interests:
last updated 2025-03-30
Though Asimov is one of many big sci-fi authors, I have had little interest in giving him a try, especially not after reading I, Robot and getting disappointed. I, Robot was also part of my cyberpunk homework, which is different from Foundation, the series he is most known for. I ended up putting Foundation on my list despite my immense disappointment, and you know what, Asimov impressed me on many fronts despite being a cishet White man.
Foundation tells of a small group of people originating from the Galactic Empire attempting to minimize the originally predicted era of barbarism and unrest. It's centered around the Foundation working to preserve the pinnacle of human knowledge. The first book, at least, captures segments of the descent into political unrest, all centered around people on the Foundation.
Now, I've not read many stories set in space. As a matter of fact, I cannot name one I've read as I'm typing this out. Foundation was a fascinating read because it got me invested in the overarching plot while not caring about the characters one bit. They all lived to serve a greater purpose, and I was honestly fine with my lack of investment in any character. The ones I can name off the top of my head are Hari Seldon, Salvor Hardin, and Hober Mallow. Oh, and Linge Chen and Yohan Lee but that has less to do with their functions in the story and more the fact that Asimov gave some nondescript characters real Asian names instead of making something up based on "vibes," which is rather a common crime. I mean, look at JKR and Cho Chang. Terrible naming with too much ambiguity from a clearly racist person.
Putting that aside, I do think Salvor Hardin stood out more than anyone else. In Part 2, there's a moment where they're gathered to discuss about Seldon and the issues at hand. The rest of the Board is very happy to blindly trust the process and the path they've walked along for the past few decades, but Hardin calls into question everyone's passiveness. This reminded me of the world we live in. It's a given that most people are like sheep, and when offered a solution, they choose to not think. Why think when you can shut your brain down? Why innovate if someone has done it for you? I guess this is a reflection of the society we live in.
I'm upset that I got more invested than I thought it would be. I had walked in with the expectation that I would be dropping this series after book one, but it looks like I'll have to keep reading (not a priority though). Maybe space politics is something I'll look into more!
Between Tang poetry and Shakespeare, I'm quite unsure how I ended up choosing a poetry anthology when I am decidedly not into free verse. Finishing Jihyun Yun's Some Are Always Hungry solidified that for me. I was quite into the content—it evoked distrubingly visceral images and was in general unsettling. The topics covered—Japanese occupation in Korea, womanhood, the 20th century immigrant experience—are heavy, and I appreciated that the author was willing to explore them. It spoke to me not as content catered to a foreign audience but a raw portrayal of heirloom trauma.
Now, the standout pieces:
"All Female" - "The men watch game shows / as we wreck the girl bodies / for roe, and I don't know why."
"Field Notes from My Grandparents" - "When I fled / without returning you / to earth, you did not resent me. / Please say it, / you did not resent me."
"I Revisit Myself in 1996" - "I live in California / on Washington Street, / so I think I live / in Washingstone State / and dream of California / weather all sun all the time, / except at night when God / throws stars like darts and punctures / the ground sometimes."
"The Daughter Transmorphic" - "In no version / are they not hunting us."
"Yellow Fever" - "When the first blood releases between your thighs, they'll come."
"Menstruation Triptych" - "I bleed like girls are taught to bleed, / pretending I am fine."
"Some Are Always Hungry" - "We pass the last chicken thigh between us"
"Immigration" - "At sixteen, she's still new to this nation that unnames her daily."
"Benediction as Disdained Cuisine" - "Give me all / I avoided so long for your sake."
"Savaging" - "Today I woke not knowing / which country holds me or if those love / motels stringing neon cords outside my window / were those of Oakland or Seoul."
"The Leaving Season" - "What keeps me / so afraid of wounding a man?"
Comments for:
"Homonyms": This is one of those things where I'll always go "??" because I don't really find meaning in a word meaning two things and taking the meaning that's clearly not the one you're meant to use, then going "haha language is soooo complicated for diaspora."
"Recipe: 닭도리탕": I'll be honest, I didn't pay that much attention to the contents of the recipe. What I did grieve about in this was the fact that Grandma could not "discard" Japanese. It's something I've witnessed firsthand. Japanese is weaved into everyday conversation in Taiwan, especially for the elderly. Even now, there are Japanese words that have been identified as "Taiwanese" because before the arrival of the KMT on the island, Japanese was what the people spoke. It didn't matter what ethnicity you were, what job you did—you learned Japanese.
