superborb

To Be Taught, If Fortunate, by Becky Chambers: Astronauts exploring four habitable worlds, as the time dilation and time required to travel to distant planets stretches their connection to Earth. Each planet showed a true aspect of scientific research, in a way rarely done well in scifi. Overall, I thought the book was pleasant, but ultimately forgettable.

Far from the Light of Heaven, by Tade Thompson: Locked room murder in space: a long haul transport ends when the captain wakes to find some of the passengers have died. It was... fine? I did not enjoy the prose style, though it did fit with the short, punchy pacing, and often felt that people were just saying things to convey info. It isn't really a mystery novel as you don't have enough info to solve it before the characters, so it's more an action / survival in space story.

Mamamoo MY CON concert: The first big standalone concert I've ever attended! We had decent seats, right in the center. However, we were pretty far away so the camera work being not great was a definite detractor from the experience. Maybe I should have brought opera glasses ahaha, though I think that would be unusual at a pop concert. I enjoyed it! I do like most of their music, and the outfits were eyecatching (sparkles really are hard to catch on camera, aren't they). If I were to go back in time though, I miscalculated just how annoying it would be to get to the venue and it miiiiiight not have quite been worth the sitting in traffic for 3+ hours to get there (and then another hour back).

Not Me (2021): Naive and privileged White must disguise himself as his twin brother, who he's been separated from for 15 years, and go undercover to discover who beat his brother into a coma. Complication: his brother has started a college protest group that is about to commit arson and now he's in the middle of it. Not a subtle show with respect to gay rights, rule of law, etc, but I can see how that would be really refreshing in many ways? The arguments about how to best take action to protest were well done, and the tensions and relationships between the characters mostly reasonable and not too over the top. The main relationship is very cute and stays at the right level of screentime too -- and I think if the fandom does not yet have a "Hot n Cold" vid, this is a missed opportunity. (It's not actually hot and cold, but from the perspective of the love interest, the twin situation definitely feels like it...) You must suspend a lot of disbelief on the twin swap, the realities of tattoo and piercing care FOR the twin swap, and best choices in the face of raging fires. Overall, it's pretty short (14 eps of 45 min) and a solid watch.

New Life Begins (2022): Set in a pseudo-historical China where there are nine province-slash-kingdoms with one ruling over the other, each with its own distinctive culture; the plot occurs between annual selections where each province sends representative women to the ruling province to be selected as wives or concubines for the ruling family's sons. This is very superficial eye-candy overall, with some nice emphasis on food. I also appreciate that they do have a serious postpartum depression storyline, even if it's a bit hamfisted. I do love that we get lots of girls on screen and they have agency. Aaaaand I have a list of complaints that I will hide here:

Problems often arise just for plot, or situations occur that contradict previously established facts about the society.
There's also (tbf, standard at this point in Chinese censorship) weird tension where they can't have the emperor be anything but insightful and good, but also they need a comically evil crown prince to defeat. As a result, the emperor is, once again, the plot device.
It's HUGELY biased towards agriculture and against a nomad lifestyle; our protagonist gets the nomad descendants to welcome farming after resisting forever with just a few words. (Also very into free trade?)
In general, they seem to want to subvert tropes, but simply don't put the thought in or the effort needed to actually succeed. For example, the momo having a Tragic Past that caused her to be strict about the women learning proper etiquette doesn't satisfy: the problem with the rules for women isn't that the world is changing, it's that they never protected the women anyway. And one province is supposed to be the 'matriarchal' society, which seems to just mean a flipped standard patriarchal society with military women. Don't get me wrong, I love watching the women from that province get to be badass, but it's not exactly thoughtful about how a matriarchal society would have evolved OR how it would have influenced neighboring provinces when they are de facto acting as the same country.
I get that this is supposed to be a superficial type show, but really, much of the relationships and characterization does rely too heavily on an outline instead of depth.

PlanD: I realized when I was reorganizing my DW tags that I had recced a youtube channel before, so it seemed that I should rec the one I've been watching consistently for the last year! She's a vlogger who has a small sewing business and mostly vlogs food and cute shops. It's very soothing to watch! I also learned some nice little tips for recipes.