whimsyful wanderings

the wanderings of whimsyful, bookworm, nerd and drama addict

[halveablock]

we love you, carol

[kocalls]

[whimsyfuls]

Cautiously excited for this after the first trailer. Lu Yuxiao looks perfect as Nan Yi, and it should be a very rich character for her - a street rat who starts off caring for nothing except her own survival and slowly grows to become a force of nature.

Also very morbidly curious re: the inevitable toxicity/ flag discourse for the ML if they stick even somewhat close to the source novel. Dude is basically like Xiang Liu from Lost You Forever except as a doomed period general instead of a doomed xianxia one, down to the complete inability to express his feelings in a sane/healthy manner.

(Also as a novel reader, complete LOL @ the "as long as I am here, you won't die" line. My dude, you are directly responsible for a good portion of the life-or-death situations she ends up in in the first half of the book!)

[gcantread]

key and marius: I am your SWORN SHIELD you can command me to do ANYTHING

cobra: I knoooow and that power imbalance is why it's now soooo unethical and entirely off the table for us to fuck 😔

rae, already taking her clothes off: it's what

[apolladay]

Favorite Soup on a Rainy Day (hot soups)

Chicken Noodle

Tomato

Minestrone

Clam Chowder

Hot & Sour

French Onion

Egg Drop

Ramen

Potato

Chilli

Soup Hater

Other

Voting ended onMay 31

[aceinthetrap]

Dynasty Flowchart (Extended) – Nüwa Hanfu

An ultra extended flowchart for identifying dynasties! Even identifying sub-periods of each dynasty. As always, this is a general guide ther

does the makeup look sad or happy? >>> goth & sad >>> middle tang dynasty [lmao]

[mediailove]

Prime Minister Pio:

[slecnaztemnot]

Out of Context All Hail Chaos memes (spoiler-ish)

[frodo-of-the-nine-fingers]

it is always narratively correct to make your characters sleep together before they sort through the hundreds of lies and misdirections between them. make things worse make things worse make things worse #i love betrayal #i love lying #i love people feeling bad about themselves

[baiwu-jinji]

I've been reading this monograph called Chinese Dreams by Eric Hayot which is my favourite thing rn, and it talks a lot about different approaches of translating classical Chinese poetry and the philosophies behind them. In one chapter, the book gave three completely different translations of the same poem by three professional writers/translators. I want to share them here and I'm curious to hear which version people find to be the best/feels the most authentic:

1.

Green grows the grass upon the bank, The willow-shoots are long and lank. A lady in a glistening gown Opens the casement and looks down. The roses on her cheek blush bright, Her rounded arm is dazzling white; A singing girl in early life And now a careless roué's wife … Ah, if he does not mind his own, He'll find someday the bird has flown!

2.

Blue, blue is the grass about the river And the willows have overfilled the close garden. And within, the mistress, in the midmost of her youth, White, white of face, hesitates, passing the door. Slender, she puts forth a slender hand And she was a courtezan in the old days, And she has married a sot, Who now goes drunkenly out And leaves her too much alone

3.

Green, green, The grass by the river-bank. Thick, thick, The willow trees in the garden. Sad, sad, The lady in the tower. White, white, Sitting at the casement window. Fair, fair, Her red-powdered face. Small, small, She puts out her pale hand. Once she was a dancing-house girl, Now she is a wandering man's wife. The wandering man went, but did not return. It is hard alone to keep an empty bed.

[fwoopersongs]

So I said at first that option number one reads best to me offhand, but on second thoughts I wanted to know what the original poem was like and then look at these renditions again. So here's the version I would share with someone who has watched a Chinese period costume drama at least ONCE in their lives.

青青河畔草 - green, green is the grass by the riverbank

by Unknown (202 BCE - 220 CE), second of the Nineteen Old Poems

青青河畔草 鬱鬱園中柳 qīng qīng hé pàn cǎo yù yù yuán zhōng liǔ Verdant is the grass by the riverbank, luxuriant, the willows in the garden.

盈盈樓上女 皎皎當窗牖 yíng yíng lóu shàng nǚ jiǎo jiǎo dāng chuāng yǒu Graceful is the lady there on the upper floor, luminous before the window -

娥娥紅粉妝 纖纖出素手 é é hóng fěn zhuāng xiān xiān chū sù shǒu lovely in her rouge and powder, delicate fingers on her fair hand extended.

昔為倡家女 今為蕩子婦 xī wèi chàng jiā nǚ jīn wéi dàng zǐ fù Once the daughter of a performing House, now the wife of a wayfarer -

蕩子行不歸 空床難獨守 dàng zǐ xíng bù guī kōng chuáng nán dú shǒu a wayfarer who has not returned, with an empty bed hard to mind alone.

Side note: Wondering what a house which allows one to stand at the window to both be seen by the passers by outside and observe the garden would look like, I looked for Han dynasty tomb rubbings and grave good miniatures as examples. Here is one excavated in Henan!

