Hello! I write fanfiction, on AO3 under achray, and I'm also on DW under the same name. This tumblr replaces an older and now defunct version. Always happy to hear from people with shared interests. She/her/hers, comfortably middle-aged.
I'm thinking about AI again because we're in the Nexus that creates Torment for profit.
And there's a thought rattling around in my head over the fact that a lot of the issues with AI are not brand new to the technology era--a source of chronic and easy misinformation; a technology that causes people to withdraw and isolate and often self-harm; an environmental scourge; an absolute machete to critical thinking, disciplined learning, and meaningful study because why bother with hard and long tasks when you can get fast and easy dopamine hits--all of these can be applied to social media as well.
But something makes AI so foot-to-the-gas-pedal worse in such a festering and pervasive and sudden way, and I think my conclusion for that lies in this emergent technology debuting to the public already under the control of big tech mega-conglomerates who--and this part is critical--were absolutely panickingly desperate at the exact moment ChatGPT hit the scene.
And I'm going to bother you with graphs about this. Because I think it will help explain a lot of the Full-Shove-Down-Throatedness you've no doubt noticed with AI.
And like to back up a second--modern social media is controlled by these exact same mega-conglomerates. But the social media platforms didn't start that way. They were a lot of guy-in-his-basement style inventions--tumblr included--which developed to serve an organic and natural niche people wanted. No throat-shoving yet. Most of us (tumblr demographic) were probably sparkle-dogging on deviantart and--yeah whatever--superwholocking over here. And that was by no means perfect or necessarily even good but there was opportunity to ease in and learn the good and bad.
THEN the mega-conglomerates got it and Facebook is a festering cesspit and Twitter is Like That. But there was a bit of a gradual enshittification there, and I imagine most people following my blog are old enough such that you were able to recognize what enshitted itself and disengage appropriately.
AI--for all the way its ills mirror social media--was born a fully formed fucking asshole directly into the cradles of big tech. And it's weird to consider the technology behind LLMs is not, inherently, evil. And that feels weird because it never really had the chance to exist in the public eye in any capacity before it was the throat-shoved and desperate weapon of big tech downright begging you to rot your brain out your ears and steal your work and pollute the earth and stop thinking and stop trying and stop learning.
Which maybe then begs the question, WHY the crazy desperation? Why the complete disregard for sense, law, legal ownership, and customer voices? Why does 'fetch' need to happen and why do Tech CEO's talk about it like they're gonna bite the cyanide pill in their molars if you don't buy a fucking gemini subscription.
Well I promised you graphs.
Here's your first graph. And here's a little fun fact for those following at home: ChatGPT came out Dec 20, 2022.
This graph shows the stock price for Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta (nee Facebook) between August 2016 (10 years ago) and Dec 20, 2022.
Now see that peak right before the start of 2022? Cover the downward side of it with your finger. Go on. Don't you see a beautiful exponential future of infinite growth? Don't you love when exponential growth is forever? Some of those returns were 400% in just 5 years. Sure, Covid caused a blip but what's a global pandemic in the face of a bullish stock run?
Okay now uncover the right side. That side is the screaming crying sobbing coaster of rich people feelings. And they were so very in their feels.
I'm zooming in on the graph for you. Welcome to November 2021 to Dec 20, 2022.
If you bought Amazon at peak? You were down 50%. Meta at peak? Down 60%. And every rich person investor is a money genius until the market turns, at which point it's panic to right the ship.
There were whispers of recession all throughout 2022 and it made the tech market crumble, because tech stock prices are highly speculative, and they ride market whiplash with more aggressive slingshotting than companies grounded in material value.
And then something happened on Dec 20, 2022. Obviously you know, I've said it 3 times. ChatGPT released. And oh boy.
Companies started promising AI. Investors started listening. The stock prices got happy.
Welcome to the graph 2022 to current day
And if the dance is working, they don't fucking stop dancing.
Do you WANT AI? Do you NEED AI? Will it actually help you? Might it in fact harm you? Will it harm the planet? Will it harm learning, and discipline, and the vulnerable, in the exact ways big tech companies are shoving it down people's throats?
Who give a shit! Whogiveasshitwhogiveasshitwhogiveahit. Money up! Desperate crying tech company HAPPY now. Money happy now!
Now the entire 10 year graph looks like this
And that scary scary scary scary drop off in 2022 that course corrected itself nigh exactly on December 20, 2022?
Well, you love AI, don't you? 🙂 As long as it's shoved down your throat.
Welcome to another round of W2 Tells You What You Should See, where W2 (me) tries to sell you (you) on something you should be watching. Today's choice: 南部档案 / Archives: The Nanyang Mystery.
