forestofglory

It’s been ages since I did one of these! But I haven’t been reading or watching much that I want to talk about the last couple of months. I read a couple of things that I just don’t have anything to say about, and a ton of fic which I never include in these round ups. And I’ve watched almost nothing – not even mini dramas

But there’s couple of things I did want to talk about and I thought it would be nice to post about the last little bit of 2025 media before I start a new running notes document for the new year.

Crush of Music—This Chinese reality show is the one thing I have been watching recently. Crush of music is a show where songwriters demo original songs and then through a mildly gameifed process are matched with a singer (or two) who then performs the song. It’s the second season of Melody Journey, but I have no idea why the English title is different (the Chinese title is the same) It's a really fun low stress show and features some of my favorite singers! (Liu Yuning and Zhou Shen) I can't really rec the show though because the subtitles are very very bad -- I'm just watching anyway even though I can only understand about half of what people are saying. But it turns out that not understanding the show makes for very slow watching

Off Menu: A Graphic Novel written by Oliver Gerlach drawn by Kelsi Jo Silva—Cute YA graphic novel in D&D-ish world. It’s about a cook called Soup – kind of a coming of age thing with lots of cooking and community. Very Charming!

The Fellowship of The Ring— R has been reading LotR to the kid, they haven’t quite finished but they are close enough to done that we watched the 1st movie. I’ve never been huge into LotR but it was fun to watch – so many classic lines! I did kinda find myself wishing that the characters' names would show up on screen the first time they appear the way they do in the cdrama I watch. NZ remains very beautiful!

Day 22
Today for #DecRecs I want to talk about Saint Cavish a Chinese food youtube channel run by Christopher St. Cavish
https://www.youtube.com/@saintcavish
I'm always a little careful about media by white dudes about China but I was intrigued by the series of videos where Italian chefs visit "China's Noodle Homeland" -- which turned out to be really good! I've since watched a lot more of the channels videos
The videos are thoughtful, never treating the food as too weird or exotic and do a good job of putting stuff in context both historical and with regard to modern China

Day 23
Today for #DecRecs I want to rec fancy seam finishing for sewing projects! I mentioned in an earlier rec that this year I've been sewing a lot of garments for myself. For all of those I've used either french seams or flat felled seams and they are so nice to look at and so stratifying to make!

Day 24
I had PT this morning and it wore me out so for #DecRecs have a pretty picture

https://www.tumblr.com/hisiheyah/794758124462637056/as-the-leaves-on-the-trees-change-with-the

I guess I can link this to the whole year in review theme of this year's #DecRecs by saying that this year I started a tumblr account -- I still don't understand tumblr culture so I just follow people I know and reblog pretty pictures

Day 25
For today's #DecRecs I want to share some of my favorite songs so far form the Chinese reality show Crush of Music which I'm part way through watching having just finished episode 4

Crush of music is a show where songwriters demo original songs and then through a mildly gameifed process are matched with a singer (or two) who then preforms the song.
It's a really fun low stress show and features some of my favorite singers ! I can't really rec the show though because the subtitles are very very bad -- I'm just watching in anyways even though I can only understand about half of what people are saying
Anyways on to the songs! Here's Liu Yuning having the best time rocking his heart out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThwZSs1MTqo

Zhou Shen singing with cute children!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBlR8iSsrTc

I am constantly so impressed with Xue Zhiqian's stage designs (also featuring cute children)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h29GaZroe4g

There's two version of this song and I can't decide which one I like better

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fkxr0uqhgHs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pO9kRZ3JsKw

Here's the last several days of DecRecs!

Day 6
I am sick to day but I don't want to miss #DecRecs so you are getting an old favorite "Fandom for Robots" by Vina Jie-Min Prasad

It's a delightful short story featuring fandom, friendship and robot pals!

https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/fandom-for-robots/

Day 7
I'm still not feeling great today so another old favorite for #decRecs "The Witches of Athens" by Lara Elena Donnelly is one of my comfort reads. It's everything that I want cozy SFF to be. Featuring sisterhood, coffee shops, and queer romance

http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/the-witches-of-athens/

And since I mentioned cozy SFF this seems like a good time to link back to the piece I wrote about cozy SFF earlier this year -- "Domestic Labor and Community Building Rec List"

https://ladybusiness.dreamwidth.org/2025/05/29/domestic-labor-and-community-building-rec-list.html

Day 8
Doing a little better today so I want to talk about my favorite drama I watched this year for #DecRecs
Rookie Historian Goo Hae Ryung! It's a historical kdrama about a young woman who becomes a historian -- one of the people charged with writing down everything that happens in court for the historical record. It's so so good!

