Reading

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.

In university I took a course on twentieth century women's literature in English. One of the books we read for that was Virginia Woolf's A Room of Her Own. In it, as part of constructing a critical historical account of women's writing in England, Woolf discusses the Restoration era writer Aphra Behn, one of the first women to earn her living by writing professionally.

At the time, our lecturer gave us a brief autobiographical sketch of Aphra Behn to contextualise the reference. What he did not tell us was that she wrote at least one genderfucked lesbian poem. Or that she may have been bi. I had to discover that for myself at my current great age. Thanks, Malaysian higher education.

I just saw that Rosmei posted cover art for The Creator's Grace on Twitter and Bluesky

Hey everyone, I'm putting up an interest check for a Miss Forensics read along. This work by Jiu Nuan Chun Shen is a thriller and sits at 878k words in Chinese on JJWXC. With some people's copies of the physicals coming in, I thought this would be a good time to start a read along for one of many baihe novel staples of the new generation.

I will be asking for FIVE (5) people minimum to start this, as I would not want to start a thread and have it dwindle down to me speaking to a brick wall.

How it works: I'll put up a master post every 2 weeks, with the assumption of this being paced at 5 chapters a week (based on the web version) and one chapter summary posted per weekday. You would read 20k words per week at least and 50k words per week at most. If you are reading from the Traditional print, please keep in mind that the chapters are condensed, with the chapter headings from JJWXC being used as section breaks. Of course, this can be adjusted if people would like to commit and want to suggest a lower cap on the weekly word count.

Where to read: You can read Miss Forensics through JJWXC or acquired copies of the Traditional Chinese print. Please keep in mind that the Simplified Chinese print is censored. There are 5 chapters translated on Fluffy Translations, but any subsequent translated chapters found online are MTL. I do not like MTL and will not promote it, and will not be responsible for any plot interpretation discrepancies as a result of reading via MTL.

If enough people are interested, we will start on June 2nd. Any "late" postings will be attributed to time differences. If there are no changes made to the reading pace, the read along would run until December 2025.

Please let me know in the comments if you have any questions! If you are shy and don't want to publicize your questions/comments/concerns, please feel free to DM me on Dreamwidth or drop an ask in my Neospring inbox. I can then share said inquiry with my reply in the comments and maintain your anonymity.

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…

The Chinese imperial court was a deeply hierarchical, misogynistic place. The Chinese imperial court of the popular imagination may, in certain respects, be an even more hierarchical, misogynistic place. This presents certain challenges if you're writing a baihe court intrigue novel, because you probably want the main characters to have at least some agency. From my (not that extensive) reading of court intrigue and court intrigue-adjacent novels, here are four approaches you could take.

( very, very mild and vague possible spoilers for the texts under discussion (see tags) )

Let me know if you have any other examples or any other approaches for female characters in historical settings to gain political power! Or whether you see/categorise them differently.