The Southern Archives (which is what I'm going to call it) is a 2026 prequel series that's part of the Lost Tomb/DMBJ cosmos, featuring two almost-brothers/besties/coworkers, their terrible mom/boss, and the various adventures they have in early 20th-century Southeast Asia.
Yes, the Southern Archives -- like Reunion and Sand Sea and Time Raiders and the Mystic Nine -- is part of a long-running franchise based on a set of books written by a guy we're going to refer to as NPSS. However, this show is such a prequel that honestly, reading my recs for the others is more than enough to prepare you. You don't even need to read them! Look, here is a (mostly) complete list of things you need to know in advance to appreciate this specific show:
You are meant to recognize and have positive associations with the name "Zhang Qishan".
That's it! I have, with that one bullet point, sufficiently prepared you to watch this drama. Everything else will be given to you in exposition or can be picked up from context clues. I promise.
This show is a high-energy, high-emotion, wild-ass ride starring beautiful people in dashing period costumes. If you are intrigued by the idea of a bromance for the ages directed by the same guy who did Guardian, come a little closer and let me give you five rambling and semi-coherent reasons to watch these adventures.
1. The insanely compelling taste of salt-baked shrimp
Like Reunion, the Southern Archives is fundamentally a bunch of solid yet frequently goofy action sequences strung together like precious beads along a thin, unevenly paced plot, and if all that were put on the backs of mediocre talent, it would be amusing but missable junk food. However, also like Reunion, the production cast charming and engaging actors who are almost too good for the material, which elevates the shenanigans to something actually worth watching. And nobody here is more charming or engaging than than the leads.
The main acting kudos go to Steven Zhang as Zhang Hailou, because he has to carry large portions of the show singlehandedly. I loved him so much in Justice in the Dark that he was my #1 selling point, and I might have made him alone the #1 selling point here too except that his costars rise to meet him. Zhang Hailou is one of my favorite character types: a cocky, charismatic motherfucker whose (only slightly unearned) confidence leads him to fuck up real bad and have to deal with the catastrophic fallout of his thoughtless actions.
Also, he stores razor blades under his tongue and fights by expertly spitting them at people like he's a triggerfish, and you are not prepared for how stupidly hot it is when he does it.
He is matched in performance and intensity (if not screentime) by Ding Yixi as Zhang Haixia, the guy who's been cleaning up Hailou's messes since they were kids. He's the brains of the operation -- which of course means you have to nerf him and/or take him off the board frequently, lest he be too smart for the situations Hailou has to work himself out of. Besides, he's going through some stuff.
(For the record, the 'xia' in Haixia's name is a homophone of the word for 'shrimp', and the 'lou' in Hailou's name can also be read as 'yan', which is a homophone of the word for 'salt', in case you've been seeing all the seafood jokes and are like, I don't get it.)
When this show is silly, it's so so silly. When it's serious, it's a gut punch about grief and guilt. And the reason that gut punch lands is pretty much entirely due to how both leads can sell the idea that even the goofiest goings-on have real emotional weight to them. They are going to tell you with the straightest of faces that you can use a snake as a GoPro, and you are going to cry about it.
Both these lads also have track records of doing a whole lot with not a lot. Steven Zhang was the emotional lighthouse that cut through much of the fog of Justice in the Dark, and Ding Yuxi somehow managed to turn in a strangely affecting performance in White Cat Legend despite also being the titular white cat. And if it sweetens the pot, you should know that both of them spent those respective shows being very purposefully in love with various other boys.
Q: ...So are they gay for each other here too or what?
A: [laughs hysterically for thirty-three episodes solid]
2. this Gary-Oldman-in-the-Fifth-Element bitch
Speaking of the capacity of acting to elevate a production, I love the absolutely bonkers principal antagonist. Respectable Actor Fu Dalong chews to bits every possible bit of scenery as Mo Yungao, the campiest a villain on Chinese television is allowed to be by law.
The short version is that when Mo Yungao was a twerpy younger man in the army, he ran into a mysterious Zhang in a black cloak and lost his eye in the process. Now he's dedicated his life to finding said mysterious Zhang and wreaking a lot of incidental havoc along the way -- and being a waistcoated floppy-haired melodramatic lunatic the whole time. This part must have been so fun to play, because that joy really shines through in the completely over-the-top performance choices.
Mo Yungao is one of those Joker-style baddies, the kind where the sheer force of their whimsy is terrifying. He has an enormous amount of power and the ability to make lots of soldiers do whatever he wants, and whatever he wants can change on a dime. You don't even fully need to keep up with whatever he's trying to do at any given point in time -- just know that if he wants it, you shouldn't give it to him.
