Reading Record 44

 So, yesterday I finished reading The White Cat's Divine Scratching Post, volume three, by Lv Ye Qian He.  (And considering volume two was in the Reading Record 10 post, I think I can forgive myself for any details I forgot in between them!)  Didn't want to post about it yesterday because of IWSG.

Anyway, final volume of the novel.  Did not disappoint.  😁

In the course of my new danmei obsession (if "new" is the right word for something that started in like 2022) I have now read three novels in which the main pairing is between a cultivation master and one of his pupils.  This one was by far the least questionable of the three.  (Unsurprisingly, actually.) For comparison's sake:

The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System:  the protagonist died and was reborn as Shen Qingqiu, a villain in a particularly bad webnovel, which the protagonist had actively been griping about when he died.  (In fact, he basically died of rage at just how badly written Proud Immortal Demon Way was!)  To save himself, he decides to treat the original novel's protagonist, Luo Binghe (a student of Shen Qingqiu's), like a precious pearl, so that he won't want to rip all of Shen Qingqiu's limbs off, like he did originally.  This, of course, proves a little too effective, and Luo Binghe falls in love with him.  The "romance" is definitely the weakest part of the novel, and has a lot of questionable aspects to it, but the teacher-student aspect ranks much lower than some of the other aspects.

The Husky and His White Cat Shizun:  protagonist Mo Ran, having taken over the world, commits suicide and wakes up in his own teenage body, then proceeds to relive his life, and instead of coming to hate his teacher, Chu Wanning, as the ultimate enemy, he falls head over heels in love with him.  (Er, well, that covers at least a little hint of the earlier portions of the plot...this book is crazy long (it ends halfway through volume ten!) and the plot goes all over the place...)  There are so many unsettling aspects of both this book and the primary romance that I couldn't list them all even if they were all things I was willing to talk about on my blog!  Weirdly, the teacher-student aspect of the romance is so tame by comparison that it doesn't even make the top ten.  😰  I saw someone on discord describe this book as "not for the faint-hearted" and they were very right...

The White Cat's Divine Scratching Post:  protagonist Mo Tianliao dies after protecting his precious pet kitten from the forces that are causing his own death, but his spirit doesn't dissipate, and after three hundred years he manages to possess the divine Undying Tree, turning it into a new body for him.  Before he can resume his life, he has to join a cultivation sect to train up a bit...and the teacher he ends up studying under just happens to be his pet kitten, who has cultivated a gorgeous human body over the last three hundred years.  Again, there are some issues with their relationship (mostly the whole "pet kitten" issue), but since their teacher-student relationship was fake to begin with, it really isn't one of those issues at all!  This is, in fact, a pretty sweet and almost innocent novel...(aside from how many of the other cultivators are treating spirit beasts with full human sentience as essentially slaves...which is at least a practice the hero wants to put a stop to...)

So...yeah...why did I just spend so long talking about other books in this post...?

Hmm.

Well.  Anyway.

Uh.  Yeah.

Book was fun.  Will probably read again someday.  😊

Original language:  Chinese

In other news, my November writing challenge numbers for the last two days:

Yesterday's total was 12419

Today's total was 15536

Tuesday's total was 9689, so that means

Yesterday I wrote 2730 words and

Today I wrote 3117 words.

Seems like 2-3k a day has become my new norm?  Not great, but not terrible, either.

Reading Record 42

 So, I just finished rereading volume five of Mo Dao Zu Shi (English title Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation) by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, which completes the novel!  😁

Naturally, volume five (despite being the longest volume) is the fastest read, because the quite long incense burner bonus story is...uh...well...cursed.  I like the introductory materials for each section--especially the first part, where we get insight into the recurring dreams of the two leads--but as soon as the story gets to its intended 'subject matter' then I skip ahead because...*shudder*...

Anyway.

Hmm.

What else was I gonna say?

Dang.

I am distracted by my impending dentist appointment, I guess.

If I remember what else I wanted to say, I can always add it back in later.

Original language:  Chinese

Reading Record 41

 So, I just finished rereading volume four of Mo Dao Zu Shi (English title Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation) by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu.

Ah, volume four.  Some of the best moments--the final and most exciting drunk Lan Wangji episode, especially--and all of the worst--namely, the tragic spiral that ends the flashbacks leading up to the death that started the novel.

But I have now gotten through it and can move on to the final confrontation, the happy ending, and the bonus stories...though of course some of the bonus stories are only half-reads, 'cause some of them contain some of the most cursed sex in all the fiction I've ever read.  😰  (Reminds me why I am so super-glad that MXTX opted not to include any sex scenes in Heaven Official's Blessing!)

