interests

i hear things a decent amount.

recent:

• the beatles - white album, sergeant pepper, abbey road good old liverpudlian boys. i used ot listen to them in middle school but i'm coming back to them from time to time
• car seat headrest - teens of denial, twin fantasy face to face twin fantasy is really good wtf. the ideas of twins, pairs, and fantasies have grown in my head for the last few weeks. they won't go away. i love the spoken word, at least the parts by mr. toledo himself i don't care much for some of it on famous prophets and especially nervous young inhumans, how to leave town tbh the highlight is kimochi warui)
• ichiko aoba - 0 | old review: crazy good new review: it gets so so so so much better with time. it's has very inspiring (?) and awesome progressions and i love this album to death
• lovely summer chan - #ラブリーミュージック it's a pretty standard jpoprock album as far as im concerned. i don't understand why there's a 16 minute long song with silence in it though. strange behaivor. i really like the tracks　はじめまして、私は好きなもの、ルミネセンス、おやすみ. lovely sumemr chan gives me hella weezer vibes but if weezer was the 18 year old japanese girl. see my review of "lsc" above.
• joanna wang - 爱的呼唤, hotel la rut, 摩登悲剧 beautiful stuff on these...
• kero kero bonito - bonito generation 50% is really great 50% is okay, time 'n' place (peak), totep (mostly peak, civilisation peak
• my little airport - 因当时太紧张, SABINA 之泪, 在动物园散步才是正经事 pretty fantastic dream/twee pop music.
• microphones - the glow part 2 old review: i will admit it's good music but i usually don't have a 90 minute attention span. rip. it's my fault new review: this album is good as FUCK yo like. i want to be cold? i want wind to blow? the glow? the gleam? i felt my size? i felt my shape? fucking *samurai sword*???
• neutral milk hotel - in the aeroplane over the sea it would be a 10/10 except for oh comely
• number girl - SAPPUKEI yet another hit-and-miss but probably the best of their albums
• pitcher56 - her abiding memory a great record. it doesn't have the same kind of epic scope as some of the other records that i listen to but it's great
• soutaiseiriron - town age, synchroniciteen, chiffon capitalism, hi-fi anatomia, tensei jingle i would highly recommend to all human beings all of their albums. june 2024 update: i came back and listened to hi-fi anatomia. still hits as great as it used to
• the strokes - is this it classic. maybe it's late and ive been so musical today but now that im recalling it, it does get grating
• weatherday - come in damn. half the tracks are so amazing (mio, min mio, come in, my sputnik, agatka but then the others are okay. in my opinion.

i read a lot. tends to be 90% (shoujo) manga (or manga from yuri hime) though. recent novels:

• albert camus - the stranger i'm not exactly the greatest reader of all time. this book is really great but not in like a "whoa i feel so profoundly affected" way, but i think it has its own kind of twistedness that i guess intentionally makes me feel so incredibly uncomfortable and not at ease. like mr. stranger i was talking about this book in class and i referred to mersault as mr stranger and my teacher thought i was talking about some book called mr stranger is such a character. such an interesting and frightneing individual.
• amy tan - the joy luck club i wrote a whole ass 3 page essay. but turns out we're only allowed to do one page. copying and pasting it here: I began to read Amy Tan’s 1989 realistic fiction novel The Joy Luck Club at about 2 on a dreary Wednesday morning without any preparation besides what I’d gleaned from reading other books in the “Asian-American canon,” which was that this novel was a bona fide classic. At first I figured that the novel would be a pretty standard story about Chinese family dynamics, like Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother or Crazy Rich Asians. But I learned almost immediately that this was wrong. The Joy Luck Club centers on four daughters raised in an American background and four mothers raised in a Chinese background. Waverly Jong, chess prodigy, is frustrated by her mother’s way of bragging about her, eventually becoming nearly engaged to a man unfamiliar with her mother’s culture. Her mother, Lindo, escaped her cruel mother-in-law from her first marriage and is now unable to connect with her daughter. Lena St. Clair ends up in a zero-sum marriage, and her mother, having been raised to be passive, wants to save her daughter from the same passivity. Rose Hsu Jordan’s little brother died in his early childhood, leading her mother to lose her faith. An-Mei, Rose’s mother, left her mother’s family after intense scheming and pain. Finally, June Jing-Mei Woo takes her mother’s place at the titular Joy Luck Club, leading her to reunite with her mother’s long-lost twin daughters back in China. Her mother, Suyuan, had to leave Kweilin Guilin today after starting a similar club to escape the horrors of the Japanese invasion, and in America she forced June to practice piano to compete with Waverly. And in each narrative, I find my own story. My grandparents are the same age as the daughters in this story, but they survived trauma during Mao’s reign as did the mothers during the war; my parents left developing China for greener pastures like the mothers; I am also disconnected from my “Chinese blood,” as my parents like to say, and they too are intent on my competition, if not for a specific skill then perhaps for a “good just like the daughters. I hear my mother’s voice saying the exact same phrases, and I see myself desperately connecting to my mother’s uncannily familiar culture, speaking her English and my Chinese. I can even write down every Chinese phrase mentioned in the novel in Chinese characters. On closer inspection, however, the novel is not exactly universal. The Joy Luck Club was published in March 1989, before Tiananmen Square put an end to the novel’s somewhat positive outlook on China; it stars four Chinese women and their Chinese-American daughters in a rather diverse community; its romanization of Chinese words is antiquated, and every character is more than thirty years old excepting flashbacks. My life as a Chinese-American high schooler [vague pronouns here cause i'm not exactly out or anything] thirty-five years after Tiananmen, living in an area known for its famously diverse makeup, is far removed from The Joy Luck Club. But today, the political and personal messages remain relevant. Tan managed to capture the Chinese-American experience in a manner both specific to me as a Chinese-American but also understandable to a wider audience. In my favorite passage, Lindo discusses a movie about an “American soldier [who] promises to come back and marry the girl. She is crying with a genuine feeling and he says, ‘Promise! Promise! Honey-sweetheart, my promise is as good as gold. …. [T]he American soldier goes home and he falls to his knees asking another girl to marry him.’” Lindo states that his gold, like her daughter’s, isn’t good enough for Chinese people. Not only is the passage a clever allusion to Puccini’s Madama Butterfly which, if taken into account, makes this passage even more insightful, it captures so many of the novel’s universal conflicts, including that between Chinese and American values, between men and women, and between young and old. Though simplistic, the passage is the conflict resolved by the novel’s overarching theme: while people are fundamentally different in their values and identity, they can still understand and love one another. However, simplicity is a prominent issue in The Joy Luck Club. Like Jing-Mei’s Polaroids, the real world has fuzz and grain that Tan seems to sidestep in favor of a more fabulistic, “Confucius say” kind of “deepness” itself maligned in Lindo’s fortune cookie chapter. Men, both American and Chinese, are flat and often cruel; antagonists of each narrative are more caricature than character; the stories with the easiest endings sometimes cheapened the complicated webs of family dynamics into balls of yarn to toy with. Although these issues aren’t at first blush, I’d have to give this novel a eight or nine out of ten score at best. Ultimately, The Joy Luck Club is a novel about dichotomy. It dwells in parallels and paradox, from the parallels in each mother-daughter relationship and the paradox inherent to their loving opposition. As I wrapped up reading the Friday morning of the same week, I was struck not by a sense of dread that the novel’s conflicts were inescapable, but by a sense of hope: that someday, we will finally be able to understand one another.
• virginia woolf - orlando this book is fine. it just went over my head i guess? like i get it and all but really -- i know it's a pivotal whatever whatever but it felt a little dull. idk. the romances are not that interesting and the characters are not that interesting and the commentary is kinda mid. i respect though.
• jd salinger - the catcher in the rye reading this again (i first read it in like 7th grade), i just feel so bad for the kid. still he's an annoying 12 year old despite being 16. you gotta feel for him though.

