Notes on my rewatch of The Untamed, episode 7

     And yet again, more likely incoherent rambling notes on The Untamed, episode by episode, largely so I can access my specific thoughts later on as I'm working on the next draft of my fic that uses drama canon.  All thoughts beyond the read more tag will make very little sense without having seen the show (or at least read the novel).

Notes on my rewatch of The Untamed, episode 6

     Before I get to yet another post of rambling, chaotic notes as I rewatch The Untamed in order to assist the rewrite of my massively long fanfic, I want to talk about what I found at the bookstore on Wednesday.  I was dropping in on my way home in order to pick up the remaining four volumes of Thousand Autumns, since the final volume's release date was on Tuesday.  (It turns out I was grossly misjudging the novel all those times I turned up my nose at how its first volume's plot was described.  It's very different from what I mistook it for, and quite different from the other danmei I've read so far, being wuxia rather than xianxia, and set in a very specific historical period.  But I should give it a full post of its own once I've read the other four volumes.)  Anyway, I was frustrated in my purposes for the visit (they had volumes 3 and 4, but not volume 2 or 5.  Not having 5 isn't a huge problem right away, but volumes 3 and 4 don't do me much good until I've gotten volume 2! 🤣)  But what they did have, prominently displayed on a rack facing the entrance from the mall, was....

    The official artbook for The Untamed!  In official English translation, published by Seven Seas, so it's using all the same names as the translation of the novel.  (As in, using the "Impure Realm" translation of the name of the Nie Clan's stronghold, rather than the "Unclean Realm" as seen in the Netflix subtitles.  Etc.)  I was super-excited to see anything official for The Untamed in stores in English, and obviously I bought a copy straight away, in the hopes of encouraging someone to do a Blu-Ray release with a set of properly translated subtitles.  (I'd settle for internal consistency, grammatical accuracy and actually reflecting the nuances of how characters address each other.  It wouldn't have to be perfect.)  I haven't read too far into the book yet (and I'm trying not to just flip through to look at the pictures 😅) but in addition to pretty pictures, I think it's actually going to be useful to me for working on this massive fanfic that's set in the drama's canon, since it has a section on how they approached the various rules of etiquette for the setting.  (Since the novel is in an ahistorical setting, drawing on customs from numerous different time periods separated by many centuries.  For a visual medium, they obviously had to draw more concretely.)

    Hopefully, enough other fans will pick up a copy that they'll be encouraged to bring out even more translated materials.  Because I can never get enough MDZS in my life.  😊

    Okay, all that aside, I can get on to my notes on the next episode on the rewatch docket.  As always, they will be rambling and chaotic and doubtless incomprehensible to those not familiar with the show.

IWSG - July 3, 2024

 

    Well.  Imaginative title, no?

    *cough*

    Anyway.

    I don't really have much to say, since my writing life is still in a bit of a lull (all the more so now that I have a pinched nerve in my shoulder and can't really do anything without pain), so I'll just answer the monthly question:

July 3 question - What are your favorite writing processing (e.g. Word, Scrivener, yWriter, Dabble), writing apps, software, and tools? Why do you recommend them? And which one is your all time favorite that you cannot live without and use daily or at least whenever you write?

    I don't know if "favorite" applies as such, but I typically use Microsoft Word, just because it's what I'm used to.  Once, years ago, I tried downloading the demo for Scrivener, since NaNoWriMo always gave out half-off coupon codes for it to winners, but at that time I was put off by the always online nature of it, and it was also too complicated at a first glance.  I might not be as bothered by the latter now, and I'm definitely used to the former by now (though I still prefer the offline nature of Word over anything that's always connecting to the 'net) so who knows what I might think if I tried it again.

    I also use Google Docs pretty heavily because that way I can write on my phone but still have access to it on my computer.  (There are probably ways to do that with Word, but that would likely either not be possible with a phone as old as mine (I am now almost a full 10 versions of iPhone behind the current model) and/or would require the subscription-model Word, whereas I have the one-time-purchase-in-exchange-for-no-updates-model of Word.)  Sometimes if I'm writing a short, simple VN I might write directly into Ren'py, and in the past I've written in TWINE to make use of its easy branching feature, but mostly it's either Word or Google Docs.

