspace is that I can't really watch or read anything on my own rn, so very grateful for groupwatch/groupreads! I also spent the start of the month making a list of short mobile games to play to reset my brain. I've given up on borrowing my brother's Switch (my other brother has taken custody of it haha). I don't think it's a good idea for me to start more standard-length games anyway—I have a really bad game (sometimes TV) addiction problem that gets in the way of my ability to function and take care of myself.
( Games: Monument Valley; Agent A: A Puzzle in Disguise )

( TV: Delicious Romance; Who's the Murderer 7; Under the Skin; The Strongest Men of God )

( Music: Sabel (covered by Jona); 打開太陽 (Kimberley Chen x Flesh Juicer) )

( misc links: on troll farms; on writing outside of your experience and identity )

Books

Still reading The Priory of the Orange Tree. ISMM is also back with vol 5!!!!!!!!

TV

Remembrance of Things Past
12-episode drama, centered around Dongbei women in their late 20s and 30s who live and work in Beijing. Thoughts and content warnings here.

Who's the Murderer s6
Although I initially jumped into the show for Zhang Xincheng, this has sort of become my emotional support LARP variety show. XD It's a lot more enjoyable the more you watch it, as you get more familiar with the regular players, the inside jokes, and their relationships. My favorite part is always the final voting of each case where everyone privately casts their vote for who they think the murderer is, and explains their reasoning to the camera. But I got really attached to the regular players, including Sasa, who I initially disliked because I found his humor too slapstick. It's just really fun to see "veterans" be extremely comfortable with each other, and Zhang Xincheng (the new kid) get more comfortable with both the game and his seniors. I also like the cases best when they go ham with the plot. I truly wasn't expecting to see bodyswap, space/time bubbles that led to complicated time mechanics, and aliens, so I'm very delighted.

My favorite S6 case was case#5, with the town of sad people. It got a bit dark (suicide, depression, trauma, and some horror), but the puzzles were satisfying and I felt that the characters were the most compelling, with very funny banter and puns. (Unsurprisingly this is one of the episodes that ZXC is in, and my favorite role for him. XD)

Games

Sadly I wasn't able to play any games during the holidays, but I did get to do a virtual escape room with lunarflares! Would recommend this as a pandemic/remote social activity!

Movember Virtual Moscape (link)
Although it is called an escape room, it's actually the opposite of that, since what we did was INFILTRATE. :D One can do it solo but it's a pain to switch between screens, so playing it with at least one friend is best. To play as a team, you can either enter the virtual room individually and just simultaneously play the game, or have one person screenshare their playthrough. We decided to go the screenshare route because I had internet problems—luna screenshared the playthrough and entered all the solutions, while I screenshared my interactions with a character. You need a Facebook/Messenger account for the interactive portion, but you're not talking to a real person, so it's FINE.

The first half of the game was Puzzles I Did Not Like To Do (decoding stuff, reading instructions, and sometimes Googling—I was very happy to just listen to luna do everything). The second half was a lot more interactive (talking to an AI on Messenger), with Puzzles I Was Happy To Be Part Of (examining sceneries, unlocking hidden doors, figuring out the passwords, choose your own adventure, and some internet sleuthing).

The game design and experience were really impressive, with an effort to be accessible. They had real websites and Facebook accounts that you had to scour for clues, and very cool visualizations that I associate more with console games (luna particularly had the time with her life rotating the 3D object). You alternate between entering answers in the main room, which is a virtual desktop computer, and messaging the results of your investigation to your fictional colleague. For the color-coded portion, there is an alternate chart for the colorblind (we aren't colorblind, but we referred to it anyway), as well as the option to turn on video captions. The Youtube videos only have auto-generated captions, but you get messaged a recap/summary of the information that was in the video.

Gameplay is estimated to be 90 minutes, but there's no time limit. It took us more than 2 hours since there were only 2 of us and my connection kept dropping.

Tools: we used an internet browser for the game, Discord for voicecall and screenshare, and Facebook/Messenger to interact with a fictional character.

Fanworks

I spent my New Year's Eve (and part of New Year's) subbing/translating I Only Have Four Nights with You, the Vogue short film featuring Zhang Xincheng (of course) and Tong Yao, to English. It's a 10-minute adult love story that unspools the present-day established-relationship tensions back to its past promises. I have no basis of comparison for Tong Yao's performance, but I've heard that it was exciting (and confusing XD) to see her in this role! On Zhang Xincheng's part, he was uncharacteristically restrained and introverted—I want to see him cast more in these types of roles where he doesn't have the wholesome protagonist halo.

