wrote_and_writ | Reading

Okay, in an effort to actually post about fandom stuff in a format I actively like more, I am copied and expanded a thread from fedi and bsky... basically, about Nie Huaisang and whether I believe he was really responsible for everything.

An idea someone had in the cx server: NHS realizes the soul switching array didn’t work, WWX is already in someone else’s body and so must figure it out. Fun enough, but it ultimately doesn’t work for me because it underscores why I don’t think it makes sense for NHS to be behind MXY doing that: WWX being at Mo manor is unnecessary for his plan to be put into effect. All he needs is LWJ, and involving the Lan juniors ropes him in.

Wei Wuxian is actually a potential complication, if you think about it. He's a wildcard. Can Nie Huaisang really anticipate, much less control what he will do? Adding to that, well, why would Nie Huaisang think putting Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian together in this situation lead to something better and more productive than just Lan Wangji? He would not assume they'd collaborate and work well together. As far as he knows, they were constantly at odds (of course this is different in CQL, but I am not a CQL girlie, I am always will be going from novel canon). This is actually potentially bad if the goal is to the truth about Dage's death come to light and especially, to make sure cultivation society believes this. Lan Wangji has the reputation to be believed. Wei Wuxian... not so much, not necessarily.

So personally I think Nie Huaisang’s plan as presented through Wei Wuxian’s deductions at the end is unnecessarily complicated and doesn’t make sense, which is why this is one aspect of mdzs where I just ignore probable authorial intent… at least I assume mxtx does probably intend for his deductions to be true, even if it’s not actually verified within the story. It's just Wei Wuxian's suppositions, really. So I can and will do what I like with my headcanons.

Does this mean I think Nie Huaisang is an innocent little lamb? No. I just don’t think he did everything Wei Wuxian thinks he did. Because it just does not make sense to me.

Some of it (luring the juniors to Yi City) makes more sense if mxtx had gone ahead with her original idea to give him an accomplice. But that’s not what she wrote, so that leaves me, again, to find an interpretation that makes sense to me given what we DO know in canon.

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3130/

I dropped my phone while trying to search, and I tried to unlock it from up here, so can you also search for screen repair places?

https://xkcd.com/3130/

pauraque

In this casual strategy game the goal is to accumulate points by placing buildings in a model town. Each type of building earns points according to what other buildings and resources are nearby, suggesting the city planning process—houses want to be placed near the town center and other houses, but not near noisy industry, etc. It's less a city builder than it is an abstraction of what you do in a city builder, reduced to its most basic elements.

player places a lumberjack hut showing points gained and lost from nearby buildings and trees

player places a lumberjack hut showing points gained and lost from nearby buildings and trees

This game didn't do it for me. I love city builders, but for me just placing buildings isn't enough to hold my interest, at least not as it's presented here. I can do object placement puzzles that are completely abstract and arbitrary like Tetris or something. But if we're calling it a town, then I want people in it! I want to manage traffic and resources! I can see from the positive reviews that many players enjoy the simplicity and find it relaxing, but for me it's so impersonal that it feels sterile, and I found myself getting bored quickly. It has good reviews so I guess I'm just the wrong audience for it. It did make me think about how I don't respond just to the mechanics of a game, but also to the setting where those mechanics exist and what I want to see in that setting, so at least there's that.

Islanders is on Steam, GOG, and consoles for $4.99 USD.

groundwiremantaray posting in

sangcheng

( You're about to view content that a community administrator has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Current Mood: cheerful

groundwiremantaray

Writing Log

Sangcheng Qixi: Two prompt fills uploaded to AO3! Here's the collection link - looking forward to reveals on August 29 :D

Both of my fills are between 1000 and 2000 words long, short and fluffy. Both also ended up pre-relationship due to the nature of the prompts that I was drawn to write. One is modern AU and one is canonverse, just like last year haha. In terms of writing process, both were almost entirely written on my phone during my lunch breaks / while waiting for the train. One also got a first pass of editing while the draft was still on my phone. I do miss when I had the brainpower to write on my computer in the evenings, but while things are still busy at the day job, this is better than nothing.

