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Current Mood: worried

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Nobody needs a drought, but here we are

The entire province is in a drought now, after a generally dry season that was already extremely dry in a lot of areas, and last I heard there was no rain in the forecast. Yesterday official word came out asking people to try to conserve water and telling everyone to stay the hell out of the woods. (Apparently there's a substantial fine, although my understanding is that no such fine has ever been successfully enforced, so that's...great.) So now is the time of hoping the farmers and crops come through as well as possible, and that wildfire season passes us by.

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Not all danmei this Wednesday, but close

Recently read

Xue Shan Fei Hu, The Disabled Tyrant's Beloved Pet Fish, vol. 3. Silly and fluffy danmei. It's basically domestic fluff crossed with palace intrigue, except all the intrigue plots are resolved with minimal trouble and everything always works out for the main characters. Conflict level: -500. I don't know that I actually enjoyed reading this, because there was absolutely nothing of substance in it, but I still started vol. 4 right away. I blame the cliffhanger.

I'll have to start being less of a completionist about danmei, don't I?

Xue Shan Fei Hu, The Disabled Tyrant's Beloved Pet Fish, vol. 4. Yeah. I've no excuse.

Gu Xue Rou, To Rule in a Turbulent World, vol. 1. Yet more historical danmei. I was pretty sceptical about this one, since the English translation is published by Via Lactea. Also, the translator/editor team is apparently Suika and Pengie, who made something of a mess of the TGCF and MDZS translations. Luckily, the quality of the translation and editing was better than I expected. Maybe nothing to write home about, but at least none of the tableware was tired of life, which was a step up from the TGCF translation.

But. The fucking epub file, oh my god. Rant incoming.

( Screeching about the epub. Accessibility, goddamit! )

It wouldn't have been a surprise if I'd just given up. I'm glad I didn't, though, because this was a surprisingly enjoyable read. So much so that I actually read it in one day.

The MC is a flightly young master from a filthy-rich merchant family who has been sent to the capital to study for the imperial exam and to eventually buy prestige for his family by becoming an official. The ML is a slave from one of the northern nomadic tribes, whose loyalty the MC earns by saving his life. Since the MC is a flighty wastrel at first, he'll naturally have to face some difficulties to grow as a person.

The prose isn't the most polished, but I liked the characters, and the pace of the novel is good. I also liked the farming, which is probably a weird thing to say about a story where the MC is studying to become a scholar, but there it is. A large part of this volume at least is taken up by restoring an old manor house and making the estate ready for spring planting. I happen to love stuff like that in fiction -- restoring something dilapidated, forging order out chaos, getting deep into the minutiae of a profession or craft -- but if you're bored by endless talk of watermills, then this might not be the book for you.

Some content warnings to keep in mind should you be someone who would like to avoid these things: age gap relationship (15/22), master/slave relationship.

A.J. Demas, Lion & Snake: Series One. Damn. Way to slay me again, Demas. Slow burn, enemies to lovers, arranged marriage, age gap romance in Demas's pseudo-historical setting. Basically tailor-made for me. I have this because I'm subscribed to Demas on Ream. I don't think it's available anywhere else (yet).

Currently reading

Little progress on the old RIPs. Oops.

Up next

More farming in historical China, perhaps?

Elsewhere on the internet....

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recs-tv,
tv-cdrama

CDrama Rec: Nothing But You

Wu Lei and Zhou Yutong in Nothing But You

Nothing But You (愛情而已) is a 2023 cdrama. It's a noona romance set in the world of sports: between Song Sanchuan, a professional badminton player who later switches to tennis (Wu Lei - you might know him from Nirvana in Fire, or maybe from Sand Sea), and Liang You'an, a sports company sales person/executive assistant (Zhou Yutong). He's 22, she's 32, and basically the whole obstacle to their relationship is that she thinks he's too young for her. That sustains the tension for a very long time indeed. :D I personally find both of them very cute (and I say that as someone who was indifferent to Wu Lei's looks before).

Is it a rec? Yes! Yesyesyesyes! It's so, so good.

Does it have a happy ending?

ending spoilers

Yes! So much yes. They manage to wrap up pretty much all the storylines in a saccharine finale, and I didn't hate even a single one of the choices.

Where to watch? You can watch it on Viki or Youtube.

I love so many things about this show!

