leave no penguin behind

On DW: https://superborb.dreamwidth.org/494109.html

Poking my head in to signal boost! A meme for reccing a fandom community over on DW https://superborb.dreamwidth.org/493318.html

Peng Lai was a popular rock star in China, before leaving her daughter, Bai Tian, behind to try and make it in the US; years later, after Bai Tian's father dies, she returns. I thought this was one of the more unique and interesting modern cdramas I've seen, with a lot of nuance in the portrayal of the complicated characters. Pacing was a bit messy, with some repetition (we didn't need quite so many episodes of mom-daughter revenge pranks) and contrived scenes (why would a job interviewer bring in a candidate who they were not going to consider...), and there was some tonal whiplash with the comedy parts. However, the last couple episodes really pull it together and end well! Peng Lai is pretty awful, and the mother-daughter conflict is fully on screen without flinching; obviously, they have to end with some reforming, but I think they don't let her off the hook. I was particularly impressed that despite the centrality of the biological mom relationship, it executed the step mom relationship well and gave it respect. They also did a decent job of fleshing out the side characters given that it's only 12 eps long. I found it a shame that they didn't have the space to really reflect on parallel of the grandma - Peng Lai relationship though. OTOH, I don't usually like the focus on a confession scene / misunderstandings in an early relationship, but they did a great job with this one and it was genuinely super cute. Of course, I loved the Chen Yue-Peng Lai antagonism, but it never quite lived up to the starting scene slow mo hair toss cut of Chen Yue. Overall, I thought it was well done and certainly very different! CW: alcoholism, terrible parenting, medical issues. If you need English subs, be aware the current set are clearly MTL; Bai Tian's name is often translated to daytime / during the day / Tony (???), and Xu Duo's to many.

Dracula, Solo Dance, xxxHolic (2022), The Nightmare Before Christmas (Chinese dub), Meet the Chimps (Chinese dub) ep 1, Ponyo (on DW)

This 700 page tome is an attempt to change the narrative of how humans organize themselves and therefore implicitly critique the rigidity of our society now. Overall, I learned a LOT from the book; the details of many of the societies, historical and indigenous, were new to me and it was organized in a novel way. From lirazel's rec, which actually details the arguments the book makes. The main flaw is that while it's fun to read takedowns, the book often tilts into defensive territory and too much ink is spilled on this. It reads like a series of university lectures, which is far too repetitive for a book. And yet despite this, sometimes their own hypotheses were very much citation needed, when they overreached. A collection of interesting tidbits: - Many cultures made seasonal changes of social structure; the variations in the seasonal changes are also huge. For example, European carnival, when social structures are turned upside down. - "Scholars and professional researchers, on the other hand, have to actually make a considerable effort to remain so ignorant" lol - A great deal of space is devoted to hammering the point home that it was Native American ideas of democracy and free thinking that started the Enlightenment, and it was not brought over from Europe with the guns and germs etc. (This was a very important point! It was repeated a LOT.) (Also, our ideas of more indulgent child rearing originate there too.) - Ancient Greeks considered elections not democratic and an aristocratic mode (sortition was the democratic choice)-- and this carried through for Medieval Europe as well. - There was a long period of time when people explored farming (on the flood plains ofc), while still hunting/foraging. Farming was originally a method of last resort, to get food out of less productive land. - The process of schismogenesis, when neighboring groups start defining themselves in opposition to each other. - The authors posit the basic freedoms are to move, to disobey, to rearrange social ties. "To move" is the most basic one, from which the others derive; obviously has implications for our current society. - The space in between the famous dynasties and empires is when people were probably least oppressed etc, and more work should be devoted to that. - Humans always CHOOSE how their communities are shaped deliberately. Anyway, I learned a lot from the book, but I feel like it could have used some tightening. I also am not necessarily completely convinced of all the presented evidence, BUT I think the points it makes are valuable nonetheless. On the scale of popsci books, it's on the pop side, very much a brief survey, but is not annoyingly so.