Jiangsibs AU: Now that I've got my prompt fills uploaded for Sangcheng Qixi Fest, I'll probably circle back to the extra I was working on previously. I think I'll start by reflecting on what I really want to say with this extra, then review what I've written so far to see if I've managed to say it.

forestofglory

I have being doing a lot sewing projects recently so here are some more pictures:

( Read more... )

soricel

Teaching:

NA

Learning:

Geography and Romanian. Enjoyed this week's somatic movement workshop. One thing I guess I learned was that I get more out of these sessions when I leave my camera on the whole time. The journal prompt at the end brought up some feelings, mostly around the theme of self-acceptance etc. and what constitutes my actual life as opposed to various idealizations and aspirations.

Listening:

Still keep coming back to that WPSE s/t. It dawned on me at some point this week that these songs don't really do much for/to me emotionally, but for whatever reason, they spark a lot of imagination. The past few days, I've been especially into this song:

So many tracks on this album, as on a lot of his other recent stuff, are about driving through mountains and stuff at night...this one is too, but the energy feels a little different, lighter somehow. I really like it. I'm also wondering if my recent infatuation with these songs has to do with my recent infatuation with the Raven Cycle, and this one scene that lingers in my mind a lot, of Gansey and Blue driving into the mountains together late one night. I feel like I should be ashamed of what's become of my taste but whatever.

Anyway, this song isn't my favorite sonically, but it includes most of my favorite lyrical elements and WP motifs: the blending of the magical and the mundane, the diaristic insider references to people and places. I feel like I want to write a whole story about this song.

Also been spending more time with the saoirse dream s/t, and I love it a lot. Dynamic and moving and funny and catchy and just really good. And samples! I love samples!

Reading:

Making slow progress on Sașa Zare's novel Dezrădăcinare, but so far I like it a lot. Diary-style autofiction about a young queer woman from a small village in Moldova who moved to Cluj for university and is now staying in a small village in Romania to try to write. Lots about her fraught relationship with her mom. Anyway, I'm impressed with how smoothly it's been going so far, and how seldom I've had to look up words. I mean, sure, I'm zooming past a few that I don't know if I can figure out the general gist of the sentence/passage in which they appear, but still. This book is huge so I'll probably be at it for a while.

Watching:

BBT, still. This show is *so weird* about sexuality and gender. Like, Amy's weird quasi-sapphic infatuation with Penny (which the writers seem to have dropped), the episode when Howard gets dosed with estrogen from the cream he's been applying to his mom's back, the recurring "jokes" about Howard and Raj being a gay couple...it's just relentless. And for all that, it's become something of a comfort watch. What the?!

Writing:

Speaking of the Raven Cycle, finished a transfemme Gansey drabble sequence that I'm pretty happy with. Also keeping up with the RPs; happy the cyberpunk one has transitioned to a lighter/goofier scene after some heavy action and trauma. I sort of got an itch for a new RP this week luckily didn't really pursue anything. I feel like I've got enough to occupy me.

Other:

Kind of a whirlwind week. Settled in for a couple days after coming home from the U.S. and then headed out to this "Marxist summer school" thing in a small village a few hours from here. T. had a presentation to give there, and I tagged along and had an okay-ish time despite the lodgings being sub-ideal and most of the presentations being pretty uninspiring. I feel like I don't even know where I am politically anymore, and while on some level I admire the people who organized and participated in this event, I just felt like it wasn't my world. Anyway, happy to be back home, in our own little world.

umadoshi

Reading:

scruloose and I finished listening to Artificial Condition and have started Rogue Protocol (but only barely--we've listened to however much of chapter 1 we could get in over supper on Friday before

scruloose had to be doing something else).