It takes Mo Yungao a little while to rise to the front of the show, though, because you've got some equally camp-as-hell bad guys to take down first. I do not know what possessed this production to make ninety percent of the antagonists fruity like classic animated Disney villains, but it was a brilliant choice. Come watch our heroes battle creeps such as Sexually Threatening Zhang, Man Who Likes Collecting Human Skin, and Badly Dubbed White Boy #5!
It's interesting, really, because DMBJ usually takes its villains much more seriously. Even the ones that are meant to be kind of laughable are played with a mostly straight face. Not so in the Southern Archives! These are the grownup versions of the guys who menaced your favorite Saturday morning cartoon heroes. Skeletor and Cobra Commander would be right at home with this bunch. I will almost always prefer something that can laugh at itself to something that takes itself too damn seriously, so you know I was having a good time.
3. World's Worst Mom Boss
Zhang Haiqi is a terrible person. She's a terrible mentor. She's a terrible parent. She's a terrible distant relative. She's a terrible guest. She's a terrible friend. She's a terrible manager. I love her so much.
She says she's a hundred years old, but you get the sense she's rounding down. As the director of the titular Southern Archives, she's got a lot on her plate already. But she decided maybe a decade ago to take in two orphan boys and raise them to be perfect agents of the South-Sea-based wing of the Zhang Family. She is Wire Mother. There is no Cloth Mother.
It's not that NPSS is bad at writing female characters. (Okay, those of you who have seen other series, stop laughing.) It's that he's not always great at writing female characters who are not female first and characters second. In DMBJ land, there are two genders: normal and woman. Zhang Haiqi does not fall so neatly into this binary. I would truly believe that she got the Ripley-from-Alien treatment, in that she was originally sketched out as a male character, then got girled.
It works out great, though, because she's not just a male character incidentally played by a woman. Zhang Haiqi is a lady. She is a hyper-competent woman in a male-dominated field in an incredibly patriarchal and homosocial society, and she has been holding her own place for a century now. She can weaponize femininity against the dipshit men that surround her, but she obviously does not feel compelled by gendered social norms in her private life. She's a hard-drinking kickpuncher with no maternal instincts who still likes looking pretty. We have no choice but to ask her to step on us.
I sometimes go to c-drama subreddits -- I know, I shouldn't, but I do -- where I see complaints about growing trends to make female main characters flawless and perfect and pure of heart. While I don't tend to see that as much in the types of shows I frequent, I understand the objection. You do not often find a c-drama woman who is both unambiguously one of the good guys and kind of a total bitch, and you especially don't see one where her male counterparts love her and accept her just the terrible way she is. That's Zhang Haiqi, baby!
And speaking of those male counterparts, those boys absolutely, 100% do not regard her as an object of romantic or sexual interest. Despite the different ages of the characters, the actors are all essentially the same age, so I was prepared for some streams to get crossed. No way. They love her and are deferential to her and recognize her authority in every possible aspect, and the show mercifully recognizes that men who feel this way about a woman do not automatically have to proceed to the next step of wanting to fuck/wife/possess her. It believes it is possible for men to be normal about women! What a concept!
It's good they don't, too, because Zhang Haiqi has absolutely no time for romance. There are men throwing themselves at her feet left and right, and this queen forgets about them the second they leave her field of vision, if she even noticed them in the first place.
I didn't mention her specifically up top because I knew I was going to give Zhang Haiqi this whole third point, but absolutely Jiang Peiyao deserves all the flowers for doing such a good job with this role. She conveys perfectly that essential Zhang quality of being too old to give a shit. Her Zhang Haiqi isn't a block of ice -- she laughs and cries and shows off and gets angry and makes selfish demands, and she absolutely does not care what you think about any of that. You can feel the weight of the years on her, but instead of tiring her out, her long life has made her a composed, elegant gremlin.
I'm sorry, I'll stop before I go on way too long about her, but I cherish her so. Zhang Haiqi is a fucking delight. If you too support women's wrongs, you will love supporting hers.
sidebar: Not as ableist as it could have been?
Okay, so: You know that Asia is, on the whole, Not Great on disability issues. So you also know when you see that silhouetted figure in a wheelchair in the opening credits that you're going to have to grit your teeth at least a little through some of this. The bar is in Hell.
And you know what? Southern Archives clears it! I'm mainly talking about the character who fairly early on goes from walking to using a wheelchair because of an injury. The show winds up being so much better about this than I was afraid it was going to be, which may be damning by faint praise, but we take what we can get.
Where I'm going to give it the most points is that it presents I'm such a burden and you should just kill me since I'm useless now self-talk as objectively incorrect. It's not even halfway about that -- in fact, it puts those same words in another character's mouth specifically to horrify the one who said them originally. We're not going to Million Dollar Baby this shit. While the character's loss of mobility is treated as a tragic (and there's some I wish it had been me instead of youuuuuu bullshit), it's not a full-on tragedy. Physical therapy is placed in direct, literal parallel to learning how to do cool new martial arts moves. Both are heroic expenditures of effort that take time, patience, concentration, and repetition.