Things I love about Rookie Historian:
*It's thematically about history and why it matters!
*Young women succeeding at traditionally masculine jobs
*female friendship!
*it depicts but doesn't endorse monarchy
*The ML is a princess coded chaos mupet and I love him

Day 9
Since I just posted and annotated bibliography todays #DecRecs has to be Zotero!
Zotero is a free citation manager! It's great! I'm not an academic and am not writing papers for publication but I love it!
I have a lot of PDFs and they aren't always easy to sort through, but Zotero make it easy for me to find things! I can tag them and search.
I also love that I can drag and drop and Zotero will pick up any meta data!

Zotero is a great tool for fic research. I've used it to create bibliographies for several fics now (including an annotated bibliography for my most recent fic)
I generally create tag for each fic as go along and it makes it easy to find stuff again.

Day 10
Today for #DecRecs I want to rec Intergalactic Mixtape! This a SFF newsletter that my friend Renay started this year! It's got links to interesting articles and reviews, smart thoughts and recs! It's joy to get it in my inbox every week!

https://buttondown.com/intergalacticmixtape

Somehow I always go for long stretches without much to say about media and then finished several things at once, and suddenly its time to post here again.

Dominion and Devotion—Instead of watching any of the dramas I’ve already started I watched this mini drama (24 15 min episodes). I’ve had mixed luck with mini dramas but I enjoyed this one! It’s a crossdressing girl drama with enemies to lovers and political intrigue! The premise is that the FL has been raised from birth to pretend to be a young weak prince, in the hopes of someday escaping the palace. But instead she gets picked to be the puppet emperor.

The “AFAB person was raised as a boy for Reasons” variety of crossdressing girl stories really have a different vibe than the crossdressing girl adventures I grew up with, there’s just less of a sense of agency when the FL didn’t get to choose to crossdress.

Spoilers

I was not expecting the tragic ending thought! I thought it would somehow turn out ok up until the last moment.

Content Notes: Child death, corporal punishment (children and adults), torture (presented as righteous), blood

Wow the Worldep 1-4—Yes, I’m watching yet another Chinese reality show featuring Liu Yuning. This travel show where a group of people visit a bunch of cities near the 40th parallel. It’s pretty charming! I love that there's a little cartoon planet that represents each person. I would prefer a bit more focus on the tourism – tell us more about these places, and describe the food please!

Ancestors and Anxiety: Daoism and the Birth of Rebirth in China by Stephen R. Bokenkamp—This was a super interesting book about Daoist ideas about the afterlife and how they evolved after contact with Buddhism. I kinda wish I had read this before finalizing my translation of the about Wei Huacun because she’s mentioned in this and there’s a bunch of useful context about early Daoist practice.

Dragon Steel by Laurence Yep—The second book in this series which I’m reading to the kid. Still holds up well, I enjoyed the under sea dragon kingdom which was one of the bits that stuck with me from my first reading. This one does have some fatphobia though, which I didn’t enjoy.

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh—I tried so hard with this book! Well maybe that’s not strictly true because at first I wasn’t going to read it because I didn’t really like the one thing by Emily Tesh I had read before (Silver in the Wood) but then I found out more about the premise – a teacher a magical school who actually has to do paperwork, so I decided to give it a go.

I loved the first third of this book with its teaching and risk assessment and a big climatic battle that could be the end of a different book. Saving the world part way through and then having to live with the consequences would make for an interesting book, but that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening here. Instead we introduced a new very annoying character.

I was considering DNFing at that point but I asked some friends if he went away and they said that I could expect less of him, so I kept reading. And there was a lot less of him for a bit, but another thing started frustrating me: the story was providing big clues about something that the main character was not figuring out. I really don’t enjoy that kind of reader character knowledge mismatch! That’s been resolved now but I didn’t feel motivated to keep reading after that.