Watch on YouTube

And a song translation attempt, though incomplete (subbed video on the Twitter link below):

tried to translate the most evocative parts of the version of 曾經我也想過一了百了 (I Also Thought About Ending It All) that Zhang Xincheng covered for Who’s the Murderer! the pre-chorus imagery has been rattling in my head all month pic.twitter.com/798jCMmSSI

— (@halfcactus) December 29, 2021

Good news:
Am fully vaccinated, and free to go out now! \o/ AND as of this week face shields are FINALLY no longer mandatory, which is going to help me drag my foot less when I have to be out running errands haha. (Face masks are still required but I've never minded wearing them the way I have face shields.)

Bad news:
My desktop computer's (~5 years old) been having software issues, and my Kindle (more than 10 years old) battery is no longer charging. /o\ Neither of these is urgent, which is why I'm just simmering in the guilt/discontent of not doing anything about it. Partly it's because I've also been meaning to get my dead laptop looked at for the past 2 years so I have to get that done before anything else, and I'm not really good at managing multiple low-priority issues at once. /o\ I am regretting cancelling the appointment I made at a service center for my laptop due to my dad mentioning a cheaper (and still very accessible) service center. If I'd just pushed through and swallowed that diagnostic fee as originally planned and budgeted for, I would have one less thing to be paralyzed about ahaha. Now I have to make inquiries at the other place and set aside another block of time. /o\

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Media consumed in November so far:

3 eps of Leverage Redemption (dropped because of computer issues; plus, it's hard to multitask to lol)

2 eps of You Are My Glory (dropped because of computer issues; it is otherwise ideal for multitasking, very low-key and relaxing)

Symphony's Romance (watchpartied up to ep 15, then dropped)

My Huckleberry Friends

Currently consuming:

Remembrance of Things Past

Half Magic (by Edward Eager)

我五官缺你 (fengshui boyfriends): finished the dollhouse arc! My 2 modes of reading this novel are "cannot finish a single chapter, it's so sloooow" and "reading 4-5 chapters in a day because I must know what happens next"

September... flew. I had to go back and reread my own tweets to remember what happened. /o\

Media log

他們都說我遇到了鬼 by 青色羽翼 (English: They All Say I Met a Ghost by Cyan Wings)
This was a book club read, and we finished the main novel right before Mid-autumn Festival which was apt and fortunate in light of Mid-Autumn busy-ness.

TL;DR - I agree with superborb's review which includes a handy synopsis!

My main thought about this book is that I think it works best in other mediums where other PoVs can be more organically incorporated: I've listened to bits of the audiodrama and enjoyed it, but I think it would be even better as a visual medium like a comic or an animated series. The writing is best when it stages the comedic scenes that highlight the differences between what Shen Jianguo (the main character) sees and what other characters see.

To me the book has a very rocky start, but gets better: when we first meet Shen Jianguo, the dense-ness of his PoV felt overdone. Between his exaggerated obliviousness, and the confusing circumstances of the first ghost he meets (Mr. Saw), I wasn't sure it was my type of humor. But I think these were the chapters where the author was still figuring out how to write the book and the characters. The writing and humor certainly get more refined as you go on—my level of engagement peaked between chapters 13 to 30, before the author rushed their way towards the ending.

The women are written so lovingly! My favorite parts were all the arcs involving the girl ghosts. The author really took their time with telling their stories, making for the most heartwarming resolutions and bittersweet partings. When you see the MC interact with the girl ghosts, you understand why he was so popular with school AND why the ML falls in love with him. These are the parts that shone for me the most. The author's end-of-chapter skits for the girls' ending were also really funny.

The romance was smooth, stress-free, and basically just a side dish. I enjoyed it more for how the romance characterized Shen Jianguo than what the relationship or the ML (an exorcist from a well-known family) was like.

In conclusion: I enjoyed this book for the middle bits. XD It's a nice and easy book if you want a short and funny story with a gay main character who's very comfortable and confident in his sexuality (and his pecs!). Although there is some romance, the overall vibe of this novel was very gen! Also, apart from being a poor grad student, the main character was completely self-sufficient and did NOT need any saving at all, which was nice! He's very athletic and earnest.