I did not edit this; this is a literal screenshot.
The show also gets credit for showing just how infuriating benevolent ableism is. You be as bitchy as you want to to that girl who tried to push your wheelchair without your permission, baby! If she's telling you that you need to be careful because you're too pathetic and enfeebled to care for yourself, you stab her and show her how wrong she is!
Now, it does do the thing where some of the Big Bad guys are visibly disabled; one of them is missing an arm, and Mo Yungao has some light facial scarring to go with the eye thing I mentioned earlier. It's cheap shorthanding, and yeah, it's not great. I don't know if it makes things better to show that they were both bad guys before they suffered their disfiguring injuries? Wait, I've just been handed a note that says it doesn't. Cool.
Anyway, if you are inclined to be critical about how this series treats disability, there's a lot to criticize it for. If you are inclined to be charitable, there's some stuff to praise it for. You know your own tolerance levels. Proceed accordingly.
4. A(nother) fun-filled action-packed romp of nonsense!
So let's talk about the silly parts now.
As is the way of action-adventure series like this, the plot takes place in multiple video-game-like stages, many of which completely defy conventional understandings of little things like reality. (Do not ask how that bottomless chasm fits in the cargo hold of an ocean liner.) As our heroes in various combinations travel through what are essentially point-and-click-adventure dungeons with occasional combat, they have to solve puzzles and fend off creepy crawlies. There's fighting and flipping and punching and blowing things up. There's a lot of blowing things up. Cool Zhangs don't look at explosions.
Please do not hear it as a criticism when I call the adventure parts silly. They are silly like the adventure parts in the Indiana Jones movies are silly, which means they are Rule of Cool'd within an inch of their lives. Physics behave exactly as they need to so that our heroes look awesome. This is not the place for people who are going to get hung up on how snakes, blood, aerodynamics, thermodynamics, immune systems, the human mouth, American accents, boats, smells, death, and tattoos simply do not work that way. This is the place for those of us who go fuck yeah! and cheer the nonsense on.
If anything, the nonsense keeps the tone (mostly) above how grim it would be to take a lot of these premises seriously. The show has a huge NPC body count. An enormous number of Southern Archives agents, professional soldiers, hired goons, friendly bandits, and plain ol' civilians die, both offscreen and on. Wherever the plot goes, the streets wind up littered with corpses. If the show lingered on that, it would bum you out real fast! So instead we're back to the video-game logic, where we'll be sad if someone with a character portrait dies, but everyone else is kind of background noise. Now watch this cool razor blade trick!
As part of the proceedings, you're going to be introduced to a colorful supporting cast of good guys, bad guys that eventually become good guys, and bad guys that look like they're maybe going to become good guys except oops just kidding. They're all pretty entertaining and more or less endearing (even if one of them I can only like by ignoring the show's gross take that sexual assault sure is funny when a lady does it!). Because Zhang Hailou's the one spending most of the show criminally unsupervised, they're mostly going to orbit around him, so it's good that man could have chemistry with a lamppost.
And speaking of supporting characters...
sidebar #2: Know Your Lao Jiu Men
The Southern Archives takes place at vaguely yet unspecifically the same time as another DMBJ prequel show. At the risk of quoting myself, there's a couple episodes in the middle where you get introduced real quick to about five different people where it seems like you should already know who they are -- and yes, you should already know who they are, because you met four of them in the Mystic Nine, and one of them is for some reason the Kirkland brand version of an actual Mystic Nine character.
But just in case you don't want to go through a whole ten-year-old 48-episode sprawling semi-unconcluded drama before starting this, here's the CliffsNotes version:
The aforementioned Zhang Qishan -- you'll see him called "Fo Ye" or "Master Buddha" -- is the head of the Mystic Nine. I know he's introduced like he's a villain, but trust me, he's the hero of the other series. In fact, once you know who he is and why these pesky Country Zhangs are giving him such a fucking headache, you kind of side with him in all this mess.
(I have beef with this interpretation of the character, because yes, fine, I realize he's closer to the book version, but also I don't liiiiiike it. I imprinted too hard on William and am now a lost cause.)
I absolutely love it when DMBJ double-casts the old and new generations, so it brings me particular delight to see erstwhile Xie Yuchen actor Ji Xiaobing killing it as Xie Jiu Ye, the billionaire fashion plate of the Mystic Nine. All you really need to know about his character is that if you need someone to menacingly deliver unnecessarily cryptic clues over a game of go, he is 100% the correct choice.