"Blood Type": Partially an "LOL" moment for me. Identifying blood types is the personality test of … a decade ago? Two decades ago? And Koreans still love to talk about blood types, so this seemed about right to me.
game 1 - third quarter celtics letting a team close in on their 20-pt lead just to lose a game, a classic. the first half of the game had me so excited because i was like, whoa celtics are performing great! and then boom … letting the knicks close the lead AND losing in overtime because they were just losing steam
game 2 - honestly how do you let a team close in on your 20-pt lead TWICE and BACK-TO-BACK?? what an atrocious game. i was watching the first half, went to make dinner, came back for q3 and my best friend went "this feels like game 1 all over again." i said i would blame him if they lost
game 3 - if i had written this right after the game, i would've called it a must-win. it still is a must-win b/c it looks so bad to be down 0-3. historically improbable to come back up from something like that, so i'm really happy that they won this game in MSG with everyone shooting lights out :)
game 4 - probably the most devastating game of the series. literally nothing could ever come close to this loss. tatum was absolutely crazy here. he dropped 40+ pts, only to be hit with an achilles tear. everyone else was SHIT. JB stood out terribly with his poor performance, and it was so frustrating to watch in general b/c tatum was the only one that showed up in this game
game 5 - THE must-win. i guess you can have more than one must-win game, given the circumstances. /i/ wouldn't want to be a second-round exit finishing a series 1-4, but i'm saying that as if i didn't witness Celtics vs Bucks back in … 2019? lol. anyway this game … dwhite was the MVP by far!! he just did so good that game. made my day honestly
game 6 - a basketball game may be 48 minutes, and you could totally get a reggie miller situation where he's putting up so many shots to turn the tide, but i feel like there are also times where you can tell right away that a game will go wrong … this is one of those. too many turnovers, bad shots. less ISO than we've seen from their shittier games I think, but it was still brutal to watch because they would make plays and the shots wouldn't fall in. drive to the basket and the ball would just rim out. JB was the only one playing well, but then he got fouled out, and not a minute later, it looked like joe had emptied out the bench. IN THE THIRD QUARTER. in a way, it made sense since JB was the only one with a good performance, but it was so frustrating that we were getting like … 15 minutes of garbage time, and i was watching celtics third stringers play the knicks starters. gross
welp, and that's wraps for the celtics' 2024-25 season … am not looking forward to what might happen because i'm 90% sure celtics are like. 500 million dollars into luxury tax??? so a lot of contracts they might be letting go of, on top of two injured (supers)stars, who both have max contracts. i guess we'll cross that bridge when we get there, though i wouldn't have anything substantial to say b/c i rarely pay attention to the league as a whole nowadays…
i've been following the celtics for 7 seasons, but have never done a write-up. this is not all that weird b/c all i do is yell in my best friend's dms. he is unfortunately so busy with grad school that i have no one to talk to, so i might as well speak into the void. that being said, i am only covering the Cs games because uhhhh i watch the other matchups very inconsistently
game 1 - the one game i didn't watch oopsie. i saved the date, but had not looked at the time, so i slept through the realtime broadcast of this game. i did see the highlights and got annoyed when i saw the tatum injury. the magic were getting on my nerves here already
game 2 - flagrant central methinks. i'm glad horford didn't get injured here, but KP's bleeding forehead? what the hell! it's pretty easy to bleed in that area, but also kinda gross to watch streaks of bleed on someone's forehead like that. the magic are pissing me off at this point. the game is not so fun when watching them play …
game 3 - the game the Cs lost. just sloppy af omg idk what these players' obsession with ISO is. if you want to go solo go play another sport! not basketball! a couple of plays where they actually had ball movement, then bam, back to ISO. constantly! i don't get it
game 4 - kp with some good looks though his 3s (was it this game …) looked really ugly. they had kind of a lead but let the magic close that which is such a them thing, but annoying to watch. it's not like you're in the last 3 minutes of the game, i don't understand why you're letting loose like that in the first 3 quarters? thank god they won, i would've been yelling
game 5 - other than being the game to close this series, i was just happy in general because team sports! maybe a bit too much of garbage time that killed the excitement. recency bias might be at play here but i think they had the best plays this game …
anyway fuck kcp! also glad to see the lakers eliminated woohoo
Another year has passed by, and though I probably have over 10,000 words worth of notes for the books I read in attempts to put together individual book reviews, that did not happen, so I will be doing what I did for 2023: a "short" review for each book I read.
I finished 12 books in 2024, 9 being in English and 3 being in Chinese. In addition, I started 3 books, two of which I will continue reading, and one of which I dropped. I’ll also cover the 4 books I did not finish last year, with one I have definitively dropped for personal reasons.