(Source)

The first translation with its vaguely medieval - or at the very least trying for amorphously historical imagery through words like glistening gown, casement, roué - seems to be adapted for readers who have never watched a cdrama in their lives and cannot imagine what a Han dynasty setting might look like. The translator probably swapped out the context for a more localized feel to their own culture’s historical settings... Making every sentence’s middle and end rhyme was a little silly and creates this funny sing-song effect when read aloud, but then so is the unserious tone of the original and the doubled words in its first three lines has a similar effect. Anyway, I’m not a fan of the localisation, but it was interesting to see the scene transplanted thus.

It was amusing to see 盈盈, which elsewhere in the Nineteen Poems is indeed used as a descriptor for the silver river (aka the milky way), envisioned by the translator as ‘glistening’ here. They also might have understood it in the brimming/overflowing sense and associated it with her figure as they pictured her ‘rounded arm’. There’s no other logical explanation and place to derive it. 纖纖 can only mean slender! I also don’t believe ‘careless roué’ is the description for a 荡子 in this context, but can understand the choice.

Overall I appreciated ‘Ah, if he does not mind his own, / He'll find someday the bird has flown’ the most because it shows his own understanding of the poem (It’s a Han Dynasty suggestive pop song and he knows it!). And locking in is always a fun choice to make when translating!

The second one is a piece of work…🤣 I’m not sure it can be called a translation because it has remixed nearly every line, but not quite in a manner creative enough to be considered derivative? They’re writing an AU where ‘the mistress’ is a lonely little nightingale in a cage with a drunken owner by funhouse mirror style paraphrasing. Unlike the first one, I can’t tell what they’re going for at all here? It’s like someone gave them one of those word by word lists of definitions of each sentence for beginners, and they cherry picked what they liked to construct a story. Taken as a translation, what a mess! LOL. Downvote! Downvote! 

Special callout to the most choices of choices, ‘Blue, blue is the grass…’, ‘courtezan’ spelled with a z (it’s giving 1700s) and ‘a sot’. 

The only quarter point for effort I’ll give is for the bending over backwards to nod at the original’s structure xD 青青 blue, blue / 鬱鬱 willows, overfilled (????) / 盈盈 mistress, midmost / 皎皎 white, white (really????) / (娥娥 line was skipped entirely -0.25pts) / 纖纖 slender, slender hand. 

What to say about the third one. 

I mentioned the word-for-word for learners earlier, this is like that, except certain ‘definitions’ seem completely pulled from thin air, with no corresponding words in the original. ‘Sad, sad’ is an invention. ‘Casement’ is an invention.

It’s not trying to be a creative work, but it’s also not being entirely faithful.

Overall, directionless and the worst of the lot!

[whimsyfuls]

Tag game: 5 songs u like to listen to

Prompt: when u get this, list 5 songs u like to listen to, publish. then, send this ask to 10 of your favourite followers

Tagged by @romchat. Thank you!

Vienna Teng - The Hymn of Acxiom

Really hard to pick a Vienna Teng song, but I ended up going up with this eerily prescient one about tech companies tracking everything you do online and feeding it into their predictive algorithms. This choral performance is absolutely inspired as well. The use of the cell phones!

Bach Chaconne on Cello, by Jonah Kim

I used to play the violin, and the Chaconne from Partita No. 2 in D minor is possibly my all time favorite piece of classical music. Despite it being written for violin, I love transcriptions of it on different instruments (piano, viola, electric guitar and even saxophone works shockingly well). But this particular performance on cello is one of my absolute favorites.

Polyphia - Playing God

Spanish-influenced guitar shredding!

终角浅 by 周传雄

at least 50% of the reason I went feral for the secondary OTP in My Journey to You is because of this song.

Florence + The Machine - The Old Religion

My favorite on her latest album!

No pressure tagging: @queenofattolia, @renewedmotionforjudgment, @ryfkah, @outside-seoul, @dangermousie, @supernumerarianism, @chasingfigments

[petemcvries23]

the natural lifespan of a fandom is unlimited. when well tended a fandom can be functionally immortal. and yet everywhere you look you see newly bred fandoms withering and dying when they’re barely a year old. barely even six months old. fans are looking at their six month old fandoms and saying i think it’s on its last legs, should i euthanise it? when with the proper care that fandom could outlive them for decades. it’s sad. sad state of affairs we’re in.

[mylittleredgirl]

i was thinking this morning about how i categorize fanfic authors that i enjoy like AKC breeds and decided to share my rubric with you:

the specialist: this author has a favorite kink or trope and has written 80% of the content in that tag. you know exactly what you’re getting. they have A Brand™️. no matter what other traits they display, dedicated rare pair authors belong here.

the chocolate box: essentially the exact opposite. this author will try anything once. they have 80+ works in the fandom with no discernible pattern. the shortest one is 268 words and the longest is well over 100k. this breed of author may or may not be related to:

the renaissance fan: they’ve written three things in your fandom: your favorite fic, your notp, and a bizarre crossover with a show you’ve never heard of. you hit “expand fandoms list” on their author page and have to scroll down twice to reach the bottom. whenever you curse the fact that you can’t legally commission fic writers, this is the author you’re thinking about.