And then Ba Ye. If you don't already know who Ba Ye is, he just comes across as a soft little fortune-teller prone to kidnapping and mild hysteria. If you do know who he is, then you know he is actually a soft little fortune-teller prone to kidnapping and mild hysteria who is also the best and most wonderful numbers boy in the world. Then you are definitely going to side with him re: what those uncultured ruffians do to his nice shop. (Fun fact! Ba Ye is one of the vanishingly few DMBJ characters who has been played in every appearance across multiple series by the same person, the incredible cuddleable Hanson Ying.)
...And then there's two other guys, but honestly, Hei Bei the Sixth gets more screentime here than he does in the original series, and Lieutenant Whassisname is a pale imitation of Zhang Rishan, so it doesn't matter if you walk into those cold.
Anyway, now you know! But you should still go watch the Mystic Nine! Or at least read my rec post about it. I work hard on these silly things. Eh, I'm mostly just entertaining myself, it's fine.
5. Okay, but ... are they gay for each other or what?
All right. Fine. Yes.
This whole show is a love story. You can read it as sexual or fraternal or platonic as you prefer, but it is fundamentally a love story between two men who are each other's everything. One of those men is hurtling towards his own demise at all times, and the other is desperately trying to save him, and then you get about a third of the way into the show and they switch roles.
I implied they'd been raised like brothers, and that's sort of true? Except it's also very not true, because Zhang Haiqi adopted both of them when they were already fully developed little kids with concrete memories of their tragic-ass backstories and immediately tossed them into her own Southern Archives Boot Camp. They are Not Normal about one another in large part because they have never at any point known what a normal family structure is like. I am even being cagey here about some of the precise ways they are Not Normal about one another, so that you can have the joy of discovering them in context.
We see flashbacks to when Zhang Hailou and Zhang Haixia were young enough that they had to be played by child actors instead of the two main stars, and since at least that time, it's been just the two of them. They work together fantastically well. They read each other's cues in a way no one else can. They are absolutely a bonded pair, do not separate. So of course the show is going to spend the whole time separating them and using the angst of that separation to fuel the plot, because that's how dramatic tension works.
The following paragraph has extremely minor structural spoilers, but if you want to go in completely unprepared, just skip down past the next picture, okay? Awesome.
The book (which does not have a satisfying conclusion) removes Zhang Haixia from the narrative in what's basically the second act. But the show has paid handsome Ding Yuxi a lot of money to be here, so you better believe it's going to find a way to keep him around. When you get to the way it finds to keep him around, and you're like, hey, that doesn't seem entirely congruent with the way the story was going at the beginning? Congratulations! You have unlocked the achievement NPSS Was Also The Screenwriter.
If you are here for boys who have powerful love and longing for other boys in their curiously misaligned hearts, you have come to the right place. If you lose it when someone loves someone else so much that they're willing to overlook literal war crimes, start your engines. If you think that wounding someone either from a distance or at close range is a love language, you cannot miss this show. The bond between Zhang Hailou and Zhang Haixia is the story, and buddy, it is neither safe nor sane nor always consensual. It is, however, incredibly fun.
And if you want those boys to fuck nasty about it? There's 412 Works in 南部档案 | Archives: The Nanyang Mystery, a mere 72 of which are in English. See you in those Archives.
caveat: If this is your first time in the Tombs ... maybe don't go any further?
Look, there are few pleasures more sublime than talking somebody into loving DMBJ. I have burned entire hours of my life trying to convince random strangers on the internet that what they really need in their lives is a jank-ass adventure c-drama series based on a bunch of books by a guy cursed by a witch to die if he ever writes a satisfying ending. So I need you to hear me loud and clear when I say that the Southern Archives has set your bar in entirely the wrong place, and if you go into the other series expecting them to be like this, you will perish.
By DMBJ standards, the Southern Archives is a show with a tight plot, competent pacing, dynamic cinematography, high production quality, solid CG, and a complete and concluded narrative. If you read that sentence and are like wait, what? then I am sorry, but you may need to stay out of the Tombs.
DMBJ shows are Dude Shows For Dudes. The Southern Archives is a Dude Show For Ladies. It's very aware of how it's both sexualizing and woobifying its main boys. It lets the camera linger on so many beautiful manly eyes brimming with unshed tears. It keeps the poop and pee jokes to a minimum. It passes the Bechdel Test, for heaven's sake. When was the last time a Tombs show passed the Bechdel Test?
I think you should keep going! I think you should watch the Mystic Nine and Time Raiders and Ultimate Note and Tibetan Sea Flower and Sand Sea and Reunion and the heihua movie, arguably in that order! And maybe some of the other ones too! And I absolutely think that if you do not go into them with the right mindset, you will bounce of whichever series you watch next so hard it'll make your head spin.
So what is the right mindset? The right mindset is that of a forty-year-old man's inner twelve-year-old boy.