recent light novels/manga/anime:

• uninvited wife, with child! is cute
• oddman 11 is fucking insane. avant-garde doesn't begin to describe this. it's like if monogatari and scott pilgrim were fused together in a bizarre way, and yes i am including the elements of araragi's pedophilia and scott pilgrim's dating a high schooler called knives. by the way knives is such an awesome ass name. but avant-garde this manga certainly is. don't read if you aren't comfortable with ... basically anything that normal people would find uncomfortable. (all manners of) assault? bdsm? incessant and incredible cultural references that i can't really understand? you betcha! not that i wasn't made very uncomfortable by this story. eventually you get desensitized. it's a lot of whiplash.

recommended light novels/manga/anime:

• TO DIE IN JUNE!!! chapters 9 and 10 are scanlated by me. it is probably up there in my top 5 manga (definitely my favorite doujin project) and definitely in the top 2 yuri. bless you ouka and mitsuki!
real talk. wartime love stories -- especially japanese ones about the second world war -- rarely get things sensitive. or right. but in my medium-level reading, somewhere inbetween superficiality and incredible close reading, i find it to be a remarkably sensitive and fullthroated indictment of war, and a very very sad love story.
• land of the lustrous would recommend to all humans
• the ends of a dream would recommend to all humans
• composing spring in this room where cherry blossoms bloom absolutely beautiful
• liar satsuki can see death peak fiction except for the fucking ending what the fuck is this author thinking what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck
• convenient semi-friend people think i only read sad gay manga for the male gaze which is kinda insane because sad and male gaze don't go together. neither does male gaze go together with me. rubidium and water, we are. i absolutely abhor any notion of getting sexual satisfaction from manga. sometimes, it is for the plot. dear god that's mortifying to say.
where was i? oh right convenient semi friend is an absolutely charming little 4-panel. its only negative aspect is that it runs monthly and i wish there was so much more because it's a really really cute story.
• handsome girl and sheltered girl is only good thing that mochi au lait have contributed to the genre and is to be honest the best introduction to all lgbt+ manga if you don't consider manga written 1000 years ago and really obscure stuff or of course the entire genre of bl which i'm not too versed in
• the summer you were there in tears
• kubo won't let me be invisible people think i only read sad gay manga and that's like 70% of my library personally speaking i believe land of the lustrous to be an lgbt+ manga but this is my favorite straight manga
• call of the night i admire the artstyle and humor of this series even though it's not really made for either.
• sengoku komachi kuroutan: noukou giga people think i only read (sad) (gay) romance manga but this is my favorite action/isekai-ish one. weird historical fiction?

i'm big on games but not that much.
though you should recommend a good wlw dating sim to me, people tell me a lot about them and i think theyre p cute!
recent:

• minesweeper
• mullet madjack for a person like me you might be surprised that i liked a game with (an obvious critique of) 80s faux-macho masculinity and (an obvious critique of) save the princess shit. but i answered your question.
• highway blossoms this is the first true blue visual novel (or should i say true pink? lily-colored? i guess that would be white classically speaking) that i've played & it's a pretty cute story. i mean never have i seen wlw media that is about a road trip across the southwestern united states. but at this point i'm about 40% through the game. amber is the real clueless one. it's cute!
• class of 09 it's like watching a car crash!
• borderlands 2 people hate this game sorta. i did all the non-dlc quests and it was a good enough game.
• borderlands the pre-sequel people hate this game a lot more than 2. while playing i was struck by the feeling of bad writing + bad balance + bad enemy placement + fuck the stingray.
• heaven will be mine i'm on a mission to play all the famous visual novels
• celeste strawberries are the most agonizing thing put into a video game
• single player minecraft im so scared of enderpeople... they just look at me and i feel like i accidentally looked at them and then i dont want them to get mad at me :. kind of how i act in real life with other people tbh
• bioshock!!!