I have been in Graeber purgatory for the last three months and I am STILL NOT DONE with Dawn of Everything, so uh. Some mostly non-book media! (I... am mostly enjoying it, but it's just very difficult to read through in one sitting, which makes my progress slow.) Make, Sew and Mend, by Bernadette Banner: An overview of hand-sewing techniques. From sophia_sol's rec. It was well laid out in terms of the order of covered topics and mostly clear, though it was occasionally excessively wordy. There were a few times when I had to reread a sentence a dozen or so times before I understood what was happening and afterwords felt like it could have been expressed with more clarity. On the one hand, I'm not an experienced sewer so it makes sense that I would be confused sometimes; on the other, surely that is most of the intended audience, as the techniques covered are not particularly fancy. I did learn how to properly anchor my thread! And corrected a few other things that home ec misled me on. 8UPPERS: In conjunction with their album promotion, Kanjani8 released this movie, where they are gangsters who have suddenly acquired a baby. I guess a lot of background was supposed to be revealed in teasers in advance, but the plot still made sense without it. Not that the plot is that complicated or deep, but it is coherent! Mainly, they cast a cute baby and there are lots of found family scenes. As We Like It (2021): An all-female cast retelling of As You Like It, set in a neighborhood of Taipei where internet is banned. It opens with many gay and lesbian couples as background, but an 'I'm not gay' freakout is what keeps Orlando and Rosalind-as-a-boy apart? And the het couple being able to have a baby is why they're superior? There are briefly mentioned gay couples, but it does come across as being far more comfortable with lesbians (or the playacting of a lesbian relationship) than with gay people. It tries to conclude with a 'gender doesn't matter' message at the end, but... all the main couples are het, though played by women, and the closest they get to queerness is the slight gender bending of Rosalind-as-a-boy. It was a fun romp, just not as queer as it seemed it'd be. Luca (2021): Summer adventure coming of age movie set in Italy, where a sea monster child explores the human world for the first time. (I got the rec from someone on DW, but I can't seem to turn it up in search, as searching "Luca" also turns up hits for "Lucas"...) Fun, easy story to watch. I didn't love the animation style, but so it goes. I really like that Disney+ movies are available dubbed in lots of languages, and they're often pretty ideal for language learners in terms of speed etc. Debrief (RP): Alternate Cold War with ghosts, one hour, two player game. From skygiants' rec. This was the first time I did an RP and I am not sure I'm very good at it! I played with bf, and we were much more inclined to negotiate openly and also not add character quirks that would make it more difficult to succeed lol. It was fun! Being time limited makes it an easier introduction too. If you play, warnings for upper class white men in mid 19c Britain attitudes and histories.

On DW (Tumblr keeps eating the formatting so I give up)

2. Blogs or news sites? Something with a relatively high interesting story to article count ratio OR more in-depth stories. (I'll rec one to start: I feel like sixthtone's articles have gotten better and meatier over time! Focused on stores about China, with a wide coverage.)

The plan for the kawas (gods) to leave after the last rain falls is disrupted by a human girl. According to some random Taiwanese blogs, they used general concepts from Amis mythology, but any particular story/kawas is fictional. The good: The worldbuilding is TIGHT, very cleanly done. It started very strong, doing a great job of subtly setting things up without explicitly overexplaining. The arcs that did get resolved, where they revisited earlier scenes from new perspectives, were incredibly satisfying. The reveal of the motivations of the character you're set up to think is the villain is VERY good; in only a few minutes, it totally recontextualized everything in a believable, yet unexpected, way. Toem, a character who's written to be ambivalently evil, is also incredibly acted and has great scenes (and outfits! and earrings!). Generally, the other world set is used to great advantage, as are subtle special effects, though the male lead's fortress/house is uh, hilarious. Early on, the otherworldliness of the kawas was subtly contrasted with humanity's concerns in how they handled problems, though this got dropped in the genre shift (see below). The folktale at the beginning of each episode is really interesting: sometimes clever, sometimes overextended. For some reason, they seemed to have a very large music budget, with many new pieces appearing towards the end of the show. The bad: The plot is extremely unfocused as a result of trying to tackle too many elements: one of the reasons the ending feels unsatisfying, as noted by halfcactus is because it changes from a story about the female lead, which is shaped like a family centric story, to one about the male lead, which is shaped like a romance. Certain subplots were very draggy, in particular the romance (in retrospect, makes more sense since that was the story they were trying to tell), the guilt arcs, and when they were trying to do something clever with a slow reveal (made it hard for the watcher to participate since so much was omitted). I really, really hated the henpecked storyline; it was a bad relationship in a boring way. There are some interesting implications of the memory tampering allowed by the Comb of Memories, which they... didn't fully explore and they didn't even lean into how fucked up it was. halfcactus summed up the ending well as a fix-it fanfic (in a literal, not figurative way). This left SO MANY dangling, important plot threads? Overall, when it hit, it was VERY good, but there were major pacing issues because it spent a lot of time on things that weren't important and ended up unresolved. Still, I would recommend it overall, as the worldbuilding was fantastic and the way they tried to tell the story ambitious.