This is not to say that DMBJ can never be sophisticated, meaningful, intelligent, or affecting, because it absolutely can. It's just that all of that potential is built on a foundation of a guy daydreaming about how awesome it would be if his Marty Stu went on dangerous adventures with a really strong and mysterious best friend who had an awesome sword and an awesome hypercolor tattoo and also semi-magically appeared in times of crisis to save him and only him, would that be awesome or what?
If this is not for you, it's not for you. And that's fine! You can enjoy the Southern Archives as its own separate, self-contained thing, and I hope you have a wonderful time with it. Do not feel compelled to drag yourself further into what will quickly become an exercise in frustration.
Oh, but if you're up for more? I'm so happy. My heart has been living in these Tombs for years now, and I'd be thrilled to have you join me in this catastrophic mess. There's so much nonsense and goodness and homoeroticism and snakes and shitty greenscreen and bronze artifacts and unfinished stories and uncles and friendship waiting for you. Bring your own inner twelve-year-old boy. We'll keep an eye on him.
Are you ready to get salty?
This is an iQiyi exclusive, baby. You can watch the first five episodes for free on YouTube to see if you get a taste for it, but beyond that, it's pretty much back to the Green Site.
If you've made it this far, thank you for letting me get all this Tomb Goo all over your shoes, especially since (unless I go back for Ultimate Note) I'm probably not going to write another DMBJ-related rec for a good long while now. Thus, this has become a meandering, easily distracted post that's not as funny as it thinks it is and definitely just sort of ends with a whimper, but perhaps you can consider it a microcosm of the experience of watching an actual DMBJ series.
I think it is very important to remember at all times that DMBJ is not here to give you -- queer internet-dweller who is probably not Chinese, given you're reading this ridiculous English-language Tumblr post -- what you want. Not to be all 'kids these days!' but I do think a lot of people have gotten spoiled by the ready availability of textually gay media. DMBJ is a bit of a throwback to old-school shipping culture. The Tomb Boys will never kiss. They are not woke. You will have to grind your teeth through a lot of disappointing shit. That's okay. It's good for both you and your inner twelve-year-old boy. It builds character.
Also! You can go read the book if you want to! There's a fan translation here. Just remember the thing about the witch's curse and temper your expectations appropriately.
Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” that was written in 1950 is set on the day of August 4th, 2026 (tomorrow)!! Now’s your chance to read it around the time it’s based in!
Audio: A recording of Leonard Nimoy reading it on Internet Archive.
I used to set this one for second year undergraduate creative writing seminars on writing science fiction on a double bill with Octavia E. Butler's "Bloodchild" and no-one here gets out alive.
1984 Soviet film by Nazim Tulyakhodzhaev based on "There Will Come Soft Rains" while taking place on December 31st 2026 (and January 1st) is too wonderful not to mention here in my opinion.
It is in Russian (with a song in English) but I've found a version with subtitles. I do recommend watching it. It's really beautiful.
Gulliver's Travels was published in 1725. It's a satire. If you've never read it, it's a pretty brutal satire. It makes fun of literally everything. And not in, like, a fond and gentle way. In a way that's supposed to shake us and be like, LOOK HOW STUPID THIS ALL IS.
And here's a little bit of satire from the book. In this scene, Swift is satirizing the pointlessness of academia. And, to do so.....HE INVENTS GENERATIVE AI:
The first professor I saw, was in a very large room, with forty pupils about him. After salutation, observing me to look earnestly upon a frame, which took up the greatest part of both the length and breadth of the room, he said, “Perhaps I might wonder to see him employed in a project for improving speculative knowledge, by practical and mechanical operations. But the world would soon be sensible of its usefulness; and he flattered himself, that a more noble, exalted thought never sprang in any other man’s head. Every one knew how laborious the usual method is of attaining to arts and sciences; whereas, by his contrivance, the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.” He then led me to the frame, about the sides, whereof all his pupils stood in ranks. It was twenty feet square, placed in the middle of the room. The superficies was composed of several bits of wood, about the bigness of a die, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender wires. These bits of wood were covered, on every square, with paper pasted on them; and on these papers were written all the words of their language, in their several moods, tenses, and declensions; but without any order. The professor then desired me “to observe; for he was going to set his engine at work.” The pupils, at his command, took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof there were forty fixed round the edges of the frame; and giving them a sudden turn, the whole disposition of the words was entirely changed. He then commanded six-and-thirty of the lads, to read the several lines softly, as they appeared upon the frame; and where they found three or four words together that might make part of a sentence, they dictated to the four remaining boys, who were scribes. This work was repeated three or four times, and at every turn, the engine was so contrived, that the words shifted into new places, as the square bits of wood moved upside down.