We'll Prescribe You a Cat (Syou Ishida) was a very quick read and hard for me to pin down. It's a story in the vein of "~mysterious~ place provides X [often wishes granted or strange/deadly creatures, as in xxxHOLiC or Pet Shop of Horrors], but the actual cats being prescribed mostly appear to be just ("just") cats. I think this is the first in a series. Alas, I find the prose of the translation awfully flat, and can only hope I would've found the book more engaging in different hands.

I also read The City in Glass, which was my first time reading Nghi Vo. Gorgeous prose, a neat concept, and a great read overall.

Watching: We're six episodes into The Summer Hikaru Died (which is, I suppose unsurprisingly given the premise, touching on a significant existential question from Newsflesh [and from plenty of other places]). It continues to be very good. ^_^

I think we also saw an ep. of Silo sometime last week.

And on Friday I started watching Glass Heart on my own. As so often turns out to be the way, choosing it from my horrifying to-watch list was mostly random. Sometimes the choice is made simply because something is short (ten episodes, in this case) and I've seen several friends talking about it very recently. I'm six episodes in now.

I knew going in that Machida Keita is in it (who I knew only from Cherry Magic). I did not know in advance that Satoh Takeru is one of the leads, and then couldn't place him until I caved and looked up the cast. (He played Kenshin in the live-action Rurouni Kenshin movies [of which I've still only seen the first], and was impossibly good in the role. I keep meaning to rewatch the first and watch the others, despite my feelings about the franchise overall being irrevocably poisoned now by the horrible revelations about the creator. I still need to offload my set of the manga. >.<)

Weathering: The drought continues. Parts of the province are on fire, although the uncomfortably-close-to-me wildfire is under control, last I heard.

Planning: We don't have tickets yet, because there aren't yet showtimes for it, but the plan is to see Dongji Rescue late in the week. *fidgets*

Current Mood: tired

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3129/

The academic archaeology establishment is suppressing my breakthroughs because of the disruption it would bring to their prepared-core flake-based toolmaking industry.

https://xkcd.com/3129/

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3128/

Hey, so did you ever finish your video series about Cassie and the caterpillar morph? I loved the first three, but never ... no, sorry, I get it, this isn't the place. Sorry! Sorry.

https://xkcd.com/3128/

pauraque

This novel is structured as a woman's reminiscences of her life, beginning in the 1990s at an elite boarding school she attended in England. The students are told that they are special and important, and that it is an extreme privilege to attend this school, but they aren't given a clear understanding of why this is or what makes the school so different from others. Throughout the first few chapters, it becomes increasingly apparent that something strange and ominous is going on. The students have close friendships with each other, but nobody ever mentions family or going home for holidays. The teachers are cagey about the nature of the situation, and some seem distressed by it, as if their hands are tied.

What is really going on is stated outright a quarter of the way into the book. The rest of the book is spent exploring that premise and looking at how the characters are shaped by and respond to their circumstances. I don't know whether the author intended to present the premise as a secret or not, but the book has been marketed as though it's a secret, and whether it's a spoiler is subjective. (Thank you all for your input on the poll!)

The premise and my thoughts on treating it as a spoiler

The premise is that the students are clones who are being raised to serve as organ donors. They have limited rights compared to non-clones, and the expectation is that they will die from having their organs harvested sometime in young adulthood.

I knew the premise going in because I saw it discussed years ago, and I suspect it wouldn't be that hard to figure it out even before it's made explicit. But I'm sure it also depends on what your expectations are going into the book, if you're looking for a "twist" and how broad you think the scope of possible twists is. Personally, I think it does the book a disservice to coyly market it as literary fiction, if that's the reason the premise has been treated as a secret. For people who like both litfic and specfic equally maybe it's fine, but that's not everyone, so you're asking for people who only want litfic to be annoyed by the bait-and-switch, and for some proportion of people who would like the book to never pick it up because they think it's not for them (or to be aggravated by the implication that we're not calling it specfic because it's "serious literature" instead). I knew it was speculative fiction and I enjoyed it as speculative fiction, and I think dancing around the genre is unnecessary. So that's where I sit with it.