A) There's not a single 'evil' character on it (minus one very short exception in one of the later eps). Every character has their own valid reasons for doing the things they do. Some of those are callous or misguided, but nowhere near as cliched as I'm used to from other dramas, and overall, most of the characters are just wonderful all around.

B) Many of the main characters are women, and I feel like the story is definitely told from a female perspective. All the women are encouraged to stand up for themselves and follow their dreams. The men aren't idiots either, though, which is just fun to watch. Of the secondary characters, I especially like Sanchuan's stepdad. He always has good advice (which doesn't always match Sanchuan's actual needs, but I love that too), and while I don't know the actor, I got the distinct impression that he must be a popular comedian. I also really like the boss's storyline. Overall, I like a lot more of the storylines and characters than I expected.

( many more reasons, not spoilery (two minor spoilers separately tagged inside) )

Now I'm looking through fanvids and interviews on bilibili instead of starting something new. That's not the case for many cdramas for me, and I'm enjoying that, too. (I haven't found any really good ones yet, though. I'll keep looking.)

Some pictures of the couple

They always look this adoringly...

Nothing But You - dinner

...at each other

Nothing But You - good hair

He looks good sweaty and sporty

Nothing But You - cuddles

They're very cuddly together

Nothing But You - baobao

Gimme a hug!

Nothing But You - hugs

More hugs

Another hug!

Nothing But You - kiss

There are quite a few kisses too

Nothing But You - hugs

But mostly hugs :)

x-posted to

c_ent

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weekly update

Me-and-media update

Previous poll review
In the Your Name poll, 73.5% of respondents spell their name out, unprompted, 26.5% offer an explanation or additional information, and 14.3% exaggerate the pronunciation to reflect the spelling. I've concluded that names are super inefficient, and we should switch to serial numbers.

In ticky-boxes, being gentle with yourself (69.4%) came second to hugs (77.6%), followed by three enchanted owl feathers that can draw forth the dawn (53.1%). Thank you for your votes!

Reading
10 Things That Never Happened by Alexis Hall, read by Will Watt -- I loved this! The banter was hilarious, and the reading was flawless. Neither of the lead characters are exactly cinnamon rolls, but that helped to offset the impacts of some, er, questionable choices. I giggled my way through most of it and found it genuinely moving at the end. The basic premise is that the regional branch manager of a bed-and-bath store gets himself and his entire team fired for underperforming, immediately has an accident, and grabs the opportunity to fake amnesia and move into his prick of a boss's house (for "monitoring the concussion" reasons) a month before Christmas, in a bid to reverse the damage and save his team. Reads like a wild remix of the Sandra Bullock While You Were Sleeping Christmas movie, which I also love.

Will Watt is such a great reader that I then listened to another Alexis Hall, this one set half inside a MMORPG, despite my knowing nothing at all about gaming. Looking for Group was cute, contained a) a lot of gaming references and terminology, and b) a fair amount of '19-year-old guy falling for another guy for the first time, and also being very clueless!19, but eventually getting his act together.' The story scaffolding was showing by the end, but it still worked.

I'm now listening to Will Watt reading A Market of Dreams and Destiny by Trip Galey. Magical AU London. This is an adventure story with lowkey m/m, set in a goblin market and a workhouse full of indentured children. The comps are Neverwhere and The Night Circus, and both seem apt; I'd add in Six of Crows, too. I'm 4 hrs 20 in and enjoying it so far.

Also in audio, Andrew and I started the new Rivers of London. It feels super self-indulgent so far, but you know, fun. Good sense of place, as always (to the point where I keep imagining Aaranovich swanning around Scotland, taking notes).

Ongoing: Guardian by priest, and Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman.

Kdramas
Just passed halfway in my Nothing But Love (AKA Nothing But You) rewatch. Still loving it. *smishes everyone*

Other TV
More North of North, the first few episodes of Middle Class Bogan (Australian sitcom about an upper middle class doctor who discovers that a) she's adopted and b) her birth parents are drag racers; features New Zealand's Robyn Malcolm; the main character is very uptight and it stresses me out, but not in a terrible way); the first episode of Chief of War (Temuera Morrison is outstanding); Bluey! Fringe with my sister.

Hudson Hawk (DVD from my collection) -- shamelessly ridiculous, and I am totally here for it!! :D Apparently New Zealand is the only country where this film was a hit. Rated five out of five giggles.