Six hours a day the young students were employed in this labour; and the professor showed me several volumes in large folio, already collected, of broken sentences, which he intended to piece together, and out of those rich materials, to give the world a complete body of all arts and sciences; which, however, might be still improved, and much expedited, if the public would raise a fund for making and employing five hundred such frames in Lagado, and oblige the managers to contribute in common their several collections.
He assured me “that this invention had employed all his thoughts from his youth; that he had emptied the whole vocabulary into his frame, and made the strictest computation of the general proportion there is in books between the numbers of particles, nouns, and verbs, and other parts of speech.”
I made my humblest acknowledgment to this illustrious person, for his great communicativeness; and promised, “if ever I had the good fortune to return to my native country, that I would do him justice, as the sole inventor of this wonderful machine;” the form and contrivance of which I desired leave to delineate on paper, as in the figure here annexed. I told him, “although it were the custom of our learned in Europe to steal inventions from each other, who had thereby at least this advantage, that it became a controversy which was the right owner; yet I would take such caution, that he should have the honour entire, without a rival.”
This is exactly how an LLM works. Absolutely astonishing, that in 1725 Jonathan Swift was like, "Look at this stupid idea" lololololol
Hello! Thank you for all your hard work~ I was wondering if you were aware of any stats or papers about commenting trends? I always see writers talking about getting less feedback these days, and I wonder if it's actually that people comment less, or if it is that there are more fandoms / writers / works spreading the fans who do comment thinner. Or if commenters used to be more likely to also be writers as well as readers and are now more likely to be one or the other. Thank you!
Hey! Those are good questions. I don't know of a ton of relevant data, but I'll throw it out to my readers -- does anyone else know of relevant studies/data?
I do have this comment data I collected recently:
We can see that nearly three quarters of fanworks on AO3 have fewer than 10 comments. I've looked at popularity metrics a number of times in the past, and when I examine the data from this post in 2014, I see that 12 years ago, over 40% of AO3 works had 0 comments (vs. 25% now). And at that time, only 5% of works had 25+ comments, whereas now 6% of works have 50+ comments.
So it looks like maybe things have actually gotten better, right? And possibly they have, in spite of the general sense from authors/creators that they're getting less feedback than they used to. But OTOH, the older works have now been around longer and had time to accumulate a bunch more comments. This histogram can't tell us about the age of the works with more comments, nor how quickly the comments have accumulated.
You are also right that fannish attention is probably spread thinner than before. There are a huge number of fandoms on AO3 (76K as of June 2026), and most of those fandoms are very small, meaning that a lot of attention is spread around -- and most people in those fandoms are probably not getting nearly as much feedback as people in some of the really big/really active fandoms. (Though I will note as someone who has made the first/only work in a fandom that the people who DO comment on such a work are often extremely enthusiastic to have found it! :) )
(Sidenote: It's worth me & other fandom data enthusiasts noting how few fandoms have 10K+ works, given how many fandom stats are about the big fandoms!)
I don't have historical numbers on fandom sizes for comparison. But I expect that there has been a significant shift toward more smaller fandoms on AO3 (and elsewhere), given how the general cultural attention to media has fragmented over time. I have seen indirect evidence of such fragmentation... I recently compared the popular ships from 2013 to those now (forthcoming work!) and shockingly, most of the top 5 ships are the same now as in 2013. Which is undoubtedly due to a variety of factors, but it is consistent with the idea that fannish attention has spread out from the early mega-fandoms to a much wider set of new fandoms and ships now, and so very few new ships have gotten as much attention as the early mega-ships.
I do think commenting culture has almost certainly changed some over time, too. But it's a bit tricky figure out how to quantify shifts. Even if we looked at a bunch of random works over AO3 's history and compared their numbers of comments to see how average comment number is changing over time, there are complications. As I mentioned before, newer works haven't had as much time to accumulate comments as older ones. And I've also seen in the past that average numbers of kudos/comments/etc. can vary wildly by fandom/ship/tags. But that said, I could imagine sampling a whole bunch of works from different time periods and looking at how quickly they got their first comment, second comment, etc. If commenting has slowed down, then the time to the Nth comment would be longer now than before. (That would only partially address your questions, but could be interesting.) I kinda expect that maybe that's not true for the new hotness like Heated Rivalry but is true for smaller fandoms, but that's pure speculation!
I guess I could also write code to scrape my own AO3 inbox info (and my own Works posted dates) to gather the timing info for all the comments on my works. Then I could look at how commenting rate has changed over time for me and my own stories. But that wouldn't tell me much unless I also got a ton of other people to use my code to scrape their own comment/work timing info and then shared that with me. On the one hand, that could help us look at longitudinal changes on the same creators over time, which would be interesting. On the other hand, it would introduce sampling bias (which creators are sharing their data? probably not a representative set!) and also be a heck of a lot of work. :)
I'm curious whether anyone else has ideas for methods of investigating! Maybe there are survey questions that would also be useful to ask, or other ways to investigate. I think the questions around how much writers overlap with commenters (or anything else involving individual commenter identities), are ones I would hesitate to try to address through scraping due to potential privacy issues -- so something like survey questions might be a better approach there.