My thoughts which assume you know the premise but don't necessarily assume you've read the book

Anyway! I really liked the book! Based on the three Ishiguro books I have now read, (this, Klara and the Sun, and The Remains of the Day, I've come to appreciate his skill in writing characters who have a perspective on the world that could be considered "limited" in that the reader and the other characters understand things the POV characters don't, but it's very clear that their lived experience has validity and their inner emotional landscape is as rich as anyone's. No matter how small a person's world may look from the outside, to them it is everything.

Kathy and the other clones see things from a certain angle because of the way they've been raised and what they've been taught to believe. They don't automatically perceive the horror of their existence the way we do because they aren't us, they don't know what we know about how things ought to be. But within their own frame of reference, they live their lives and make choices according to their own understanding of who has authority and what the inevitable facts of life are. Their experiences, memories, feelings, insights, and relationships matter even if we can see how constrained they are by their circumstances. After all, we are also bounded by what we perceive as inevitable facts of life, and we also don't know whether we perceive that correctly.

I think the book reflects how we are socialized not to talk about (let alone question) uncomfortable societal truths. I was struck by Kathy's observation that as the students were growing up, the teachers drip-fed them bits of information that they were not quite old enough to understand. She realizes this may not even have been consciously planned, but it had the effect of making them feel they had "always known" what they were and the life that had been chosen for them, even though they had no specific memories of being told. I think this is a bullseye description of what it feels like to be socialized to accept injustice.

Children don't just learn from what is directly stated to them, they learn from what isn't said, from adults' discomfited grimaces, annoyed dismissals, vague contextless remarks, and awkward changes of subject. The school setting (which was a choice on the part of the characters, to structure the clones' residence as a school—it's not like these kids know what schools are really like in the outside world) to me drives this point home. The adults are trying to educate the students for reasons of their own that we learn later, but the primary lesson they're teaching isn't on the curriculum.

Some specific thoughts that reveal details from the end of the book

Once we got the full explanation of what the school really was, that they were trying to "prove" the clones had souls, I found it just as disturbing as the concept of organ donor clones in itself. Miss Emily's goal wasn't to prove the clones' humanity so they could be liberated and the hideous practice of organ harvest put to an end, it was to prove their humanity so they could be treated a little bit better before the slaughter.

The fact that she is able to tolerate this cognitive dissonance speaks volumes about what she has been indoctrinated to accept, and points to the modes of thought underpinning the broader dystopian world. This, for me, was the true horrifying reveal, and it's all the more horrifying because it is entirely mundane: The belief that a class of people is subhuman can withstand knowledge that disproves the belief, provided that abandoning the belief is inconvenient enough.

By the same token, Miss Emily's description of how public opinion turned against her ideas and led to the closure of Hailsham is so deeply unsettling because it is so familiar and plausible. A push for expanded rights for a marginalized group, even an incremental push, is a precarious thing that can be derailed by a poorly-timed scandal or a negative association, even if the connection is tenuous. As in our own world, many people's beliefs are not based on reason, on consistent principles, or even on a blunt assessment that saving some people justifies sacrificing others. They're based on how much of the truth you can convince yourself to dismiss. If you're looking for an excuse to discredit calls for justice, you'll always find one, and you'll find plenty of people happy to validate your conclusion.

Emily's story doesn't spell this out. As always, it's between the lines as she skips over assumed context that Kathy and Tommy don't share. And they're not even looking for justice, only a temporary reprieve from the fate they've already accepted. But they can't get that, not even when they ask nicely. (Does it ever work to ask nicely?)

My biggest takeaway from the book is how difficult it is to independently invent the idea of a just world when that concept has been denied to you. And how much harder when even the people who come the closest to being your allies don't actually want justice—they want injustice with the sharpest of its vulgar edges politely sanded off.