( Books I plan to continue reading: )
( Books I dropped: )
( Unfinished reads from 2023 and where they are now: )
Books Read in 2023: A Summary
It's hard and annoying to admit, but I am in a writing slump. I think it's the accumulation of things. No job, a terrible combined 4 months in Taiwan (honestly, stop asking me how my trip was!), a stressful graduate school apps cycle. Living with my mom the entire year has been suffocating, but what other option is there? There's also the state of fandom/treatment of ficdom and my existing bad habit of jumping WIPs (I had over 60 for dojae two years ago, and most of them were from 2020-2021).
Fandom/ficdom has been kind of a weird place. Most people prefer to not make new friends if they have a fixed set of people to talk to. I feel like this is less of a problem (to me) since I also yell in the same five people's DMs all the time because these are people I know better, and they understand what I like. The real problem is how other people react to ficdom. Everyone seems to be going on a puritanical outrage these days, and though NCT is untouched for the most part, people are still weird about RPF in writers' mentions and inboxes. So in general, I think that part is demotivating, even if I'm barely posting on AO3. There's also the quarterly report of a new evil scraping AO3 fics for an AI dataset. I've permanently locked all my fics because most scrapers do not bother logging in to grab the data.
While the idea of writing is appealing to me, I haven't been able to produce anything in ages. I get an idea, but as soon as I open that document, the words don't come out. I think one of the solutions is for me to read fic to spark joy, but it hasn't exactly worked. I read a fic, I loved it, it was good. I thought of a rarepair, went looking for a fic, got annoyed that I couldn't find what I was looking for, decided that I would take this into my own hands, opened a document, and … nothing.
The other solution is to read books more, which also isn't happening. I have two YA books borrowed from the library, mainly because I liked Marie Lu in middle school AND it might be good (or terrible) reference material for one of my many dojae longfics. Why am I not reading it? I'm in the middle of reading At Her Mercy, which is fucking long and stressful to read. The combination of 1.2 million words and political intrigue is such a headache, and I have not been in the mood to read anything. I won't entertain the idea of reading just to pass time, only to forget everything a few days later. I've got about 65 chapters left to the main story, which is only a lot because I'm taking notes every chapter. I also am not trying to read something else because I know it'll take me forever to come back to the book if I do.
I also have a hard time settling on what to write. The dojae PWP? I'm struggling on the actual porn section. The jaemrenyang? My brain is blanking on the SOL portion somehow. The jaemyang exes to lovers? Too new and fresh of an idea, and I only have two scenes I want to write at the moment. My supposed magnum opus? I did some math for it. There are 32 parts, each consisting of the same time frame. I have outlined 20% of part 1 in detail, which has 10 scenes. Whoa. Each scene is around 500 words. If you take the 500 words and multiply all that, you get 800k words. Girl what the fuck? So … I needed to take a break from that, despite the fact that I don't really see myself hitting over 200k with this one. That being said, I've never been good at estimating word count. I thought the PWP I'm writing would be around 3k, only for it to blow up to 7k, and I'm still not done. On the other hand, I thought my 00FF fic would be 50k, but it was only 35k.
The very last thing is my mindset with respect to fic writing. It's something I find fun. I treat it as something that makes me happy, until I start overthinking my craft. Did I give meaning to this fic? What is the purpose of writing this? Is it introspective in any sense? Sometimes the answer is "no," which isn't really a problem, but I tell myself that I'm not doing enough. Even when I step back to tell myself that I don't have to be so harsh on myself, I end up thinking, "But I don't want to end up encouraging consumerism and the idea that fic is consumed rather than something you should engage with." And if I write fic that can only be consumed, am I even doing what I want? Am I defeating the purpose of creating art? In any case, this is something I seesaw back and forth on, so I'll have to somehow stop my overthinking from clashing with my ability to create.
What I AM doing is ramble everywhere. Here, in my drafts, in DMs. I have a few posts I'm behind on (supposed EOY stuff and the ningrina fic reflection). I'll probably talk about my time in Taiwan and attach some restaurant rankings. There's a piece on MTL, and my remaining are all related to NCT. Mostly up to my mood and what I feel like, except for a post dedicated to my 10th year with SMROOKIES/NCT.