Anyway, all that lies ahead in volume five, after which I will have a whiplash moment as I move on to reread Dracula.  😅  But you just gotta respect the classics around Halloween, right?

Original language:  Chinese

Reading Record 40

 Hmm...did my numbering go off at some point?  I could swear I already had 40 pass by earlier... 🤔

Oh well.  Anyway, I just finished rereading volume three of Mo Dao Zu Shi (English title Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation) by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu.

This is really taking way too long, but then again I am constantly stopping to take two different sets of notes, so that's probably why...?

I'm trying to think...I feel like there was some thought that had occurred to me during this volume that I wanted to mention, only now I'm not sure what it was.

I mean, I know I realized suddenly that pretty much everyone (not just me, but everyone in charge of the various adaptations) gets the Jin Clan's uniforms wrong, but that wasn't it.  It was something that I was thinking yesterday or the day before about posting about, but now I don't remember what it was.  😭

Anyway, it's lunch time and I'm hungry, so post over.

Original language:  Chinese

Reading Record 39

 So, today I finished rereading volume two of Mo Dao Zu Shi (English title Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation) by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu.

I now understand why I had forgotten about the massive, slammed-together chapters:  they only did that in the first volume, so the remaining volumes have more manageable chapter divisions for those who, like me, prefer to stop reading at the end of a chapter whenever possible.  (They must have gotten a lot of complaints after the first volume hit the market...)

Took far fewer notes on things I wanted to check if they were changed or fixed in the hardback.  Not sure if that means there actually were fewer problems or if it was just that I was more caught up in the story.  😅  (Some things were genuine errors, though, like one time it said "Xicheng" instead of "Xichen."  (Humorously, "Xicheng" is actually a ship name for that character.  It's a pretty popular ship, afaik, despite that the two characters have no really major interactions, and that Lan Xichen has two much more plausible, built-in potential love interests...though they both end up dead, so maybe that's why some people ship him with Jiang Cheng, despite that Jiang Cheng is the most deeply hetero character in the whole novel.  (Uh, possibly excluding Jin Guangshan.))

Anyway, not much to say since I've read it so many times before, lol!

Original language:  Chinese

Reading Record 38

 So, today I finished rereading volume one of Mo Dao Zu Shi (English title Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation) by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu.

Took me a little longer to read than it should have, because I kept setting the book down to take notes.  Two kinds of notes, in fact:  some of them were general notes on details I might want to consult later for fanfic purposes, while the other was for a stranger purpose.  Specifically, I wanted to keep a list of things to check if they were fixed/changed in the fancy hardback release.  (So far, I haven't checked most of them, but I can at least confirm that the hardback's prologue fixed the error where it said "Burial Mound" instead of "Burial Mounds.")

One thing I'd forgotten since the last time I read this--surprising that I managed to forget it so fast since I last read it in January of last year!--was how artificially long the chapters are!  One of them was almost 100 pages long!  For some reason, the English editors decided to combine a bunch of the original online chapters, usually at least four, but that one chapter was made up of seven of them!

Another weird thing is that there are still things I was getting wrong in my MDZS fanfic, even though this is the fifth time I'm reading the book!

Maybe I just don't read as carefully as I used to?

Original language:  Chinese

Reading Record 26.5(ish)

 Today I finished reading Legend of Exorcism, volume 6, by Fei Tian Ye Xiang.  (Volume 5 was the first book for this reading record back in May.  That's how long they're making us wait in between volumes of this novel that has been finished for years!  😭😭😭  I don't want to have to wait that long for the remaining two parts!! 😭😭😭😭)

Um.

Anyway.

This time, the character guide at the end did start out by saying that some of the side characters are historical, but it only gave the Emperor, his consort and her cousin the chancellor as examples.  Not anyone else, not even the rebel general who's leading a massive army against the empire.  And it still hasn't mentioned that Di Renjie was real, either, though maybe they figure he's so famous that they don't have to?  (Or maybe they think no one cares...?  I have no clue what they're thinking.  How could I?)  It makes me long for the greater effort they put into the supplementary materials on their earlier releases, particularly the character guide for Thousand Autumns, which listed (historical) or (fictional) after every name.  I don't know if it was some kind of administrative decision or if whoever was writing the character guide for Thousand Autumns was just feeling more invested than whoever has handled subsequent character guides, but either way, it boils down to being frustrating.

In any case...it's volume 6 out of 8, so how much even can I day about it?

Well, except that I fear all too many of the extreme horrors of war being depicted in the novel are historically accurate.  (You know, outside the ones involving yaoguai and demons.  Those particular horrors I think one can feel safely assured are fictional.)