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3127/

Historians: Contemporaneous documentation of the initial events is often sparse, and in fact people often get testy and uncooperative when we urge better documentation for the historical record.

https://xkcd.com/3127/

umadoshi

Three unrelated things that have been announced recently:

K.B. Spangler says that the sixth Rachel Peng novel is coming out in late October!
Discotek has announced that they're releasing Monster: The Complete Series, which is very exciting since AFAIK only the first chunk was ever released in a physical edition the first time it was licensed. (I think the whole series is on Netflix, but I want to own a copy.)
ANN reports that Minekura-sensei is not only resuming Wild Adapter after a nine-year hiatus but aiming to wrap it up in its eighth volume. If it's actually completed, I imagine that increases the odds of it being re-licensed in English. (I was more attached to Saiyuki, personally, but even though she resumed that last fall [and ANY of this is pretty miraculous, given my vague understanding of her health], I'm not even hoping for anything on that front. If I'm pleasantly surprised, that'll be awesome.)

(Not an announcement, but FYI for fellow Canadians, Z1L's Dongji Rescue has made it to the Cineplex site with the expected August 22nd date. That's...that's next Friday! Less than two weeks! At some point, there should be actual theatres and showtimes! *_*)

Current Mood: excited

pauraque

I have a running list of games I remember from my childhood that I add to whenever I think of one. I always think there can't possibly be any more game memories to unearth, and I'm always wrong. For this one I blame/credit

zorealis, who brought it up during one of our regular nostalgia rambles.

Wheel of Fortune is a letter-guessing game based on the long-running US game show. It's like Hangman, or if the kids don't play Hangman anymore then it's like Wordle. The added strategy element is that before you guess a letter you have to spin the wheel to determine how many points your guess will be worth if it's right. The wheel also features bad outcomes like skipping your turn or losing all your points.

vanna white gestures to an unfinished puzzle TH_ P___T_D D_S_RT

vanna white gestures to an unfinished puzzle TH_ P___T_D D_S_RT

This DOS version of the game is very easy and probably aimed at children. You can play hotseat multiplayer, otherwise the game provides NPC opponents who don't exactly pass the Turing Test; I found it difficult to lose to them even when I tried. They'd cheerfully guess Q or Z for no reason, even while R and T were still sitting there like so many low-hanging consonant fruits. Poor pixel Vanna White always kept a professional smile on her face as she clapped encouragingly for each spin of the wheel, but I know she was secretly judging us, languishing in her pixel heels as she waited for someone to guess a right letter so she could awkwardly shuffle over there and turn it already, for God's sake.

The reason I was trying to let them win was that I was curious what would happen. When a human player wins, they get to do a solo bonus round. Would it make me sit through the computer doing it too?

( Let's find out )

I don't think I played this game very much as a kid. Even in 1987 there were more engaging options. But if you're like me and have been holding onto memories of it in some dusty disused corner of your hippocampus, you can play Wheel of Fortune in your browser.

soricel

Teaching:

NA, though I did send off a proposal/description of a new writing workshop series at the artsy personal development NGO. It's "urban wildlife themed." I'm ambivalent about it, and about my continued participation in the NGO in general, but ehh, I think I'll go for it.

Learning:

Kinda slacked off on my geography and Romanian practice this week, but got in a little bit of each. Also missed another somatic movement workshop, but watched the recording the next day. Actually got a little emotional doing it, but then I've been a little emotional all week I guess. Can't say I "learned" much in particular, but I feel like doing things like these workshops has helped me cultivate some skills I found very useful during this visit to my parents.' Or maybe not, I don't know!

Listening:

Not much really until this weekend, when I've been coming back to that Wicca Phase self-titled. Comfort music, I have to admit, and also pretty transportative, which is nice when I'm sitting in an airport feeling grossed out and overtired/overstimulated/etc.