    I've heard good things about Obsidian, though.  Keep meaning to look into it, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

    As to "why do you recommend them"...I'm not sure I'd say that I do recommend them, just that I use them.  My use of Word is pretty no-frills; almost anything that can accept text could do the same things.  I use it because I'm used to it.  I don't know that any of its features are especially outstanding, unique or even necessarily worth the cost of the program.  On the free end of the spectrum, Google Docs is convenient, but I've heard horror stories about people losing all their work because something happened to cause Google to delete their account, and I've also heard that they feed documents from Google Docs into AI training programs, so that's horrible.  (The plus side to that is that if they feed my docs into an AI training program, they'll be shooting themselves in the foot:  Half my files in Google Docs are just my nebulous, random, sprawling thoughts, complete with messy counter-thoughts inserted in brackets in the middle of a sentence, as well as words or entire passages that are in strikethrough in the middle of paragraphs or sentences, leaving things that an AI would treat as, for example, a sentence with two verbs back to back, because it wouldn't recognize that one of them was struck out because I picked a new word I liked better but didn't want to delete the old one yet.  There are also quite a few that are half or more in Ren'py code, a lot of them that have Chinese words inserted into them willy-nilly because they're Mo Dao Zu Shi fan fiction, and so on.  There's even one that has both Ren'py code and Chinese words all over the place, being the partial script of a fan game. 🤣)

    I don't think I'd say any of them are my "all time favorite" or that I "cannot live without," but I do use Word pretty much every day that I'm planning to do any writing.

Notes on my rewatch of The Untamed, episode 5

     Back again for more.  (There are fifty episodes, after all!  And I plan to be done with watching the show by August 20 at the latest.)  Episode five starts out at the base of one of the gorgeous waterfalls around Cloud Recesses.  The locations they filmed at for The Untamed include some truly breathtaking scenery.  If I was capable of traveling and felt like it was actually a good idea to travel right now, I would love to go on a tour of China to visit some of the places where they filmed it.  (I bet some of those places get a lot of tourists specifically because of dramas that have been filmed there.  And among Western women, The Untamed probably draws more tourists than most other cdramas.)

Notes on my rewatch of The Untamed, episode 4

     Yet another entry in my rambling notes on rewatching The Untamed, posted to my blog because I am lazy like that.  Probably very weird, dull and incoherent for others to read.  Hence why I'm putting the majority of the text behind a read more tag.

Notes on my rewatch of The Untamed, episode 3

     Lol, I had to scroll Netflix back to the start of the episode on this one, 'cause a while back I had watched just the rooftop fight, as I wanted to see if it could be considered what Jill Bearup calls a "flirty fight."  (My conclusion at the time was that it really couldn't, though it absolutely fits the same purpose in the story as a flirty fight.)

Random Pride Month Post

So, events seem to be preventing me from watching episode 3 of The Untamed today.  (Which sucks, because that's the episode where Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji first meet and have their rooftop duel!  (If it even counts as a duel...))

But I wanted to do a random Pride Month post anyway, so...that's at least something?  (Something I should have gotten to much earlier in the month, more specifically.  😅)

I don't actually have anything to say, to speak of, though.

Mostly I wanted to share some game screenshots.

Because rainbow trail.

The pictures are from Fae Farm, which I've been playing lately (and am almost done with).  The game got an update recently and some of the new potions give your character an effect trailing behind them when they move.  (Spoiler:  the rainbow one is the only one worth bothering with.)

The game is kinda confused about its own name.  When it's written in text form in menus and such (like the album menu to copy the screenshots to computer) it's written as I wrote it above, Fae Farm.  But in the game's logo it's written Faefarm.  I feel like they should have gotten that straightened out long before the game was released. 😅

Anyway, you may have noticed my rainbow flower bed in those photos.  Well, I have a video I captured about that.  (I can only hope it works.  Don't think I've ever put a video on one of these posts before.  (If it doesn't, I'll try to remember to turn it into an animated .gif tomorrow on the computer and post that.))

Wow, I hope that runs.  Won't be able to tell until I've actually posted it, though. 😰

Anyway.

Yeah.

Didn't actually have anything to say.

Just wanted to share some rainbows.  'Cause Pride.

(Ah!  I should make some flower beds in the pattern of the Asexual Pride flag!  Wait.  Wait.  No, I can't.  No gray flowers.  😭  Dang.)