dreemyweird

I have some more poems and still need to catch up on a whole bunch of RL stuff, but I figured it was about time for a public post, so all that's going to wait a bit.

Everyone has surely seen it by now, but: Murderbot trailer has dropped. Murderbot looks nothing like my mental image, in or out of the suit, but the voiceover is fun, and I like the Preservation team -- they (collectively) do match my mental image pretty well. So, this seems like it could be fun. Oh, and I love how terrible the acting on Sanctuary Moon is.

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Taskmaster series 19 has an air date: May 1.

Taskmaster Oz s4e03 -- I like Emma's little hair buns in this ep! ( Spoilers from here )

The other Taskmaster thing is, there's a new "Transformative Taskmaster" podcast (by fans, about fandom/fanworks). I'm not caught up, but I listened to a couple. Well, on April 1 they announced that their next guest would be Alex, and there was speculation whether it was an April Fool's thing or not. It was not a joke XD Highlights of the 45-min interview with Alex include: a) the fan interviewer explaining the AO3 tagging system to Alex, from which his take-away is, so I can use the "Alex Horne Don't Read This" tag to search for fic? b) Alex being asked for prompts, and he mentions Pancake Day, and so many fics about Pancake Day got written instantaneously, and someone made this, and now there's a collection, c) Alex played a game where he had to guess whether an occupation was something he did in a fic or not -- he was not very good at this, and guessed yes for "painter" when that was false, but somebody went ahead and wrote a fic where he is. I have never before encountered a fandom with so permeable a fourth wall XD

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Hugo nominees have been announced (and also I totally missed that the Nebulas had been as well): ( thoughts on nominees )

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Fannish goals check-in: ( under here )

A bit of Chinese wordplay that I thought was funny: when two people in white shirts stand on either side of one in a black shirt, someone describes them as 利奥利 (lì-ào-lì). Guess why (or see the answer here). Answer: Oreo cookies in Chinese are 奥利奥, which is just transliteration; but it makes perfect sense that if the black-white-black Oreo coloring is ào-lì-ào, then white-black-white would be lì-ào-lì… .
Also a word/character that I enjoy for its just-exactly-like-that-ness: 汆, which means to parboil, and which is made up of 入, put into, and 水, water. (Also relieved that water is water in Chinese, unlike Japanese, in which water 水 and hot water (お)湯 are separate words; Y and I had a debate over the Japanese expression in which you “boil hot water,” which doesn’t make much sense to me; a case in which the object is the result of the verb?).

Trying to transcribe something in Chinese (an interview about my favorite singer) which is unsubtitled, and finding it extremely difficult, although the speaker doesn’t go too fast and pronounces things quite clearly, apart from the sh/zh = r thing which all Chinese men seem to do. Even so there are a lot of gaps and places where I can hear the word but can’t figure out what character it might be. I did notice that sometimes a line which absolutely stumps me on one day seems quite clear when I come back to it the next; not sure why, but it’s interesting.

I’ve been enjoying everyone’s 100-formative-books lists, and finally gave in and made my own here. Featuring a lot of the same photograph (does it count as a stock photo if it’s one I took?) in place of a book cover image, because I couldn’t bring myself to search for images of ALL the Japanese books, quite a few of the English ones, etc. Why don’t they just give you a “no image” option? Also, I feel like I’ve left a lot out; I don’t remember all the books that were childhood favorites! I mean, if the titles or authors come up I naturally remember the books themselves, but I can’t list them all off out of thin air, and my physical books have undergone many shifts due to changing houses, countries, etc. etc. Where is there a giant master list of “all the books someone of my generation would have been likely to read growing up, Anglophone edition”…

One of my original-thing characters is having a professional breakthrough of sorts and I can’t tell whether I’ve managed to be as smart as she is or completely dumb (whether it’s going to make any sense to the [hypothetical] readers or seem like it was obvious five chapters ago). I should probably be relieved that I’ve managed to come up with something for her to be inspired about; it took me literally over a year to solve another character’s similar problem for him, jeez. I’m just about halfway through the whole thing now and things are starting to happen, but I still have SO MANY question marks in my outline and I’m making such very slow progress, oh dear.

Music: an older recording of Chen Ming and Jiang Dunhao singing 让, because I continue to be obsessed, and also I like this song; also last week’s radio opera was Figaro, so here’s Jessye Norman singing Dove sono, just because it’s one of the most beautiful things in the universe.

Photos: lots more sakura and cats, also one of the prettiest weeds I’ve seen.