I really wanted to like this book because teaching at a magical school is a cool concept, and so many of my friends loved it but after the first third I found it pretty frustrating.

If you've been following along with my media round ups you might have noticed that I've been watching a lot of Chinese reality shows. So I decided to make a rec list to talk about some of my favorites

Chill Chinese Reality Shows Rec List

Since it's more than halfway through the year I started to write a reflection on my reading goal for the year: "Read Joyfully" But I found I didn't have much to say about it other than it turns out its easier to engage with new to me fiction when I actually get enough sleep.

However I do have some thoughts on things I've read and watched recently to share:

The Truth Season 3cases 9 and 10 — The last two cases, I’m sad that this is over now! This was so, so much fun! The second to last case featured my favorite costumes of the whole show in show with many excellent costumes. This really a fairly frivolous show but I love it so much! (Content note: the final case involved a dead kid)

Mu Guiying Takes Command ep 1-4— I wanted to love this. It is an adaptation of The Generals of the Yang Family, a story dating back to at least the Ming Dynasty that features women in command of the military. The FL is very badass. However I got fed up with how childish both the leads were acting.

Also this was released in 2012 which isn’t really that long ago but it feels like a whole different era.

Medieval Textiles across Eurasia, c. 300–1400 by Patricia Blessing, Elizabeth Dospěl Williams, Eiren L. Shea— This is a novella length overview of the topic. About 80 pages with a lot of pictures. I liked how it tied together such a big area and a long time period. Zooming out helped me put the stuff I know about (Chinese textiles, mostly Tang dynasty) into a larger context. I read it for the FTH biography I’m creating on Liao textiles.

A Song for You & I by Kay O'Neill— My friend Maureen, who is a children’s librarian, recced this graphic novel by the author of the Tea Dragon Society books in her most recent newsletter. And I’m glad she did because I haven’t been keeping up with recent releases and this was really good. It's a very gentle story that’s kind of coming of age with a lot of travel. One of the characters has a flying horse! The art is really good. I kept stoping to admire the color gradients. Just a very lovely book.

Please Be My Star by Victoria Grace Elliott— Reading a A Song for You & I reminded me that my library has lots of graphic novels and I checked out a whole pile of them including this one. Please Be My Star is a YA romance featuring teens putting on a play. It was very cute though once or twice I got a little too much second hand embarrassment.

Jeongnyeon: The Star Is Born ep 1-4— This kdrama sounded so exactly my thing. It’s got preforming arts, tons of women, and crossdressing girls! It’s also very pretty and well done. So I’m baffled as to why after four episodes all I feel about it is “meh”

Here's so thoughts about things I've been reading and watching recently:

The Gate, the Girl, and the Dragon by Grace Lin— Read out loud to the kid. I loved Grace Lin’s other MG books so I was very excited for this! It was very charming. As always I enjoy the author’s illustrations. I enjoyed having Chinese mythical creatures in a modern city. I don’t love it quite as much as some of the author’s other work, but it was good and worth reading.

The Transitive Properties of Cheese by Ann Leblanc— I heard about this novella from a WisCon panel on recent trans SFF. It's about a space cheese maker who finds out the asteroid that houses her cheese cave is about to be yeetted into the sun. She is one of many people who is a copy of an original human, including the person she sells her cheese to and the woman she goes to for help. This book was maybe not as weird as it was presented to me, and some of the politics are exactly like current earth queer community debates. Still I loved all the details about food, and the bits of community building that were present around the edges of the story.

The Truth Season 3 cases 6 and 7— This is labeled as two cases but it's really one very long case! I was a little disappointed to have to wait a week for resolution. This case also featured some upsetting queer phobic violence as part of one character’s backstory. But there were a lot of fun things too. They fought zombies with bubble guns!

The Treasured Voice Season 6 ep 1 — I started watching this while I was waiting between episodes of The Truth. It’s a singing reality show featuring people pairing up to sing songs. It’s got Liu Yuning! I’ve only seen the first episode but it seems pretty chill so far though there are some judges who make negative comments.

