#hcq

This video was in my bili recs this morning and I had to stop myself from tearing up on the train 5s into it. You have to give it to mihoyo that the microexpressions are done amazingly well in the moments it matters. The way he gives himself a moment to take in the two of them after they fought side by side (even if it was to beat up his disciple lol). He regards them with such warmth and affection before Blade cruelly cuts off his attempt at establishing a connection and ughhhh you just see how he compartmentalizes and slips back into his role as the General.

His subsequent conversation with Dan Heng is also so emotionally fraught, I don't even know how he doesn’t just implode.

His "So what?" really gets to me. I thought he'd sound quite like he's repressing his anger but I rewatched the scene and he says it with barely any heat😫 He is well aware that this isn't his old friend anymore, Dan Heng couldn't have been making it clearer. If anything, he sounds resignated and self-mocking.

Also this scene is so evillll because the first time you (I) played this scene, you're totally seeing it from Dan Heng's POV. He's justified in being annoyed with how everyone sees him as someone he isn't, and Jing Yuan seems especially stubborn about not letting it go. I for one just kept thinking "Dude Jing Yuan, leave the poor lad alone."

The thing though is that Dan Heng actually is wrong here — he is very much still Dan Feng by the definition of Vidyadhara reincarnation. The game keeps saying that it wasn't properly carried out and that it failed, but it doesn't tell you in what exact way in the main story. You have to dig a bit for info.

i was gonna say something about how his skill could be him like heating up his sword as one would to forge it (but not THAT hot obviously) and now im thinking about how with blade’s skill he turns his sword from black to red? he is forging that thing. also crazy that that sword weighs like 4000lbs and he launched it through the air like a frisbee and dan heng got impaled with it and hardly even stumbled. how strong are these guys. OOOH or yingxing could have a FLAMETHROWERRR thing. he made awesome shit and everyone loved him ok? i know he’s never going to be playable as old man furnace master yingxing but i am just imagining if he was… hehe. arrogant craftsman. god they need to let me see/hear more of him like that. I WANT TO SEE OTHER WEAPONS HE MADE I WANT TO SEE HIM SMILE AND BE PROUD AND ANNOYING!!!!!! OLD MAN NOW!!!!!!

anyways fire/hunt yingxing. imaginary/hunt would be cute and fire/destruction makes sense too and obviously most characters playable paths dont line up with their actual beliefs but idc he seems very hunt to me. i miss him. you guys remember when he said “be careful, high elder, lest you hurt yourself with it.” that was some crazy shit. show me geriatric bladie again pleeeease. blade companion mission better be 6 hours long and at least 100k words and 2 cinematics. i’ll wait. give me his life story all 800 years of it. well i guess that’d be like

age 0-7: love my family. sure hope the beasts don’t arrive!

age 8-15: beasts ate my planet. went somewhere else they are teaching me shit here

age 16-30: i am the best at the shit i was taught. idc that everyone is rude to me about it cuz they can be rude but they can’t beat meeeee 😋

age 31-70: im still the best and now i’m hanging out with my immortal friends yay :) they’re all going to outlive me but that’s for the best i think. Right guys?

age 71-800: Ow ow ow ouch ow. Where the fuck am i btw & who the fuck am i as well. Oh well guess ill stick a branch in my hair

age 801+: kidnapped by robot and woman but it’s fine. girl keeps asking me to play games with her even though i tell her i’m busy cutting my hand off each and every day. beast upon my shoulder saying ‘Meow’ frequently. unsure of the implications of this. robot here sometimes. i like it. woman tells me to stop foaming at the mouth so i do because i respect women. except ONE OF THEM. (can’t remember which one right now). branch growing from my stomach again. not my problem. i will be taking a week long nap now.

Books of 2026: PORTRAIT OF A THIEF by Grace D. Li.

I've been so stoked for this book since it came out (in...2022.....), but I was saving it as writing-project related and then just. hadn't. gotten back around to the particular writing project in mind. However!! Since I did just do a blitz through my recent-ish writing projects, I figured the time was upon us!!

I really enjoyed this one. The chapters were thriller-short, especially at the beginning, but the writing was much more literary than the chapter size would suggest. Not unapproachably literary--I thought it was very readable!--just. more contemplative and reflective than I was expecting, given how small the chapters were. Lots of meditations on diaspora and belonging and straddling cultures. For instance: I appreciated how Li used Chinese characters instead of pinyin in the main text (and there was a very sweet paragraph at the end of her Acknowledgements in Chinese, too!)(I was also pleased how many characters I still remembered from my two (2) trimesters of high school Mandarin haha).

The story is about five Chinese American college students who are offered ten million dollars apiece to steal Chinese artwork from Western museums and return it to Beijing. The five students, while brilliant and driven, are also very much college students, and (mostly) not thieves by the start of the book, but their skill sets do lend themselves toward becoming a Heist Crew.

It was a slow build toward the first heist, page-count wise, and then the heist itself was more like what I'd expect non-professional college students to pull off than, say, the Leverage crew. If you're looking for a book about the intricacies of planning a competence-porn heist, this is probably not the story for you, but I did still really enjoy it, and I liked the variations in the five perspectives we got (which rotated pretty evenly across the story). I also really liked that Li references Ocean's Eleven and Leverage and Fast & Furious in her acknowledgements, and I feel like her soft spot for F&F is very obvious (which I loved).