the horn dog: they’re here for one thing and one thing only. if someone’s dick is not in another character’s mouth within 500 words, they apologize for it in the author’s notes. they have one (1) g-rated fic.

the rookie: this writer is usually young, new to fandom, or just got a beta-reader for the first time. their fics are a little all over the place, quality-wise, but you’re excited whenever their name pops up because their unique voice gets stronger every time. you feel a personal investment in their development, like you’re an old man reading the local high school sports page and saying “this kid’s the one to watch.”

the live streamer: the most prolific author in the fandom. their works are all over the front page when you sort by kudos. you have no idea how they generate this much work, and have seriously wondered if they have access to an extra-dimensional time portal. their stories are usually un-beta’d and the characterization varies wildly, but their best works are inspired and you’ve read them 30 times.

the cryptid: this one comes out of nowhere every two years, drops the best fanfic you’ve ever read, and disappears. fifteen months after you left a three paragraph comment about how they changed your life, you get a message in your inbox that just says “thanks.”

the novelist: we talk about “filing off the serial numbers” when someone reworks their most popular story to pitch it as an original novel; this author somehow does the reverse. their fics are excellent, usually long-reaching multi-chapter AUs that have almost nothing to do with the on-screen characters except their names. i’d like to extend my personal thanks to this breed of author because it’s the closest i get to reading an actual book.

the reunion tour: this author wrote some of the most popular works in the fandom, but either moved on to k-pop or burned out when canon took a turn for the worse. they put out one new thing a year, often an old draft that’s been haunting them from under the floorboards. their last six author’s notes all say they never thought they’d write this pairing again and “this will probably be the last time.”

who did i miss?

[xiakeponz]

chinese language learners ! so someone ik works on this language exchange platform tokimonki (for chinese / english language exchange) and word rn is there has been an influx of chinese native speakers who want to learn english, but this means an imbalance and there are not enough english speakers who are trying to learn mandarin chinese - so pspsps apparently now is a good time to join for chinese learners, there is like a free trial or smth, if you are looking for this type of method to practice spoken chinese. the platform has pre-prepped materials to help you avoid awkward convos, but there is sorta a pre-req requirement that you need to have a certain intermediate-ish level of chinese first to do exchange seshs. anyway just putting it out there since ik a lot of language exchange usually has too many english first language speakers and not the other way around , hope this reaches the right people

[ao3commentoftheday]

For anyone who hasn't seen them before, Hidden Search Operators are handy tricks you can use when you're either searching or filtering AO3.

summary: string is a generic way of explaining that you can search AO3 for a specific word that appears in a summary. You can do this from the search bar in the header, from the Any Field box at the top of the Advanced Search form, or from the Search Within Results box at the bottom of the filter menu.

Examples:

summary: Bruce

summary: "Bruce Banner"

summary: Bruce OR summary: Banner OR summary: Hulk

You need to put quotation marks around your search term if it is more than one word. The quotes make sure that the site searches for those two words together.

The other two operators listed work best in the Search Within Results box.

expected_number_of_chapters: 1 will return results where every fic has only 1 chapter currently posted.

You can use -expected_number_of_chapters: 1 if you want results where every fic has more than 1 chapter currently posted.

otp:true will return results where there is only 1 relationship tag on the fic. If you want results where there are 2+ relationship tags (and no fics with only 1 relationship tag) then you can use otp:false

[ao3commentoftheday]

This post is going around again (with an unfortunate syntax error on it - this version is correct), so I thought I'd add some information that folks have mentioned wanting in the notes.

Any time you want help with how to use AO3, look for the question mark bubbles. Clicking or tapping on those bubbles will open up a pop up window with information on that specific part of AO3. For example, here's the information for Include filters.

2. When you log into AO3 for the first time, you'll have a banner on your dashboard that gives you a ton of links and information that's useful for new users. A lot of people will dismiss this banner without ever reading it, but you can get it back at any time.

Go to your Preferences, scroll down to Misc. and check the box next to Turn the new user help banner back on. Update your preferences, and the banner will return.

3. When you first tap or click into the search in the header bar, a little popup tip appears below the text box. This is showing you an example of a search that you can do.

4. If you've never seen the filters before, click or tap on any tag that you're interested in. On a wide screen like a laptop, the filters will appear on the right hand side of the screen. On a narrow screen like a phone, you can tap on the Filters button for the menu to appear.

5. The FAQ has a series of questions related to Searching and Browsing on the Archive. You can find the FAQ in the dropdown under the word About in the header.

6. You can also just click on stuff and see what happens. For example, if you're wondering what the four icons at the top corner of each fic blurb mean, you can just click on them and get a popup with the key. Same thing if you're wondering about the icons at the top right of a bookmark.

7. I almost forgot ☝️If you want to see fics based on the primary pairing but you're okay with additional ships being in the fic (so otp:true won't work for you) - there's a script for that! AO3 Only Show Primary Pairing.

This post is extremely long now, but if you're wondering about other things just drop them in the notes.

[orphetoon]

go watch project hail mary NOW!!

[xiaolanhua]

LU YU XIAO and CHENG LEI Harper’s Bazaar China photoshoot