(Note also that I'm not signing up to do further research here, mind you, but it's interesting to at least think through what would provide answers to these questions. :) )
One final note: For any histogram of things like number of comments or sizes of fandoms, it's almost always the case that most things are in the smallest bucket due to power laws. But interestingly, that's not what we see with comments when we zoom in:
It's very cool to see that there are more works with two comments than one, more with four than three, and so on. I think this speaks to how much authors appreciate comments: they often reply, and so comments frequently occur in pairs!
Cnetizens: Why the thousand-year-old stone statues at the Northern Song Mausoleums aren’t covered with glass enclosures.
The director of the Cultural Relics Bureau replies: "They’ve stood here largely intact for over a millennium. Why add extra barriers?"
Visitors worry wind, rain and sunlight in the farmland will wear them down. The director explains:
Glass covers speed up decay—it’s like locking the statues in a sauna. Trapped heat and moisture create sharp temperature shifts. Salt crystals inside the stone expand and crack the carvings far faster than open-air exposure.
These statues blend naturally with the farmland landscape. Glass barriers would destroy the sense of scale and historical atmosphere.
When first built, the mausoleum complex was a restricted royal compound ringed by walls, palaces and pine trees—no farmland at all. After the Song fell, protection systems collapsed. Wars and weather destroyed buildings. Local residents gradually dismantled the abandoned structures, reusing timber and bricks in nearby villages.
By the Ming and Qing dynasties, villagers turned the empty grounds into farmland, leaving stone figures scattered amid crops.
Few people damaged the statues for three reasons: each weighs several tons and is impossible to move; folk belief held that anyone who damaged the guardian statues would be cursed with misfortune; every later dynasty passed laws punishing those who vandalized former imperial mausoleums.
Once an exclusive imperial burial ground, now ordinary farmland—this shift tells the story of history. Glass covers would only be unnecessary. As an old Chinese poem puts it: 旧时王谢堂前燕，飞入寻常百姓家
The swallows that were wont to grace the halls of Wang and Xie,
Now seek the humble roofs of common men.
This is an experiment to see if there really are as few of us as people think.You can also use this to freak out your followers who think you’re 25 or something. Yay!
if haixia is in-stasis for 77 years since 1933, he'd wake up perfectly in time for 2010. and what's going down in 2010?
The Final Leg of Busting Those Wangs For Good. (after the culmulative effort spanning 3 generations)
So, while it is a bit horrible to make haixia get to work right after waking up cuz they are on a tight schedule, but im already hearing boss music playing. also it's probably Hei Xiazi who picks him up, cuz Baye's calculations and Xiao Hua's money.
(this does not explain Blind Tomb however. and also it negates my one thought about haixia being the missing member of the Xisha Team, which i know nothing about but find it compelling to just have haixia there. always. in the background. providing secret support.)
all these puzzle pieces must fit together somehow (they dont, but it's a mosaic process not a custom-fitting process)
Q: Sanshu! I'd really like to know that since the Twilight Grass can age the human body and rebuild a person's constitution, did it originate from the Zhang Pavillion or did it come from the same place as the foreign evil god?
A: The Twilight Grass had appeared in the Sha Hai drama before.
A: There's some connection between the Twilight Grass and the Tibetan Sea Flower.
(Reply from another fan): Actually the earliest version of Twilight Grass appeared in a story about a snake kingdom, categorised with the Zang Hai Hua novel. The earliest plans for these two short stories were related to the Bronze Gate and the Ultimate.
But of course! This is again to note that these Q&A are not Strictly Canon and it could just be promotional tactics to get audience to stream Sha Hai again. And also the fact that the Twilight Grass is called Wudou Disease in the novel, so this claim is crossing various streams.
The number one rule of DMBJ is there are no rules and you can have fun looking as closely or as distantly as you like.
Anyways, Wu Xie seeing Zhang Haixia sometime far after the events of Falling off A Cliff and going [gasp][pointing][rapid flashback to the a figure backlit and outlined by the sun] God who saved me when I had my throat slit?! You're Zhang Haiyan's dead wife?!
and Zhang Haixia is like :) yes. nice to meet you again.
maybe li cu just wants him to do a full body check up. and watch him get prodded and poked with needles. surely, they can't do the whole back-ashing situation again, so an embarrassing trip to the hospital will do. pangzi probs supports this. he'll be laughing along with popcorn on the side.
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