Desperately Seeking Susan at the cinema -- I love this so much!! Delightful romp with TV/movie-amnesia. Stars Rosanna Arquette, Madonna, and young!Aiden Quinn. Rated five out of five hearts.

We have tickets for Jaws at the end of the month.

Fandom
I posted a poll to the

fan_writers comm -- possibly a tactical error given the state of my arms, but the discussion there has been great. It's so interesting seeing people's different approaches to writing.

Audio entertainment
Writing Excuses, Letters from an American. (I should get back to Midnight Burger sometime -- I stalled out in the middle of chapter 18.)

Online life
Busy, busy, busy, but it's all good fun stuff.

Writing/making things
At this point, if I can finish my flashfic for the Crowd round of

fan_flashworks for the 11th NZ time (10th in most places), I'll count myself lucky and satisfied. A lot of my time, energy and arms are going into other things.

Life/health/mental state things
Same as last week, via-à-vis arms being bad and things otherwise being mostly okay.

Food
I made easy fried rice on Sunday, malfatti yesterday, and today I have a beef stroganoff minus onions in the slow cooker. Also, yesterday I made a ton of Korean pork dumplings minus cabbage. I'm still slightly baffled that I cook now -- what is happening??

Good things
The profusion of m/m profic and excellent audiobook readers. Online friends, and active Dreamwidth comms and fandoms. An inbox full of things to reply to, and a life full of things to do. Cooking. Fic and art. Wishlist is coming!!

Poll #33465 Reading preferences

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 49

View Respondents

I prefer

View Answers

standalone novels
35 (71.4%)

duologies / trilogies
18 (36.7%)

finished series
27 (55.1%)

ongoing series
10 (20.4%)

re-reads
22 (44.9%)

new books by favourite authors
30 (61.2%)

discovering new authors
27 (55.1%)

gazing helplessly at my TBR list
22 (44.9%)

mostly fanfic
18 (36.7%)

other
2 (4.1%)

ticky-box full of swinging on a star
19 (38.8%)

ticky-box full of carrying moonbeams home in a jar
25 (51.0%)

ticky-box full of having more fun than you are
14 (28.6%)

ticky-box full of teenage giraffes adopting more of a flamingo aesthetic
25 (51.0%)

ticky-box full of hugs
30 (61.2%)

More perfumy stuff

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Fannish July

I was still terribly stressed and my stress-watching is usually things I never planned on watching in the first place. I got very lucky with all my choices this month!

TV new

Ballboy Tactics, a Korean BL on iQiyi - Han Jiwon, retired gymnast, meets Kwon Jeongeu, their university's most popular basketball player. It's a very slow, thoughtful drama with a lot of internal dialogue. There's communication and sweetness instead of unnecessary drama and tropey staged scenes. I loved it a lot! There are barely any external obstacles (depending on how you count the base setup of homophobia in sports), it's all in their heads - I found that awesome! I absolutely rec this show. It has only eight 25-minute episodes, and I went through it in two days.

When it rains, it pours, a Japanese BL on Viki - Hagiwara lives in a frustrating sexless relationship with his girlfriend, while his colleague Sei lives with his best friend from childhood on whom he has an unrequited crush. They connect via a wrongly addressed email, and start confessing their problems to each other. There's a lot of talk about sex, which surprised me - it's very blunt and honest for a Japanese drama. There's also actual sex, and I really enjoyed the sex-first-romance-later plot here. Both characters are interesting, and I found the actor who played Hagiwara, Muto Jun, especially good/attractive. It's even shorter than the other one with only 7 25-minute episodes. CW for rape and infidelity.

