Ever See A Depiction Of St. George And The Dragon? It's Pretty Fair To Say If You've Seen One, You've

And here are the deleted scenes from Your Name Engraved Herein, with English subs!

https://youtu.be/djLcuhiZHd0

Behold, my Dictionary Collection.

(Not Including the dictionary that I actually normally use, or the online dictionaries that I live by.) (I gotta get myself a multi-volume Cantonese dictionary like my mom’s someday. And she has the coolest 成语词典 Idiom Dictionary, too!)

Get to know you?

Tagged by @theji

Tag some number of people you want to get to know better/catch up with.

Last song - #357 of a 413- song Zhou Shen playlist. I’m working my way through ALL of Zhou Shen’s songs!

One of my favorite recent discoveries (I am truly grateful to all those Youtubers who put these long playlists together) is when some show had some people in costume trying to sing 芒种Mang Zhong and doing a terrible job of it -- like, it sounded like me trying to sing, and my kids won’t even let me sing them lullabies --, and then Zhou Shen struts in with an entourage, singing with confidence, power, perfect pitch, and crazy charisma.  It’s worth it to hear the bad singing in the beginning just to more fully experience and understand just how different and special Zhou Shen’s singing is.   

And then he sang a little bit of 左手指月(Left Hand Pointing at the Moon).  Wow. 

Last movie - The last movie I watched that was new to me was 刻在你心底的名字 Your Name Engraved Herein, on Netflix.  It was crazy good. It was so good that I spent the next week obsessing over it and not feeling the slightest bit tired (my new measure for how strongly something affects me: if it can replace sleep, it’s Good).  Some reviews mention that the movie is sad, but I watched through to the last second and actually found it quite positive.  It ends with happiness and hope.  That’s enough for me to look forward to a(n emotionally wrenching but ultimately sweet) re-watch.  

The last movie that I actually watched was 闪光少女Our Shining Days (no longer on Netflix, but still free on Youtube!).  It’s the perfect antidote to all emotionally wrenching media, while still being beautiful and subtle and, actually, kinda deep and meaningful, especially for those of us who really care about traditional Chinese arts. And it’s hilarious and the music is Awesome.

Currently reading - 镇魂 Guardian by Priest.  I’m only on Chapter 4, but I’m totally enamored.  I am still getting used to the new vocabulary and sentence structures of Priest (new to me) vs 墨香铜臭Mo Xiang Tong Xiu (魔道祖师 x2!), though, so it’s slow going right now.  

Currently watching - ...still on Street Dance of China Season 3.  Someday I’ll finish Episode 9.  I really like it, honestly!  I just really like to give it my full attention, read all the cute little pop-up comments, and, well, I haven’t figured out yet just when I’m (stealing my kids’ ipad and) doing that.

Currently craving - Anything Asian.  Please!

Tagging: @herr-zhou, @coffintownkids, @bimingjue 

18 notes

"More missing text!"

"Why are there extra sentences in the English version?"

there's a very simple explanation here called "pipi likes to edit" 😅

｡ﾟヽ(ﾟ´Д｀)ﾉﾟ｡ Why?!? Why?!?!!

Terry Pratchett's 2001 Carnegie Medal Winner Speech

I’m pretty sure that the publicists for this award would be quite happy if I said something controversial, but it seems to me that giving me the Carnegie medal is controversial enough. This was my third attempt. Well, I say my third attempt, but in fact I just sat there in ignorance and someone else attempted it on my behalf, somewhat to my initial dismay.

The Amazing Maurice is a fantasy book. Of course, everyone knows that fantasy is 'all about' wizards, but by now, I hope, everyone with any intelligence knows that, er, what everyone knows...is wrong.

Fantasy is more than wizards. For instance, this book is about rats that are intelligent. But it also about the even more fantastic idea that humans are capable of intelligence as well. Far more beguiling than the idea that evil can be destroyed by throwing a piece of expensive jewellery into a volcano is the possibility that evil can be defused by talking. The fantasy of justice is more interesting that the fantasy of fairies, and more truly fantastic. In the book the rats go to war, which is, I hope, gripping. But then they make peace, which is astonishing.

In any case, genre is just a flavouring. It's not the whole meal. Don't get confused by the scenery.

A novel set in Tombstone, Arizona, on October 26, 1881 is what– a Western? The scenery says so, the clothes say so, but the story does not automatically become a Western. Why let a few cactuses tell you what to think? It might be a counterfactual, or a historical novel, or a searing literary indictment of something or other, or a horror novel, or even, perhaps, a romance – although the young lovers would have to speak up a bit and possibly even hide under the table, because the gunfight at the OK corral was going on at the time.