...

Hmm.

I should probably say more, but I don't know what.

Oh well.

Original language:  Chinese

Looking back on the last few months

    So, things have been.

    Ahem.

    Yes, I know that's not proper grammar.  Or rather, it's very weird grammar.  (Technically, it's not totally wrong?  Things have indeed existed, which is basically what that means?  But's not phraseology that people would normally use.  Nor is the word "phraseology," but that's beside the point.  Actually, I'm not positive it's even a word, but this one character uses it in The Music Man, so...anyway.  Irrelevant.)

    My life has lately felt even weirder and more stagnant than ever.  Partially because I more than ever feel the need to hide in my house from the world, but it's definitely not just that.

    I had to buy a new computer because of the end of support for Windows 10.  And, as I believe I posted before, I absolutely HATE Windows 11.  To the extent that I've been putting off even turning on this computer so much so that one of my utility bills will be paid a day late and it took me a week to look at the results of the MRI I had done.  Also that this computer's battery emptied itself in the time between when I last turned it on and when I turned it on this morning.  (Though it also seems to have turned itself on at some point without my permission to download updates, which 100% should not be possible, but as soon as I plugged it back in and turned it on, it started installing updates.  I looked over all its settings as soon as it finally turned on (after it was done updating the stupid thing turned itself off again!) and didn't see anything authorizing it to turn on at random intervals to check for and download updates, but it apparently did so anyway.  (I think I'll put it on airplane mode before I turn it off, which will hopefully prevent it from doing that again.  Might not stop it from turning on and exhausting its battery, but it should prevent it from downloading anything when it's supposed to be off.))

    So, because of my new aversion to going online due to it requiring this overpriced hunk of junk (I didn't realize that the computer was named the Latin word for "conquered" because I was being targeted to be conquered by Microsoft!), I've been doing my writing on my old computer in airplane mode, because unsupported OS don't matter if the Internet can't touch ya! 🤣  (Ugh, those Windows 11 emojis are so ugly!  Why would they even make the emojis worse for the new OS?  Why would they even change them in the first place, for that matter!?)  Which means, of course, that getting any of what I've written onto the internet to, say, quote a passage in my blog, is suddenly somewhat tricky.  Unnecessarily tricky, in fact, considering that one of the changes to the way Blogger adds pictures to a post means that I can't add them on my phone anymore.  Also there's the fact that for some reason this computer has decided that I should not be allowed to access my own pictures on Blogger, nor even to upload new ones!  Thankfully, it turns out I can still add pictures by dragging and dropping (for the moment!) so I can still add pictures, but it's even more awkward than ever before.

    Anyway.

    What I've been writing lately has been (surprise, surprise!) another Mo Dao Zu Shi fanfic.  Though I did at least get a little writing done on the rewrite of The Tablet of Destinies, but...ugh, it's such a mess.  It's actually really hard to rewrite it just because the current draft is such garbage.  It's much easier to just focus on writing pointless fanfic.

    I want to talk about this current fic now, blathering meaninglessly, as usual, but I think I'll put in a blocker line so the whole post won't go on the front page of the blog.

A thought about the juniors in Yi City

 Okay, so this post is going to contain a lot of spoilers for Mo Dao Zu Shi (aka The Untamed), so please don't read further if you haven't finished reading/watching it.  (I mean, I'm assuming no one would even want to read further if they're not the least bit interested in MDZS...)  This is relating to a background element of the Yi City arc, in the context of the revelations made at the end of the novel.

Various MDZS-related thoughts

     So...a week ago Monday, I started rereading MDZS.

    Like, I actually did nothing else on that Monday except read MDZS; no internet, no TV, no games, nothing but reading.  I thought reading a gay romance novel from China in which two tyrannical dictators and a couple more would-be tyrants were thoroughly defeated was a good way to show my spite and disgust at something else that was happening in the real world that day.

    I ended up getting partway into volume three of the official translation in that first day.  (They had just defeated the Xuanwu of Slaughter when I finally stopped reading and went to bed.)  So, in one day I got through about 2 and 1/3 volumes.  The remaining 2 and 2/3 volumes took me six more days to get through.  😅  (I.E., I finished on the following Monday.  Well, except some of the bonus chapters.  Those were still pending and didn't end up finished until yesterday.)  Admittedly, I barely even opened the book at all on Saturday because I ended up having to spend most of the day out of the house actually doing things.

    Anyway.

    Rereading the novel really jammed my face down into the reality that I have been doing a very bad job in trying to recreate the characters in my fanfiction.  (It also really forced me to notice how sloppy my memory was of various things about the novel, including that I had been convinced the Yi City arc ended in volume one when it was actually entirely in volume two.)