CONTENT NOTES: gruesome deaths (though the writing is very good at focusing more on the afterlife), bullying and abuse (of ghosts in their former lives), and the MC's unquestioning trust in the entire justice system



Couple of Mirrors


Also known as the 12-episode Republican era GL show! Or, as our groupwatch lovingly calls it, murder wives.

Once again linking to superborb's entry on this, because anything I wanted to say, she already said. https://superborb.dreamwidth.org/476320.html

And here is my gif/livetweet thread.

Things I made in September

Kamen Rider Build stickers: this was a collaboration with lunarflares and hoodlessmads. We wanted to thank kuyamars for streaming the ENTIRE show for us and also for drawing Chihayafuru fanart for EACH of us during our Chihayafuru groupwatch!

[fanvid] Kamen Rider Build - Seishun Amigo: This has a target audience of 1 (me). I firmly believe that Seishun Amigo should be the theme song to the Kamen Rider Build movie, and needed to make my vision a reality. The lyrics match PERFECTLY, you can't change my mind.

A Mid-Autumn Dice Game cheat sheet: My Chinese side comes from a part of Xiamen/Fujian where the Mid-Autumn practice is to play a dice game for prizes (traditionally mooncakes of different sizes, but we just customize our prizes). This year my brother suddenly wanted to ~revive tradition~ so I designed a visual guide for winning dice combinations. :P I made a colored one but it has mistakes I'm too lazy to edit, and this black-and-white printer-friendly one where you can color in the dice yourself. Anyway the most notable thing about it is that I drew the diagrams on Google Slides. Very pleased that we can do that now!

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Currently

Watching: The Justice:


A Republican era show about banking, marriages of conveniences, and revenge. Cast includes Zhang Xincheng and Cai Wenjing as the leads, with Liang Jie as one of the supporting characters. I wouldn't recommend this show, but I think it's very good at telling women's stories. It has a very complex and refreshingly consistent FL that I find is very challenging to play! I'm halfway through and I think I'm starting to genuinely enjoy it (the fallout of the first 20 eps), but IMO they should have just removed most of the ML's scenes from the first half, which I felt were a waste of airtime––especially since his character is just an empty suit of plot armor and contradictions.

What I enjoy the most about it is the FL's other relationships. She has such fun and genuine relationships with other people that the main romance feels very fake (which is not aided by the ML being, in gixi's words, a cryptid). This is definitely a script issue because the actress thought so too. And I wonder if that contributed to how reluctant and emotionally flat her character seemed in the scenes where the intent was romantic tension.

Livetweet thread (with occasional gifs, if ZXC is stripping) here.


Reading: The Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky: This is my first time reading a poetry collection designed with a narrative structure, and while I knew what I was getting into (I've read excerpts before), I almost immediately had to put it down because of how distressing it was. :( It's a book about a stageplay about a nation that decided to turn deaf after a soldier shot a deaf child. The writing and images are extremely evocative. (I'm especially sensitive to child harm so I haven't been able to pick this back up.)

I was going through a period of existential crisis so I spent the week:
1) Throwing myself into Hades (I have beaten him! Once! And I do not want to fight him again)
2) Continuing books I started months ago because I'm tired of starting new books and not finishing them.

Trying to use eglantiere's book review formatting magic—this took way too long, I had to go through my old DW comments to find her instructions, but I'm determined to have cover art on my entries. XD

So: books!

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The Black Tides of Heaven by J.Y. Yang

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I didn't read the summary for this novella so I felt cheated when we started with Sonami, who I was really invested in in the first chapter, then switched to the twins (this is definitely reader error, though). XD Overall I think this should have been a full novel because the PoV character was driven by complex emotions but the plot zoomed by so fast it felt like they were just going through the motions of their narrative arc. The characters didn't feel like people, and the scenes felt almost mechanically written, pieces of an outline that didn't connect. The political motivations were very confusing to me too, so if I was going to recommend this book it would definitely be not for the politics/rebellion storyline.

There was also was a thread of intense internalized misogyny that makes sense for such a flawed and confused character but is otherwise unaddressed so it ends up feeling strange and out of place.