Enough yapping! I've hit almost 1k words just whining about my writing. Hopefully I become a little more productive in the coming days now that I've let it out.
we're into the last week of april, and i have achieved nothing, except for paying the deposit of a crazy lease since my grad school area is just rich white people. and then i accidentally applied to a FULL TIME job based in santa monica, whereas my school is in … claremont. i couldn't even balance this if i tried! job applications are going as horrid as ever, but i highly dislike the idea of being idle for another summer. my trip to chicago is also getting cancelled bc my main purpose was visiting my internship manager, but she's having a baby. i had also planned to schedule it around a possible jaemin event, but am now realizing that the date might have been too close to move-in, so maybe i lucked out of having to explain to my mom why i'm randomly slipping away to chinatown for … kpop? actually i wouldn't even mention it, but now i don't have to stress about it
health wise, i am literally dying. i'd pulled a muscle on my right leg back in fall of 2023, which never really healed until a month ago, courtesy of our neighbor in taiwan who had given me some gel that works like magic. i thought i was fine, only to be hit with random pain on my left, which has been bothering me for almost 3 weeks now. why is this happening to me??
and because of this, i'm uncomfortable no matter what position i am in. there was a day where i sat at my desk the entire day. i thought my good posture would do the trick, but no, it got worse. walking too much is not an option. bending down is ALSO not an option. i haven't worked on anything. no language learning, no reading (besides the one jaemren fic i read last week and the updates on 催命娘), no writing, no TRANSLATING. i think part of it is the state of online fandom killing me, but my injury isn't helping in the slightest.
in any case, the only thing keeping me going is my new jaemin bubble subscription, which is sparking joy in my mundane life (the only thing i do every week now is go to my mother's office and listen to presentations about annuities and life insurance). jaemin bubble keeps me motivated because his "you did well" texts come around midnight KST, which is morning for me, and it makes me go "oh shit i should be somewhat productive so i feel deserving of this message." kpop parasocialism works…
also i haven't gotten ferrari jaemin out of my head despite the fact that i don't even like ferrari (fuck ferrari fr!!). he looks like a mix of a 626 hs fob and a rich international student at usc, with some frat boy energy. which i think is a sign that i AM into fuckbois despite wanting to deny it. my princess is also a fuckboi. sure. whatever.
writing in lapslock because, well, i'm trying not to take myself seriously for once. ironic, i guess, given how it's titled.
well, here's an accountability post, mainly for myself, and maybe if someone is interested in one of the below, they can egg me into writing a specific piece first. i'm trying to keep it chill this year, with grad school soon. more academia! yay!
post wise, i've got my "books read in 2024 post" sitting in my scrivener. i tried to keep it short for every single book i read, but it's not really working. i'll get back to it when i return to the states. i've also got my thinkpiece on how edited mtl is killing art, though i'm having trouble framing certain things. i should also start book reviewing seriously, but i never seem to have the energy to do it. it's either i do and i'm proud of what i do, or i don't because i know i won't be putting out good work. i'll do better and try to find a weekly timeslot for that. as for what i want to write, too many pieces on dojae, a psychoanalysis of the jisung/sion awsaz series, my jaemin awakening, and a summary of the c-dramas i watched last year. i had a fic goals one, but am not really focusing on that, which i'll … get to why.
i have always had major commitment issues, so the longest fic i ever wrote was my 00ff r2 fic, which was … 35k? or something. i wrote the bulk of it in two sittings by riding off the adrenaline of staying up. that being said, the two fics i definitely want to post this year are my jaemrenyang (pwp or m, i haven't decided because i'm not an experienced porn writer if i'm gonna be honest) and dojae jazzbar piece. everything else is up to god. jk. my main focus outside of these two short pieces is my diaspora dojae, which has 33 parts. and each part is … long. i'll be reworking it with alek once i get an actual outline done. other than that, maybe a ningrina b/c i think i flopped my first one too hard.
and then … my translation baby, burn. i don't really want to get into detail about why i've not touched it for so long, but my new goal is to work on about 1k/2 pages (a page being whatever fills up the left side of my monitor) every weekday, then focus on editing on weekends. i'm not particularly interested in trying to do more or translate all day. i can only do so much before the quality of the words i'm spitting out starts deteriorating, and that just requires more work on my end. this only applies to translation though. besides, i'm back to coding and studying MATH, along internship stuff soooooo yeah. i've got to hit a balance of sorts.
see y'all in april, hopefully
Disclaimer: Please do not read this piece if you cannot accept criticism of any unit or member of NCT.