My watchalong finally started When A Snail Falls in Love, with a few weeks' delay. It's an old cdrama with Wang Kai and Wang Ziwen. I'm enjoying how much more Chinese I understand now than when I first watched this seven years ago. The only thing that confused us is the weirdly unfitting soundtrack. Sometimes it tries to pass the show off as a Bond film (which is fair enough), but other times we were completely unable to figure out why the music was chosen the way it was. Granted, that's not unusual for cdrama, and it's not going to stop us. :) We've seen three eps now, and are mostly just cackling at Wang Kai's character's Bond-esque swoops and saves-of-the-day and general hero-halo awesomeness, at the Sherlockian intuitive leaps of logic of the female lead. So far we enjoy Wang Kai's voice and the leads' combined tall-and-smol-ness. What's not to like? :D

And then the biggest surprise of the month:
Nothing But You, a noona romance cdrama set in the world of sports (badminton and tennis) - a rec from

china_shop. When I'm stressed, I tend to drop all my shows and instead watch silly romance things that I hadn't planned on watching. But this one was so good I just tore through it, I binge-watched all 38 eps in three weeks, and I ended up loving it from start to finish. It's a romance between a professional badminton player who later switches to tennis (Wu Lei - you might know him from Nirvana in Fire, or maybe from Sand Sea) and a sports company sales person/executive assistant (Zhou Yutong). He's 22, she's 32, and basically the whole obstacle to their relationship is that she thinks he's too young for her. That sustains the tension for a very long time indeed. :D I personally find both of them very cute (and I say that as someone who was indifferent to Wu Lei's looks before). I am writing up a proper rec post for it and will post it soon. You can watch it on Viki.

Movies

I saw #schwarzeschafe at the theater. I should not go to the theater anymore, the camera movements on the large screen make me so nauseous! I had my eyes closed for the second half. Despite that, I rec this movie. It's a German comedy (a loose sequel to the original "Schwarze Schafe" from 2006), and it's about a handful of very quirky characters whose storylines intertwine throughout the movie during a heatwave in Berlin. It's really hard to describe, and all the trailers are (imho) misleading. What can I say, I enjoyed it, I rec it.

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rl-thingslearned

Things learned in July

I felt like I learned a lot... more than half the slots are filled, yay. \o/

( 16 things, all different categories this time )

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review: books

Media roundup Jun-Jul

An Immense World, by Ed Yong:

Pop sci about animal senses. One scientific error (if you consider light to not be instantaneous, neither are electric fields), though of course some of the science has actually updated in the years since it was written (hypotheses on why birds call in the morning). This is probably one of the best pop sci books I've read: well written, informative, and interesting, when discussing both material I already knew or didn't know. Highly recommend.

Inspector Imanishi Investigates, by Seichō Matsumoto, translated by Beth Cary:

Police detective investigates a mysterious death of an unknown person. The best parts were about 1960s Japanese society, but I overall wasn't a fan. It's probably because of expectations around coincidence, plot holes around why someone would take certain actions, that sort of thing. Was a bit of an awkward feeling translation, but I thought it was interesting that this was abridged in order to be published as a mystery and because the original was a serial and needed polish.

Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel (DNF):

Thomas Cromwell during his rise. Certainly the style was interesting, but I was somewhat bored 15% of the way though... I think knowing how it ends does detract (which I don't usually find to be the case). Maybe I'm too immature a reader to enjoy this like it should be because I don't care enough about the subtleties of the language? Distinct Cromwell is my woobie vibe.

Lady Eve's Last Con, by Rebecca Fraimow:

Interstellar rom-com between a con woman and the sister of the man she is trying to get revenge on. A fun romp and I love prince type (female) love interests always, but does follow rom com logic.

Memoirs of a Spacewoman, by Naomi Mitchison:

Old school sci fi about exploring other worlds! I liked this well enough, and I appreciated the weird aliens (who still felt weird today!) But am not sure the social stuff aged as well (in terms of insightfulness / interesting newness). The fascist butterflies were a lot, but I am still thinking about them a month later...

Language City, by Ross Perlin:

The history of NYC through the lens of language. Frequently fell into the trap of lists, which I did not enjoy. I learned some things, but I think less than I wished to have (despite all the lists... density of information in the form of lists is not the way...)

Wellness, by Nathan Hill:

A couple that met as counter culture college students in the 90s in Chicago face the doldrums of middle age and marriage. I was Highly Skeptical at the superficiality of the psych major's understanding of psych (I think this is really the author's gap in knowledge) -- and I think compared to the poignancy and emotion of sections that probably were more in line with the author's actual experiences e.g. of the beauty of the prairie, Wellness the company and the supposed psychological research sections felt much less realistic and therefore frustrating. HOWEVER, overall I kind of loved it? All its disparate plot strands, spanning locations, people, and time, really came together in a perfect jigsaw puzzle way, and in the end I did really want to root for the main couple as a couple. Highly recommend.