We categorize too much on the basis of unreliable assumption. A literary novel written by Brian Aldiss must be science fiction, because he is a known science fiction writer; a science fiction novel by Margaret Attwood is literature because she is a literary novelist. Recent Discworld books have spun on such concerns as the nature of belief, politics and even of journalistic freedom, but put in one lousy dragon and they call you a fantasy writer.

This is not, on the whole, a complaint. But as I have said, it seems to me that dragons are not really the pure quill of fantasy, when properly done. Real fantasy is that a man with a printing press might defy an entire government because of some half-formed belief that there may be such a thing as the truth. Anyway, fantasy needs no defence now. As a genre it has become quite respectable in recent years. At least, it can demonstrably make lots and lots and lots of money, which passes for respectable these days. When you can by a plastic Gandalf with kung-fu grip and rocket launcher, you know fantasy has broken through.

But I’m a humourous writer too, and humour is a real problem.

It was interesting to see how Maurice was reviewed here and in the US. Over there, where I've only recently made much of an impression, the reviews tended to be quite serious and detailed with, as Maurice himself would have put it, 'long words, like "corrugated iron."' Over here, while being very nice, they tended towards the 'another wacky, zany book by comic author Terry Pratchett'. In fact Maurice has no wack and very little zane. It's quite a serious book. Only the scenery is funny.

The problem is that we think the opposite of funny is serious. It is not. In fact, as G K Chesterton pointed out, the opposite of funny is not funny, and the opposite of serious is not serious. Benny Hill was funny and not serious; Rory Bremner is funny and serious; most politicians are serious but, unfortunately, not funny. Humour has its uses. Laughter can get through the keyhole while seriousness is still hammering on the door. New ideas can ride in on the back of a joke, old ideas can be given an added edge.

Which reminds me... Chesterton is not read much these days, and his style and approach belong to another time and, now, can irritate. You have to read in a slightly different language. And then, just when the 'ho, good landlord, a pint of your finest English ale!' style gets you down, you run across a gem, cogently expressed. He famously defended fairy stories against those who said they told children that there were monsters; children already know that there are monsters, he said, and fairy stories teach them that monsters can be killed. We now know that the monsters may not simply have scales and sleep under a mountain. They may be in our own heads.

In Maurice, the rats have to confront them all: real monsters, some of whom have many legs, some merely have two, but some, perhaps the worse, are the ones they invent. The rats are intelligent. They're the first rats in the world to be afraid of the dark, and they people the shadows with imaginary monsters. An act of extreme significance to them is the lighting of a flame.

People have already asked me if I had the current international situation in mind when I wrote the book. The answer is no. I wouldn't insult even rats by turning them into handy metaphors. It's just unfortunate that the current international situation is pretty much the same old dull, stupid international situation, in a world obsessed by the monsters it has made up, dragons that are hard to kill. We look around and see

foreign policies that are little more than the taking of revenge for the revenge that was taken in revenge for the revenge last time. It's a path that leads only downwards, and still the world flocks along it. It makes you want to spit. The dinosaurs were thick as concrete, but they survived for one hundred and fifty million years and it took a damn great asteroid to knock them out. I find myself wonder wondering now if intelligence comes with its own built-in asteroid.

Of course, as the aforesaid writer of humourous fantasy I'm obsessed by wacky, zany ideas. One is that rats might talk. But sometimes I'm even capable of weirder, more ridiculous ideas, such the possibility of a happy ending. Sometimes, when I'm really, really wacky and on a fresh dose of zany, I'm just capable of entertaining the fantastic idea that, in certain circumstances, Homo Sapiens might actually be capable of thinking. It must be worth a go, since we've tried everything else.

Writing for children is harder than writing for adults, if you're doing it right. What I thought was going to be a funny story about a cat organizing a swindle based on the Pied Piper legend turned out to be a major project, in which I was aided and encouraged and given hope by Philippa Dickinson and Sue Coates at Doubleday or whatever they're calling themselves this week, and Anne Hoppe of HarperCollins in New York, who waylaid me in an alley in Manhattan and insisted on publishing the book and even promised to protect me from that most feared of creatures, the American copy editor.

And I must thank you, the judges, in the hope that your sanity and critical faculties may speedily be returned to you. And finally, my thanks to the rest of you, the loose agglomeration of editors and teachers and librarians that I usually refer to, mostly with a smile, as the dirndl mafia. You keep the flame alive.

So, a rant and a request for advice before I begin my dreadfully important hunt/research:

I’ve been loving the WeComics app, originally for reading Mo Dao Zu Shi in English (before I improved and trusted my Chinese), then for a bunch of other Chinese and translated-from-Chinese manhua. I’ve barely been on tumblr recently because I’ve been head-over-heels in love with 化龙记.