A Random (Fandom) Thought

     Okay, so back in April, I mentioned the fact that it had long been my assumption about/reaction to Xue Yang and Xiao Xingchen that they were supposed to be a reflection of Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji, or more specifically that they actually are what most everyone else in the story sees when they look at Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji together:  an evil demonic cultivator harassing a pure and proper cultivator.  And that meanwhile Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen are also a reflection of the true relationship between Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji, only one where the tragic ending remains in place, with no revival stepping in to reunite them.  (Okay, actually, looking at that post again, I didn't so much mention that as tangentially imply it.  But that was what I thought on reaching the later portions of the Yueyang sequence in The Untamed when I first watched it, that the three of them provided a double mirror of Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji.  Um, except at that time I didn't know that Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen's story would end in tragedy. 😭)

    And I still do think that's the case, no question.  Those parallels are absolutely there.

    But in thinking about the chapter of my fanfic that went up yesterday, I realized that Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan serve as mirrors to another situation within the main plot of MDZS:  that of Wei Wuxian with Jiang Cheng.  (I mean, the clue's right there in their names, even!  Jiang Cheng and Song Lan are the only adult characters in the novel (as far as I can recall, anyway) who are consistently referred to by their birth names by the narrator.  Oh, uh, no, duh, there's also Wen Ning.  Okay, so that breaks the birth name part of the comparison a bit.  (And then there's Wen Xu and Wen Chao, whose only known names sure sound like birth names, but that makes zero sense all around unless the Wen Clan uses courtesy names differently from the other clans.))

    Let me sum up my thinking on this thusly.  Um, after a "read more" tag just in case somehow someone stumbles on this post who hasn't read (or watched) the whole story.  (Unlikely, I know, but...)

Does Netflix hate me?

 Last night, I logged into Netflix and saw a red "Leaving Soon" banner on the thumbnail for The Untamed.

I...

How can they do this to us?

First they took down Season One of Heaven Official's Blessing, leaving us with no option but to either never revisit it or to suffer through the unwatchable Crunchyroll/Funimation subtitles.  (This was likely forced on them by Crunchyroll/Funimation, of course, but still felt like a stab in the back anyway.)

And now they're going to take away The Untamed, too.

I know it's not the greatest adaptation around, and because of its runtime reading the novel is significantly faster than watching the whole show, but...I still love it anyway!

But they're taking it down.

Leaving us with only the ghastly Youtube subtitles.  The ones that use "childe" for "gongzi."  Despite that no one's used "childe" seriously since Lord Byron, and he was being purposefully archaic!

I kept saying it all through my rewatch, that we need a good and proper domestic Blu-ray release.

That has become even more important now.

If anyone happens to read this who has any social media accounts, please start sending social media messages to any company that seems likely to be willing to do a domestic Blu-ray release of The Untamed.  (My money, personally, would be on Shout Factory, as they do a lot of sentai, kaiju and I think also martial arts stuff, so they're used to working with subtitles on long projects.  Also to more niche releases.  (Someone also needs to get on them to convince Disney to let them do a Blu-ray release of The Owl House, too...)  But approaching Seven Seas (who handle the novel and the comic adaptation) and getting them to partner with a Blu-ray publisher of their choice would also work.)  Unfortunately, I don't have any social media accounts, and my heart problems (which coincidentally have been going nuts today) forbid me from even thinking of getting any.

I feel like I could moan about this for days, but I need to turn in and get a good night's sleep, since lack of sleep is one of the factors making my heart act so crazy.

Notes on my rewatch of The Untamed, part 50!

     Last episode!

    Rambling and incoherent spoilers follow the read more tag.

Notes on my rewatch of The Untamed, part 49

     Incomprehensible rambling and spoilers follow.

Notes on my rewatch of The Untamed, part 47

     Incomprehensible nonsense and spoilers follow.

Notes on my rewatch of The Untamed, part 46

     Rambling and incoherent spoilers follow.

Notes on my rewatch of The Untamed, part 45

     "Soul-Chaos Script."

    Uh...

    WTF is that supposed to be?

    😅

    Oh well.

    Spoilers and incoherent nonsense notes follow the read more tag.

Notes on my rewatch of The Untamed, part 44

     Rambling spoilers and incoherence follow.

Notes on my rewatch of The Untamed, part 43

     Rambling and incoherent spoilers follow the read more tag.

Notes on my rewatch of The Untamed, part 42

     Very confused and astonished and possibly slightly panicked notes follow.  Spoilers abound,