Am I doing a mid-June Media Diet solely so I can discuss The Color of Distance even though I didn't have quite enough for a dedicated post? ...Yes. The Color of Distance, by Amy Thomson: A human biologist is stranded on a world where the amphibian-like intelligent life has extremely refined abilities of biological manipulation. From skygiants' rec -- DW search was NOT pulling up the rec, but it seemed like it could only have come from a Becca rec. THIS BOOK WAS 1000% MY JAM. So much my jam that I hadn't realized the books I had been reading were not my jam?? Anyway, a list of things that were my jam: weird aliens with development/society that were well thought out, difficult cross-cultural communication, extended academic presentations and associated nerdery, characters who kind of hated each other a bit and had to work through it, complicated disputes that didn't have simple resolutions where the characters' needs were in conflict. The ways that learning about each other impacted/changed how they viewed the world! I did not like the ~alien word~ emphasis at the very beginning, but it stopped afterwards thankfully. Also, stranding her when they know about her being on the planet seems ...kind of evil? And not going after them in the first place when they went missing conflicts with their strict leave-no-microbes-behind policy and evil? The book also has a very 90s sci-fi obsession with overpopulation, and does mostly fall into the one-species-one-culture trap. I am very sad that the sequel is apparently not good, but I loved this book so much! An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin, by Gad Beck and Frank Heibert, translated by Allison Brown: The first part of the memoirs of Beck, a half-Jewish teenager in Berlin during Hitler's rise to power and the Holocaust. From skygiants' rec. Beck so clearly cares about people and understanding people, and the strength of the memoir is (IMO) the description of so many different, complex people from many walks of life. I found especially interesting the descriptions of the daily life of how their underground network operated -- and the many people who needed to be coordinated -- and that two of the non-Jews who contributed were motivated by spite after a perceived betrayal by the Nazi party. A short, complicated read. CW: underage sex with adults in positions of power and, obviously, Nazi Germany The Past is Red, by Catherynne M Valente: In a post-apocalyptic world, the survivors live on a giant floating garbage patch. From sophia_sol's rec. I thought the worldbuilding and plot was quite shallow. The impression is rather like a series of ideas without thought about how they'd connect and follow-through? Also, I did not enjoy the prose very much. I did like the moral it tried to convey about loving your world as it is and living for the sake of living. These Violent Delights, by Chloe Gong (DNF): Romeo and Juliet retelling in rival gangs of 1920s Shanghai. The prose is melodramatic and repetitive in a tedious way, and could have used some serious polish. Characters are rather thin, with 'snappy' dialogue and actions prioritized: e.g. breaking things to make a point just reads as if this supposedly mature protag is a total brat. I finally gave up at the line, "Despite the shine, it was brisk out today, chilly in the sort of way that drew the roses in the garden a little straighter, as if they couldn't afford to lose a single second of the warmth filtering through the clouds." Second... of warmth... Maybe I'll come back to this when I'm feeling more patient with superficiality. Mini Metro: A puzzle game where you build a rail system as a city grows. I needed a new mobile idle game after Two Dots was becoming a bit repetitive, but Mini Metro in the standard mode is a bit too real time for that (one of modes is to create an efficient system, and so you can't lose). However, I got sucked into trying to beat all the city achievements. Each city has an achievement where you have to build your rail lines with a particular restriction and reach a certain number of travelers transported. And now that I've done all of them, I can put it down in my Media Diet hahaha. I liked that the achievements encouraged you to try different techniques! The game does a good job of differentiating each city even though they can only tweak a few things-- notably, the map itself, but also the speed of the trains and some of the power-ups you get. From youtube, it seems that Mini Motorways, the sequel game, improves upon the base idea, but it's not available for mobile (yet?). Gorogoro Kitchen: A youtube channel, mostly vlogs of daily life / flea markets in France by a Japanese couple. I find the rhythm of these vlogs very soothing, and also love looking at flea markets.