Reading:

Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson. Part of me kinda felt like this book should've been twice as long. It felt like there were plot threads that just never really came together. I mean, they don't have to come together, and honestly plot isn't really what I like best about KSR's books--it's his unsentimental focus on mostly principled but slightly flawed people doing grinding, frustrating, fraught work, often within super fraught bureaucracies, to make Things slightly less shitty. Contrast with:

Fake Accounts, by Lauren Oyler. Read this on the plane. I kind of thought it was gonna be a 2016-era dive into "alt-right rabbitholes" and whatnot, with lots of predictable things to say about alienation and algorithms etc. There was a bit of that, but mostly it was about familiar Millennial novel preoccupations with authenticity, identity, purpose, etc...what I kinda refer to in my head as the Perennial Theme of the Realist Novel: the Impossibility of Knowing Oneself or Others. The usual cynicism/grudging sense of obligation to engage with politics/activism/etc. despite feeling like it's all pretty pointless and gross to do so, especially if you're privileged in all the ways that narrators in these novels always are. (That's the part I had in mind when I thought of contrasting it with the KSR book). But also some stuff about "expat life" (ugh I hate that term) that I found sadly/amusingly relatable despite the fact that my circumstances are much different from the narrator's. There was one passage in particular, about enduring conversations about U.S. politics/healthcare by smug and gleeful interlocutors, that rang especially true.

Oh, and something else I noticed: so I've been trying to de-Google my life, not using social media etc., and I feel like people--well, men--who have similar relationships to the internet/social media, are often, as in this novel, presented as creeps and weirdos with Something to Hide or I guess at best (here I'm thinking of the boyfriend in Dave Eggers' The Circle) as sort of two-dimensional, eccentric curmudgeons. Not sure what to make of this, though I noted an impulse as I read to like, create/resurrect Facebook and Instagram accounts and thus prove (to...?) my normalcy, or at least to establish some greater sense of imagined belonging to/solidarity with the vast majority of the human race.

(Also ugh I feel like I'm writing this post in the voice of the narrator from this book and I don't like it...)

Anyway, since I was in the land of my childhood these past two weeks, I felt a compulsion to revisit some old X-Men comics. I read (re-read? Can't remember) some of the classic Chris Claremont stuff: God Loves, Man Kills and Days of Future Past. I kinda forgot how political these comics were, in their ham-fisted way. I also liked how soft Nightcrawler and Colossus were. Fun to read.

Watching:

Nothing really.

Writing:

A couple RP posts. I know last week I said I was feeling kinda burnt out on them, but I think I was just in a mood. They're fun.

Other:

This was week two back home with my parents. Not gonna get into it here but despite some challenges, it was really pleasant and peaceful and I'm really grateful for this time with them.

starandrea

Me, yesterday: Did I get a new car because my old one failed inspection, or because I needed more room for plants?

My neighbor, today: This is your fault, you know.

*My new car is only nine years old, which is the newest car I've ever had. When I bought it someone asked how long I planned to keep it, and I stared at them in confusion. "Until it can't be fixed anymore," I said.

PS, the cannas are blooming and the dahlias are as tall as I am. Today I set up an auxiliary trellis so our passionflower vines would have more room to climb. They are v adventurous.

umadoshi

Reading:

scruloose and I finished listening to All Systems Red and are now maybe a third of the way into Artificial Condition.

Yesterday I finished The Hands of the Emperor, which I think I read some of every day and still took me something like a week and a half even though I continued to really enjoy it all the way through. (I did find myself wishing that some of the emotional arc with Kip and his family had been shorter; [ROT13] uvf pbzcyvpngrq srryvatf nobhg uvf snzvyl abg ng nyy tenfcvat jub ur jnf be jung ur npghnyyl qvq jrer inyvq, ohg gung jnf n YBG bs cntrf qribgrq gb znal vafgnaprf va n ebj bs ehaavat vagb lrg nabgure crefba jub qvqa'g trg vg naq jnf qvfzvffvir be vafhygvat, be fbzrbar jub QVQ xabj jub ur jnf naq univat na vagrenpgvba, naq va rvgure pnfr gurer jnf gura lrg nabgure yratgul qryvirel bs rkcynangvba, naq vg jnf whfg...n ybg.