And then I noticed that 化龙记 is also in English on the app as “Tale of Dragon Morph”, so I open it up and, Lo and Behold, there is more/new chapter-header art! And so many more panels that help explain the flow of the plot — it makes sense now!

But as I read the English version, I notice that it’s Missing Scenes. Useful, important scenes that help with Character Development and Logical Flow.

What’s up with these manhua? Why are there different missing scenes in each language? Is it just WeComics?

Is there a manhua app out there that is Complete?!?!?

Help!!!

—————————-

Grumpy follow-up: WeComics is being taken over by WebNovel, which doesn’t appear to have Any manhua at All 😠.

And KuaiKanManHua is typically censored. No cute images of one character washing another’s back, no super-useful panels showing how the protagonist escapes his lecherous captor’s bedroom. Nope.

Sigh. I will keep searching.

How would you lure someone into reading MXTX's novels beyond the usual "the main CP is this and that"? Cos for example, every time someone tells me to read MDZS, they mostly just say Wangxian is married and have a child and leave it at that, which isn't encouraging at all??? Sorry to bother you with this question. I love reading your responses though!

Hi there anon!~

I think pitching MXTX novels as purely “couple is so-and-so” is also a bit of a disservice, too! One of my favorite things about many danmei novels is indeed that they are very plot-heavy and contain lots of thought-provoking concepts. For the sake of this answer, I will limit it to MDZS since you gave that as an example.

For me, the most interesting thing about MDZS is not necessarily that “Wangxian are married and have a son” but the actual struggles that both Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji endure in order to get to a point where they can be happy together. It takes one of them dying and coming back, plus the shattering of social complacency that occurs during the present timeline of the novel. And even then, that’s not even really the main focus of the novel, it’s more like a product of everything else that happens. Their history is also long and marred with anger, confusion, heartbreak, and understanding.

I have my own preferences of how I read Wei Wuxian, for example, that I think differs from other people’s. Same for how I like to interpret Wangxian. In an effort not to rock the boat, I’ll just say that I think Wangxian is a very compelling and interesting couple because they both put in work to make it work. I like thinking of how they are just very fundamentally different people, but do well together because they choose to.

But again, I think MXTX made a point also in not focusing too much on their relationship itself, but rather the plot and how/why it develops the way it does. She had something she wanted to say with this work, as she does with each one of her works. MDZS is first and foremost a murder-mystery with the background of a war story. It’s about the dangers of mob mentality, how fast the crowd will turn against you if you step out of line. It’s about how rocking the boat has far-reaching consequences, and how society often wants the easiest and cheapest way to morality. It’s about how the pressure to be perfect will shatter someone, yet the cracks may not show until it’s too late. How oppression can make both heroes, and monsters – and that sometimes, that distinction is simply a matter of who is telling the story.

(I also want to note that there’s also the one theme that MXTX seems to really favor, and is present in all 3 of her works: having one person on your side can be enough.)

These are all incredible concepts that I think are really worth reading the novel for. Not to mention, they are eternally relevant conversations to have. MDZS is a novel painted in gray, and deserves thoughtful consideration of such. (Of course, it can also just be a lot of fun!) Even how you view the main character is absolutely dependent on what perspective you want to see him through. This itself is really interesting and unique.

The way the novel ends, with a lot let unsaid – intentionally so – is bittersweet yet satisfying. Fascinating in the sense that yeah, not everyone gets a happy ending, but in a way that genuinely makes sense. (But if you’re worried, fear not, Wangxian do end up married and with a son, after all lol!)

Ultimately, these are adult novels, meant for an adult audience – and created as much for the purposes of having fun, as they are to be discussed and analyzed through a scholarly lens. So I definitely share your frustration in being pitched a novel purely on the couple, because YEAH I do care a lot about the couple (see: how I devote at least 80% of my brain power to thinking about Hualian kissing), but I also do want a story that is satisfying in more than just one way. I.e., is stratifying in both terms of its main couple’s relationship AND a fleshed-out plot line with lots of themes to analyze, because I like having fun in both of those ways!

I think even when we pitch other MXTX novels (or danmei novels in general), it’s helpful to do it the same way. To focus on what makes the novel great in its entirety, not just a small, reductive portion of it. Especially when it’s very clear that the author has so many things they’re trying to say with the work. However, I’ll end this here because this answer is getting so long lol! I hope this helped you out, anon, and maybe even sold you a little more on MDZS haha! (ﾉ´ヮ`)ﾉ*: ･ﾟ

Concept arts and sample insert illustrations by Marina Privalova (@Baoshan_Karo) for Sha Po Lang Russian Edition of the book shared by Istari Comics Publishing.

If you haven't seen the beautiful cover arts, here's the link.

Yes, the same artist behind MDZS insert illustrations for EN and RUS license.