( Read more... )fic: sober reverie
links: ao3 | dreamwidth
sober reverie is a piece born from my cursed thoughts, which is really just
imagine Seunghan in a *some at a frat party
followed by
the setup for eunseok/sungchan/seunghan would be so easy for me but im laughing at the idea of sungchan fucking his little
and
idk imagine being assigned a little that you want to fuck. i would go crazy
The reason for *some? I couldn’t decide. It’d been about a week since Idol Human Theater came out when those thoughts first came to me, so there was a voice in the back of my head that really wanted to go with “Seunghan and the hyungs that dote on him.” On the other hand, I’d never posted smut, and I barely wrote steamy makeout scenes. I ended up cutting it down to a threesome since I realized I was partial to sungseung and eunhan.
The original idea was simply porn without plot, with the frat being a backdrop of sorts. It turned into something a bit more emotional, capitalizing on vulnerability and a bit of homesickness, as well as the invisible taboo of “families” in universities. Found family, except you’re sometimes forced to interact with someone.
I did not expect to get this done anytime soon. I’d had just 400 words sitting in my Scrivener until February 9th, and then I went to two frat parties in a row that weekend. None like the experience portrayed in the fic, except squeezing through people while holding a cup with alcohol. Not fun!
I spit out 4k of that in one night, largely motivated by Ten’s debut mini album TEN and Kim Feel’s yours, sincerely, then slept at 6AM. No regrets, though. I don’t think I would have come back to it anytime soon had I not finished then, so though I may feel regret on some level regarding the writing, I also am choosing to not dwell on it. On the other hand, I had no idea what to do with the chapter titles, then after staring at the playlist I was about to share in relation to the fic, I went with ‘Like a G6’ lyrics. A song so classic you still hear it at frat parties in the year 2024.
Last but not least, I want to give the biggest shoutout to Klara for encouraging me to write this and holding my hand while I yelled my incoherent thoughts into our DMs. I also thank everyone for reading the fic, and promise I will be back with another sungseokhan!
fic: my funny cat valentine
links: ao3 | dreamwidth
I would like to preface this by saying that since the fic is only 4.5k words, I probably don’t have as much to say as I would about a 30k fic (which you will probably get from me someday, though the exact timeline remains unknown).
The idea first came about on September 18, 2023, inspired by this animation short on Douyin, which I actually didn’t even remember existing until I was digging through my Discord DMs a couple of days ago to look for when I had first thrown this idea into the void. My Douyin addiction used to be terrible, but I must thank it for throwing generally entertaining clips onto my feed. I sat with the idea for a week, but it was only that until I DM’d nik with the following:
it’s just doyoung who finds jaehyun kinda cocky and annoying at work but he needs a ride home once and he’s like “why the fuck does this guy take a motorcycle to work!!” but then doyoung gets dropped off where he lives and he’s like. rambling about stuff and when he turns around to thank jaehyun he sees the man feeding stray cats food in a tube that he apparently brings along with him everywhere he goes and doyoung is now like. hm i’m kinda attracted wtf
That is the first scene and the foundation of everything that comes after. It quickly turned into a 5+1, with everything revolving around Doyoung, his unwillingness to take public transportation, and the contrast between how Doyoung imagined Jaehyun to be and the things he sees in their interactions.
I’d written about half of the first part last fall, then didn’t touch it until late January this year, the main reason being that the portion I did write looked like a fill-in-the-blank worksheet whenever I opened the document. I did not want to look at it. I ended up rewriting that first 1,000 words from scratch, and though I’ve left out some details I originally thought I wanted to keep in, but looking back, I like it better this way.
My major struggle writing this was actually word count. I’m not one to usually dwell on word count, but when I compared the 2,000 in the first scene to the 500 in the second scene, I started to panic. I ran to Alek (my lifesaver) to scream about this, and was reassured that it was fine. Turns out, the remaining scenes were all around that length, so it was much more consistent than I had planned it to be.
The actual writing process? I spit out 3.5k words on Monday, February 12th, staying up until 2AM to finish it. Then I woke up and shared it with Alek at 8AM, who got back to me within 3 hours. Truly a godsend. I edited it while waiting for my Statistics professor, and posted during class (I sit in the first two rows of the lecture room, by the way). A crazy 24 hours to live through, but I regret none of it. I rode the waves of vibes!!!
To be honest, I didn’t read that many books in 2023, and I most definitely read less Chinese characters than I did in 2022. That being said, I did get to walk away from most of my reads with thoughts, which is always a good thing. In total, I finished 10 books. It isn’t much, but there were a few others I tried out and simply didn’t make the cut. All reviews contain spoilers to some degree, but for sections where I thought spoilers were unsuitable, I tried to keep it vague. This is because I feel like spoilers shouldn’t take away from the experience of getting to know a story, and if it does, maybe it wasn’t that well-written.
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