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Jan. 31st, 2020 10:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. Finished reading Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo
This reads a bit like a YA coming of age fantasy/horror romance. I gave it three stars for the world-building, setting, folk lore, and mythology., all of which I kind of wanted a lot more of than I actually got.
The novel concerns a teenage girl who is asked to become a Ghost Bride. A Ghost Bride is a tradition for the Chinese Territories and not Mainland China, where the family of a dead male relative may request an impoverished or down on her luck girl to become the ghost bride of a recently deceased son. It's mainly ceremonial and their needs are taken care of -- in actuality. In the book, it takes on another eerie connotation all together.
In 1800s Malaysia, Li Lian has to fight off the advances of the recently deceased Lim Tian Ching who is haunting her dreams. She goes to extreme lengths to do so - and ends up a partial ghost, able to leave her body and wander about the after-life. Much like other novels of this sort -- the writer imagines the after-life as a bit of pale copy of own world. (For once I'd like to see another approach. But alas, no.) Or basically they live like they did in the alive world, but with all the color drained from it. In some respects the book's world-building reminded me of the anime film Spirited Away, except I liked Spirited Away a bit better.
The romance, such as it is, is between Li Lian and Er Lang...a minor official of the other realm or minor deity, who also happens to be a loong or water dragon. He's interesting, but we don't get much of him unfortunately. Instead we get a lot of Li Lian whining and navel gazing and worrying and fretting, to the point that I wanted to smack her upside the head. Also what he or anyone else sees in her, I don't know, she's does dumb things. This novel has been adapted into a television serial for Netflix -- which takes a different tact according to the trailer -- in the series, Li Lian journeys to the spirit world to help find a murderer and assist in vengeance to save her father's life. This is not the case in the book - the father is never in danger and is a rather weak man who isn't featured. But I can see why they did that -- otherwise it would be a boring series. Not much happens in the book, Li Lian wanders about and has confrontations with various ghosts, gets herself in trouble, gets saved by Er Lang at various junctures...
It's mostly descriptive and told in a rambling first person narrative style. It bored me. I kept skimming and thinking, okay, okay, I get that she's feeling guilty, can we move on please? Or yes, I understand she's worried about seeing her mother but do we really need to spend fifty pages on this?
The problem with Kindle's is you can't skip ahead and see if the book gets better as it goes. You're sort of stuck going one page at a time. Makes me miss paperbacks and hardcover.
2. End of a difficult and highly frustrating week, beset with computer issues.Among them? My system kept crashing. My word documents failed to save. One document that I'd spent the equivalent of three hours working on - got lost, but I had smartly printed it off. So I scanned it. Exported a word doc from the PDF file. Then copied and pasted onto the doc that failed to save the changes. Then re-saved in Word.
Then my email kept crashing. Then it wouldn't load due to a file accessibility error.
This was going on for three days, off and on. I called IT twice. Rebooted the stupid thing five times. And it's hard to reboot -- it has to find a signal and it doesn't always find one.
Confused? Yeah, so am I. It's this new little Wyse box developed by Dell -- where you don't have a hard-drive. Instead you have a little box that links you to the cloud or in this case network server. So the box, when its working, talks to the server that houses all your data and updates/saves it nightly. If the data server is down -- you have nothing. If they decided to switch data servers and didn't manage to migrate all the information over -- you may have nothing. The new little box doesn't read CD's, and barely reads flashdrives. It crashes half the time.
By the end of Thursday, after expending hours trying to get the stupid computer to save my documents and work, I decided that if I ever found the dumb engineer who designed the thing, I'd shove it up their rear-end.
Cubical Mate: Don't shoot the messenger.
Me: What? Who should I shoot?
Cubical Mate: The guy who made the decision to install all those boxes which most likely weren't designed to service a big organization with over 70,000 employees.
Me: Well, Dell sold it to us. And some nitwit designed it. The messenger is the IT guy who installed it.
So, shove it up the rear-end of the marketing guy? I'm okay with that.
Also, kept fighting with people. One environmental consultant in particular who I'd like to consign to paper-cut hell. I felt by the end of the week that all I'd been doing is pushing a very heavy rock up a hill and not getting very far, also it had a pesky habit of rolling back towards me every five minutes.
And still no period. Dang it. The last one was three weeks before Christmas. This probably means menopause.
I'm glad it's Friday. Tomorrow I have an eye doctor appointment. My soap is back on air as it should be. And the flick PARASITE has finally arrived to On Demand.
This reads a bit like a YA coming of age fantasy/horror romance. I gave it three stars for the world-building, setting, folk lore, and mythology., all of which I kind of wanted a lot more of than I actually got.
The novel concerns a teenage girl who is asked to become a Ghost Bride. A Ghost Bride is a tradition for the Chinese Territories and not Mainland China, where the family of a dead male relative may request an impoverished or down on her luck girl to become the ghost bride of a recently deceased son. It's mainly ceremonial and their needs are taken care of -- in actuality. In the book, it takes on another eerie connotation all together.
In 1800s Malaysia, Li Lian has to fight off the advances of the recently deceased Lim Tian Ching who is haunting her dreams. She goes to extreme lengths to do so - and ends up a partial ghost, able to leave her body and wander about the after-life. Much like other novels of this sort -- the writer imagines the after-life as a bit of pale copy of own world. (For once I'd like to see another approach. But alas, no.) Or basically they live like they did in the alive world, but with all the color drained from it. In some respects the book's world-building reminded me of the anime film Spirited Away, except I liked Spirited Away a bit better.