After finishing that last night, I completely at random started reading We'll Prescribe You a Cat (Syou Ishida), about which I have no particular feelings at this time.

Eating/baking: ( fruit, baking, salad (HelloFresh), sadness about still not liking tomatoes )

Current Mood: groggy

pauraque

This poll brought to you by some questions relevant to my next book post, and a discussion with

phantomtomato.

Poll #33473

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 50

View Respondents

Is it a spoiler to state the PREMISE of Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, which is revealed 80 pages in but is treated as a secret by the jacket copy?

View Answers

Yes.
4 (8.0%)

No.
3 (6.0%)

Technically yes, but the book is 20 years old and it's common knowledge now.
27 (54.0%)

I'm not familiar with the book.
16 (32.0%)

Is it a spoiler to state the GENRE of Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, which is discernible neither from the jacket copy nor from where it was shelved in my library?

View Answers

Yes.
1 (2.0%)

No.
19 (38.0%)

Technically yes, but it's in the first sentence of the book's Wikipedia article so you're probably good.
17 (34.0%)

I have not become familiar with the book between the previous question and this one.
13 (26.0%)

For what it's worth, I was spoiled(?) years ago for the reveal, and I don't think it hindered my enjoyment of the book at all.

(Comments may contain spoilers? I guess?)

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3126/

You say no human would reply to a forum thread about Tom Bombadil by writing and editing hundreds of words of text, complete with formatting, fancy punctuation, and two separate uses of the word 'delve'. Unfortunately for both of us, you are wrong.

https://xkcd.com/3126/

forestofglory

As the title says I've actually read some of the pile of graphic novels that I got from the library! Things have been busy and I've been sick so progress has still been slow.

The Worst Ronin by Maggie Tokuda-Hall, Faith Schaffer — A graphic novel about a teen girl who wants to be a samurai and an older jaded ronin. The tech level is handwavy feudal Japan but with cell phones, which I found distracting. I didn’t think the cell phones added enough to the book to be worth it. Content note: gore, grief and dying

Anzu and the Realm of Darkness by Mai K. Nguyen and Diana Tsai Santos— Graphic novel about a Japanese American girl named Anzu who has just moved to a new town and get accidentally swept into the underworld. I thought it was pushing a little hard on we can solve systematic problems like bullying with individual choices but it was mostly sweet. I liked the kind of cartoony art style and all the different mystical critters.

Dragon of the Lost Sea by Laurence Yep —I read this Chinese mythology inspired MG fantasy novel to the kid at bed time. I had read these books myself as a kid and I was a little worried that they wouldn’t hold up, but the suck fairy has not gotten them! It’s maybe a little weird that the dragons all have wings. Chinese inspired stuff written in English these days tends to be very strict about not mixing in more western elements like that but actually the mixing is fun. Anyways this is a fun adventure story with lots of characters with big personalities.

Navigating With You by Jeremy Whitley,Casio Ribeiro, and Nikki Fox —A graphic novel about two girls who are both new at their high school. They decide to go on a quest to find all 7 volumes of an out of print manga they both never finished reading. I loved this! Both girls are charming and quirky in a geeky way, the manga story within the story was lovely. One of them does have a dead mom, something I generally avoid but by the time that was revealed I was hooked. It was super fun and charming!

Himawari House by Harmony Becker —A graphic novel about three young women from different places who move to Japan and end up living in the same house. It's a very slice of life with lots of food and friendship but also some sad moments. The author has a heartfelt note at the end explaining that she wrote on the accents because she wants to destigmatise having an accent. I have mixed feelings about it though because I find written accents way harder to parse than spoken accents.

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wrote_and_writ

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Page Summary

gekidasa - Headcanons and what Nie Huaisang did or did not do
xkcd_feed - Predicament
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xkcd_feed - Disclaimer
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