My primary problem really is just that I wanted anyone but the PoV character we ended up having to be the main PoV character. There were interesting bits of worldbuilding, and thoughts about prophecy. I really loved the complexities of choosing one's gender—you can commit a pronoun but still not go through the entire gender confirmation process. Or you can commit to a body and gender that feels right for you but not particularly identify with it. It's just that Akeha is not the best lens with which to witness plot... I imagine we'll see more of Sonami in the next books, she seems to have her own machinations behind the scenes, but for now there is too much twins lol.

IN THIS BOOK: East Asia-inspired fantasy, non-binary characters, complex personal relationships with gender, gay (m/m and f/f) and non-binary relationships, in-character (but unaddressed) internalized misogyny, magical twins

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Twisted Travels: Rambles in Central Europe by Jessica Zafra

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book was a birthday gift from my friend Reese in 2019. The note said: Here's something you either might enjoy, or completely hate. Otherwise, I'll take my chances.

I haven't read Jessica Zafra (a known columnist and blogger; she's very sharp and funny) since high school. Just this year I sold all volumes of Twisted, collections of essays by her that I inherited from a teacher in high school who knew I liked reading Zafra. (She was Konmari-ing her possessions because she was going abroad so I was an opportunity to foist off her books lol.)

Traveling is intense—you are entirely alone, among strangers, who speak a language you don't understand, in a terrain alien to you. You find that the regular life you declare to be boring is actually comfortable and that you, in fact, love it. The purpose of travel is to remind you of that.

This has been an honest and very informative travelogue written from the POV of someone who's not afraid to figure out how to get to places herself, who's knowledgeable and genuinely interested in the history, literature, and people of the places that she visits, and most of all is Filipino. Her passing interjections about Manila's transportation and the Philippines' history are off-the-cuff and cutting. When she takes the train to Vienna, she notes:

Jarring to be in a place where you have time, where you don't have to leave an extra hour before an appointment because you know you'll be stuck in traffic, where you don't rush around in a state of traffic-induced anxiety,

and I felt the echoes of missing time vibrate through my Manila-raised body.

There's a tone shift from the early portions of the book, which are much snarkier and more blog-like, to the later portions. I don't know if it's because her writing has changed through the years and become mellower (and to me, more balanced), or if it's because of the frame of her mind as she tours places with such brutal histories (Poland: Warsaw, Krakow), but the first sections are definitely not representative of the tone of the rest of the book.

I really enjoyed her mapping out the inconveniences throughout her travels and longing for her cats, her passion for books and bookstores, and the way you can see her interests and mindset in the routes that she takes and the conversations that she has. The stories of her mishaps are sometimes anxiety-inducing, sometimes funny, but she's very generally consistent about travel being all about the stories.

A part of me wishes that this were a larger book with colored photos for reference (especially the graphic design; I must Google), but I like that it's tiny enough to fit in your handbag and serve as a travel guide—you can plan your itinerary to this.

Other notes: hmm, a lot of typos and formatting issues (ie. unindented lines + one section where the justified alignment wrapped around a photo and some of the letterspacing/wordspacing looked glaringly uneven)


CONTENT WARNINGS: detailed descriptions of the experiences of Holocaust victims

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(Having finally powered through 2 books in English, I have discovered... that I have lost the ability to read in Chinese hahahaha (am keeping up with a cnovel readalong; thankfully it's very light). Brains!)

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TV

I have put it on hold for brain reasons, but You Are My Glory is out! It's based on a novel by Gu Man that I genuinely liked, because I enjoy a het romance where the FL is mature and successful and has her shit together while the ML full-on supports her AND doesn't feel emasculated when she flexes her power to save him from bad social situations. It's a very shiny and pretty drama, and I quite like the casting: Dilireba as the cute and naive FL who as a superstar adult knows how to utilize these qualities; Yang Yang as the once-shining ML who as a disillusioned adult is struggling with his career; Gina Jin as the successful but world-weary ex-girlfriend who's enjoying the financial power but still pays for it by grinding up corporatejobs. It’s very much a canon about measures of success + the duality of teenage potential vs adult realities, and I'm enjoying the tone of the drama adaptation: glamorous but quiet and mature and occasionally devastating. Characters are 30 and act like it, and Yu Tu's (Yang Yang) storyline hits particularly hard because he's at the point where after the PhD and the years of working in his dream job, he has to shift to a different path and start from the bottom. But, as he puts it, life doesn't end at 30 which I think is a very important message.

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.