( Maiden Holmes )

I can't think of an even vaugley clever subtitle for this post so I've just put the date. I read some books with varying levels of joy. Getting slightly better sleep for a bit helped, as did putting less pressure on myself to love everything I read.

Wooing the Witch Queen by Stephanie Burgis—I was very charmed by this book! It’s not a book where I want to think too hard about the worldbuilding, nor is it a book that thinks too hard about its political systems. (There is an empire – it's bad because it wants to control magic and take over all the little kingdoms around it. But we aren’t going to think too hard about how all those monarchies work or about due process) But if you are in a mood to let those things slide and I was, it's a fun read. I liked and wanted to root for the main characters right away, especially the male lead who is a bit princess coded and becomes a librarian by accident. The plot is mostly a kind of tropey romance and I found that very soothing.

Bloody Jack by L.A. Meyer—This age of sail crossdressing girl book was recced in response to my crossdressing girl media post. Our main character Jack (née Mary) disguises herself as a boy to become a ship's boy on the HMS Dolphin, and has many adventures. This was a little too gritty for me, especially the early part of the book where her family all die, and then she lives on the street. That section featured a lot of the kids dying! Then ship life is rough and they are in battles and things so more people die. There’s also an attempted rape. Anyways this is a solid example of the crossdressing girl trope! (I actually checked the second book out form the library but it involved school bullying and I was finding that way too upsetting)

A Sky Full of Dragons by Tiffany McDaniel—I read this MG fantasy out loud to my kid over many bedtimes. I think it's a bit too whimsical, which is not a thing I thought I would ever complain about. I like whimsy! But so many unexpected things kept happening it was hard to follow the plot at first. Plus it’s just hard to hold narrative tension when absurd things just keep happening.

The Truth Season 3 cases 1-3— I’m so obsessed with this show! It’s a reality show where pretty people wear pretty clothing and play an elaborate game that’s like a cross between and escape room and a murder mystery dinner party. It’s got my fav Liu Yuning and several other people who I'm very fond of. I think the big thing that keeps me coming back is the group chemistry, which is very fun. I can’t really follow the mysteries – I can get the broad strokes, but to really follow you need to get the details. But it's fine because it's not really what I’m here for, and I enjoy the surprise reveals. This season's costumes are great so far!

Paprika—We did watch another Satoshi Kon film for our next movie night! This one is both very trippy and very creepy. I’m not sure I like it. It was good, just really intense. Anyways I’m glad I watched it. I continue to be impressed by Satoshi Kon’s cityscapes (content note: sexual assault, fatphobia)

I don't generally post two of these in a week, but I finished the drama I was watching and also read and watched several short things, so I have more than enough to say.

Artificial Condition by Martha Wells—I know I wasn’t that enthusiastic about rereading the first Murderbot novella but I still wanted to reread another one so I did. This was pretty fun. I had lower expectations which probably helped, but Murderbot admits more to caring about stuff in this one. But the best part is definitely Murderbot’s relationship with ART! I especially liked the bit where they watch media and talk about how humans portray beings like them.

Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells—Yet more Murderbot, as I was finding it rather morish. This one doesn’t have ART, and it does have a lot of new characters to keep track of.

Exit Strategy by Martha Wells— Even more Murderbot. This is the last one I have on hand and these four make a nice arc so I stopped after this one. It's hard to pull off this kind of multi part arc where each piece also is a complete story

( The Lost Boys, Race to Romance,and In a Class of Her Own )

I’m once again sharing my thoughts on my recent media consumption. But first some thoughts about my joyful reading project.

I spent several days making a deliberate effort to not read if I didn’t feel like reading or wasn’t excited by anything I had to read. I don’t think it really helped? I was kind of miserable but in a different way than when I read things because I don’t have anything better to do. (I need no screen low hand impact things to do right before bed) But I guess after I did that I did end up reading some things. So maybe it worked? But I would rather not do it again.

I went back to reading not because I was suddenly super excited but because I had a day where I was too sick to do much at all and ended up reading a long fic all day.Which was nice, maybe not joyful, but nice.

( All Systems Red, Commodity and Exchange in the Mongol Empire, The Crescent Moon Tearoom, and The Flash Band )