For All The People Out There Who Are Dealing With Insane Amounts Of Pain On A Regular And Frequent Basis.

he sounds like hes making shit up on the spot……..absolute himbo

More Evidence for How My Favorites are Evil (Geniuses)(but not really evil)

from 杀破狼 Stars of Chaos, Ch 57:

Gu Yun laments not being more decisive about obliterating (murdering) all the evidence that he had previously mostly obliterated; or he should have just collected the evidence and used it to stage a hostile takeover. Sigh. Oh well.

Chang Geng reassures LiaoRan that he won’t attack the emperor (not because being nice is the right thing to do, but) because it’s not the right time.

I’m sure there are plenty of other modern western stories where the main characters are grey, but I just can’t think of any other story where the non-villain-coded main characters are all “darn, I should have murdered that other person” and “don’t worry — I won’t murder until the time is right.”

It’s Zhou Shen 周深 Fashion Appreciation Time!

I desperately want to talk about Zhou Shen’s recent stage outfits. (I pulled all these photos from his official Weibo, link below.)

To begin: Zhou Shen is an angel. Witness!

He frequently wears white or pale pastels.

We often see him in fancy jackets with slacks for formal events …

(And those shoes!)

Though he’ll wear t-shirts and other casual outfits that make us smile and feel all the more that he’s an absolute sweetheart.

Sometimes he'll wear dark colors, too.

Anyway, I don’t usually see more than his head, his arms below the elbow, and maybe some lower leg. Very conservative dress. He is a Proper Chinese Idol for All Ages. A veritable Prince 😍

Which, of course, means I get all the more excited when I see, say, a V-Neck?!?!?

And let’s not forget how good Zhou Shen looks in black:

Hot 🔥 😍

Next, let’s talk about the outfits he’s been wearing for Melody Journey 《音乐缘计划》.

It’s nothing overly dramatic, but he’s been singing some rock- and party- songs, darker songs, and so he’s been dressing appropriately in darker colors,…

Here, he still has a black tie Over His Bare Skin to cover the deep V-neck to preserve his modesty. This is OK. (This was his outfit for 《颠倒之间》.)

And then they put him in a black tank top overlayed with a silky wine-red blouse that Does Not Fully Cover his arms and shoulders...

This shouldn't be such a big deal, but paired with all the buckles and the long red ribbon tied around his forearm, I feel a little bit scandalized. In a good way. (This was his outfit for 《MINE》.)

For 《蜂》, I thought that they had put him back in super-modest full-body coverings, ... and then I saw the inside of this knee. And his upper thigh. Wait -- those jeans aren't fully stitched! Every time he takes a step, some part of his thighs are exposed! Wha?!!?

And then No Sleeves at all! We can see his arms! All of his arms! And parts of his sides! And is he wearing ... a collar?!?! I’m clutching at my pearls now!

Zhou Shen singing 《荒芜之地》.

Needless to say, I am fully enjoying Melody Journey 《音乐缘计划》, and constantly laughing at myself that, in an age where so many pop singers wear, effectively, just lingerie; I am getting excited from seeing my favorite singer expose his arms.

Credit: all these pictures are all from https://m.weibo.cn/u/7478855230?jumpfrom=weibocom

The Untamed Cast: modern vs. ancient look

"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?!?!!

Book / Author recommendation time! Please support Daniel May so that he can keep writing so that we can keep reading his work ❤️.

Daniel May (best pen name ever 😉) recently released Blood Sports, previously working-titled Equestrian Mafia Daddy. You can read it on Kindle Unlimited, buy it a bunch of places?, and/or join his Patreon for it and more.

Here’s one of my favorite lines from this book:

And another:

I first read his work in AO3, Yi City fanfic. He made all the Yi City pain go away… (except for all the super scary painful angsty stuff he also writes, but he tags his fics well, so I know what to reread and what to avoid).

If stories are food (well, ingestibles), Daniel May is my pusher, and I hope you’ll get hooked, too.

Is Chinese Concert Fashion more interesting than American Concert Fashion, or do I just not care enough about American Concert Fashion to pay attention?

Or are Hua ChenYu and Zhou Shen just more interesting than any other singers in the world?

Mars Concert 2021 - more pictures

sources 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6

The portraits of Yiling Laozu

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.

I just finished 魔道祖师 Mo Dao Zu Shi Read #2. I kinda keep expecting fanfare— trumpets or fireworks or at least a dramatic swell of music filling the house! But, alas, it’s just me. Everyone around me assumes it’s just a normal night in.

I read Reader Comments this time (in the kunnu.com version), and I must admit, I really enjoyed them. The last chapters (113, the Official Last Chapter, and 126, the Last Chapter Published) are full of comments commemorating First Read Complete! Second Read Complete! Fifth Read! Nth Read!

So many “Nth Read!” comments. I can’t think of any book I’ve read more than three times, much less so many times that one would lose count. It’s not like putting on your favorite movie while you do your chores - you have to Concentrate and Focus to read!

It’s nice to know that there are people out there who also can’t find their way out of the MDZS rabbit hole, who also love WangXian so much that they re-read and re-read and re-read, who know exactly what’s going to happen but still want to experience it again and again and again.

And there Will be fireworks this weekend, to commemorate “my Second Read-Through 😘”.

(What book have you read more than once? Do you know why you go back to it over and over?)