The romance, such as it is, is between Li Lian and Er Lang...a minor official of the other realm or minor deity, who also happens to be a loong or water dragon. He's interesting, but we don't get much of him unfortunately. Instead we get a lot of Li Lian whining and navel gazing and worrying and fretting, to the point that I wanted to smack her upside the head. Also what he or anyone else sees in her, I don't know, she's does dumb things. This novel has been adapted into a television serial for Netflix -- which takes a different tact according to the trailer -- in the series, Li Lian journeys to the spirit world to help find a murderer and assist in vengeance to save her father's life. This is not the case in the book - the father is never in danger and is a rather weak man who isn't featured. But I can see why they did that -- otherwise it would be a boring series. Not much happens in the book, Li Lian wanders about and has confrontations with various ghosts, gets herself in trouble, gets saved by Er Lang at various junctures...
It's mostly descriptive and told in a rambling first person narrative style. It bored me. I kept skimming and thinking, okay, okay, I get that she's feeling guilty, can we move on please? Or yes, I understand she's worried about seeing her mother but do we really need to spend fifty pages on this?
The problem with Kindle's is you can't skip ahead and see if the book gets better as it goes. You're sort of stuck going one page at a time. Makes me miss paperbacks and hardcover.
2. End of a difficult and highly frustrating week, beset with computer issues.Among them? My system kept crashing. My word documents failed to save. One document that I'd spent the equivalent of three hours working on - got lost, but I had smartly printed it off. So I scanned it. Exported a word doc from the PDF file. Then copied and pasted onto the doc that failed to save the changes. Then re-saved in Word.
Then my email kept crashing. Then it wouldn't load due to a file accessibility error.
This was going on for three days, off and on. I called IT twice. Rebooted the stupid thing five times. And it's hard to reboot -- it has to find a signal and it doesn't always find one.
Confused? Yeah, so am I. It's this new little Wyse box developed by Dell -- where you don't have a hard-drive. Instead you have a little box that links you to the cloud or in this case network server. So the box, when its working, talks to the server that houses all your data and updates/saves it nightly. If the data server is down -- you have nothing. If they decided to switch data servers and didn't manage to migrate all the information over -- you may have nothing. The new little box doesn't read CD's, and barely reads flashdrives. It crashes half the time.
By the end of Thursday, after expending hours trying to get the stupid computer to save my documents and work, I decided that if I ever found the dumb engineer who designed the thing, I'd shove it up their rear-end.
Cubical Mate: Don't shoot the messenger.
Me: What? Who should I shoot?
Cubical Mate: The guy who made the decision to install all those boxes which most likely weren't designed to service a big organization with over 70,000 employees.
Me: Well, Dell sold it to us. And some nitwit designed it. The messenger is the IT guy who installed it.
So, shove it up the rear-end of the marketing guy? I'm okay with that.
Also, kept fighting with people. One environmental consultant in particular who I'd like to consign to paper-cut hell. I felt by the end of the week that all I'd been doing is pushing a very heavy rock up a hill and not getting very far, also it had a pesky habit of rolling back towards me every five minutes.
And still no period. Dang it. The last one was three weeks before Christmas. This probably means menopause.
I'm glad it's Friday. Tomorrow I have an eye doctor appointment. My soap is back on air as it should be. And the flick PARASITE has finally arrived to On Demand.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-02 12:26 am (UTC)It's true -- I can totally see him having no issue with the sexual violence themes. He used the same themes in all his other series -- or tried to. They were going to do something far worse in both Firefly and Angel, but got smacked down by the network brass.
Yeah, she got a lot of grief -- but she also made a couple of bad decisions regarding interviews. You do not tell your audience/fanbase that you are doing a "bad boyfriend trope" to teach them the errors of their ways. They won't thank you for it, if anything they will rip you to pieces. (Which is exactly what they did.) People do not like to be told what to think, do, or like. Whedon and Fury made the same mistakes at various points on social media and in interviews. Now, smart professional television writers are learning to let their managers post to the internet for them.
You can get in a lot of trouble -- and it is really easy to misinterpret intent.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-02 12:53 am (UTC)I've always defended Marti from those accusations. She's not my favorite writer from the show, and I have issues with S6, but it's clear that she got blamed for stuff Whedon approved. Back then, a lot of fans didn't want to blame Joss, but these days it seems they're much more willing to.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-02 05:06 am (UTC)And you're right -- the internet was this new shiny toy. "Oh, I can interact with my fans immediately after the show airs and see what they thought! Cool." (Not so much as it turns out. Because what people forget is for every fan that loved it, there's going to be those who hated it.) Also, studies have been done to show how toxic "kudos" and seeking likes can be on social media, and what dislikes do. It's not healthy to have one's ego praised too much.
I tended to stay away from these interactions with writers. They never go well. But I saw them. And they never did. Television writers and actors have fragile egos -- and the internet isn't kind to fragile egos.
Agree on Marti as well. People blamed her for stuff, but Whedon is a control freak and he was definitely checking everything. Everyone on Buffy knew Whedon planned to kill off Tara at some point. That was all Whedon.
And the BDSM and abusive sex was signed off on by Whedon. There were things in that season that Marti didn't think was a good idea and Whedon did. Also she was co-head-runner with David Fury. I kind of applauded Whedon when he went after the idiot on the Whedoneseque forum. (Honestly, bashing Marti on Whedonesque was stupid.) The individual got booted. Whedon however should never have posted or followed the site. Never follow your own fansite, particularly if it is named after you - no good can come of it.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-02 01:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-02 02:35 pm (UTC)All these people want to meet the presidential candidates. I don't. I have no interest in meeting any politician.