I realize that I mostly pull 'from x's rec!' links from DW search, but this doesn't work for if the post was flocked / recs I got off DW. HMMM, but I'm so bad at remembering where I got a rec from! The Empress of Salt and Fortune, by Nghi Vo: The story of the former empress is recounted to a cleric from an order dedicated to faithfully recording history. I enjoyed the slow reveal and the pacing was quite good, but the last chapter that explicated what had been strongly hinted at earlier was a little redundant; generally not as subtle as I expected going in? A short, interesting read. The Thursday Murder Club: a Novel, by Richard Osman: Four people living in an upmarket retirement community come together every Thursday to solve cold murders, and when an actual murder occurs, set up to solve it themselves. Very ...witty is probably the right word for the type of humor. Funny in one-off sentences, but I found it somewhat difficult to read in one go as a result, and had to keep putting it down when it got repetitive. A fluffy sometimes amusing novel, with what reads to my USian eyes as rather conservative politics. The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, by Patricia A. McKillip: A fantasy novel with the window dressing of fantastical beasts, but really about consent, power, and fear. From dolorosa_12's rec! I thought the ending, though foreshadowed, was a little bit too deus ex machina to be fully satisfying? Beautiful prose without being self-conscious about it, such that the prose read in an effortless way. (Difficult to pull off!) I kept feeling like this was rather dark YA -- midway through, I decided I must be getting the wrong impression and this must be adult fantasy, but wiki seems to have it under YA? Anyway, short and packs a punch. CW: sexual assault, child marriage The Disordered Cosmos, by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Discussion of racism in science, with dashes of popsci particle physics and autobiography. From chestnut_pod's rec. Could have used a stronger editor with an eye towards continuity between the chapters, especially what had been introduced already and what needed to be defined. The popsci explanations were a bit confusing IMO, but I did know most of the general ideas already, so I can't totally judge accurately. The meatiest chapters were the ones in the latter half, which centered around particular faces of racism in science, but unfortunately I did not find them particularly novel. Once, It Was Love: Very short manga about a woman whose husband suddenly stops being able to see her. From x_los's review. I guess like a good thriller, I really wanted to know what would happen next. We get to understand the motivation of the female characters explicitly, but only ever the male ones through their actions; the stalker's motivations are clear, but the husband's never become so. Under the Skin (猎罪图鉴) (2022): Mostly episodic cases as a forensic artist joins the police force and works with a captain who initially hates him for his role in the death of his mentor years ago. I think the problem is the best parts of this show were things like... extended art scenes and their bromance relationship once they get to know each other, neither of which was enough to compensate for what I disliked. Some of the characters were compelling and the pacing was pretty good too. I had a longer rant here, but I've cut for length: the gist was too much 'TV logic' leading to thin/unrealistic plots, asshole cop behavior, and weird cuts / cases not resolving satisfactorily. Although they tried to be sympathetic to the circumstances of female victims and perpetrators, it went too far into 'reveling in their pain' territory for me; additionally, having two male leads and a few stereotypical male and female cop roles meant the show overall landed more sexist than I think they intended. Episodes 17-18 were probably the strongest, doing a great job with tension and bringing in threads from earlier in the series; I especially liked how it recontextualized how surveillance was treated during the show. Also, the captain introduced in those episodes did an exceptional acting job. Overall, I think I should perhaps stop watching Chinese cop shows and the very constrained stories they can tell. CW: gratuitous extended on screen domestic violence, tragic lesbians Dream Boys 2006 Kanjani8 v KAT-TUN (DNF): I watch partied the first hour of this, and the juniors tap dancing was my favorite number. So much inexplicable plot happened in the first hour that I am scared what happens in the remaining 1.5. Cyphstress: Online group puzzle in the vein of an escape room. The first half was too straightforward and tedious at points; the second half was occasionally frustrating. I think the problem was that (for me) there wasn't much of a feeling of satisfaction at solving the puzzles; just an 'I guess that's the solution...'? Still, it was fun to do as a group activity!