I got a comment on my single Dutch language fanfic on AO3, from a university research assistant working in the Netherlands. They don't speak Dutch. They want to feed my work to a "computational model" (that means AI, in case you were wondering).

The project is meant to "train computational models to explore what readers value in a story".

"For his research, Pianzola will use artificial intelligence to analyze millions of stories and their responses, from sites in five different languages -, English, Spanish, Italian, Korean and Indonesian - collected from countries on all continents. That analysis provides a wealth of information about the characters in a story, the genre, what a story is about, how a story is constructed, what themes are covered, as well as what readers from different countries and cultures find important in a story."

This project got more than a million euro from the EU. It's called GOLEM.

You can't make this shit up, at least not if you're an AI.

I'm so mad. Fuck off and leave us to write our stories in peace, can you?

Sometimes when I haven't had any comments on fic for a while (and well, I haven't written much in the past year, so the comments dry up accordingly) I go and look at the bookmarks people have left, and it often cheers me up. Like today.

Dear person who bookmarked a small snowy weilan story with

AAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHFUCKHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHFUCKHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

I see you, and I appreciate you XD

The long-awaited update for Stardew Valley on mobile (Switch, iOS, etc) just released tonight and I was happy to dive in, but I ran into some immediate bugs and I think I'll hold off for now until bugfixes are released.

My own observed bug was a second house that is visible on your Meadowlands farm from day 1; it's obviously a multiplayer house, even has the package inside that you can't open because it's for 'someone else', but there is no actual multiplayer option on mobile. Spooky.

The bug I've seen reported that made me decide to quit immediately was that your first two chickens (you start out with those on a Meadowlands farm) can disappear overnight. No thank you!

ETA I do love the dev's response:

PSA: there is currently an issue, if you start a new farm on the meadowlands farm and open the animal door on the coop day 1, your chickens will disappear. If you leave the door closed for one day, it should save them. We will fix this. Lore: There is a wild coyote on the farm…

— ConcernedApe (@ConcernedApe) November 4, 2024

I don't participate in Yuletide as such, these days, but I like to write a treat now and then, and since the signups just opened I had a look at all the fandoms in the tagset.

At first I thought Lost Tomb Reboot was excluded, which made sense because it has a lot of fic, but it turns out it's available for Yuletide requests after all, under its new official AO3 name: Reunion: The Sound of the Providence (TV 2020). 🧐

I haaate the new name and I don't understand the need for it, either. We're fans, we came up with a better name, let it stay! This is unrelated to Yuletide though, probably. Maybe it's been live for a while and I only just noticed?

Only the River Flows, Zhu Yilong's latest movie, had two showings in the Cinemasia film festival in Amsterdam and I picked the second showing, because the first one was late at night on Friday and the second a much more comfortable Sunday afternoon. The second showing also had a Q&A listed on the program, and I enthused to mumblemumble about this, saying "I'll have to think of a decent question to ask that isn't just 'What was it like working with Long-ge?'" She told me that in a similar situation during a film festival showing in Germany, the Q&A turned out to be a prerecorded Zoom call, so I assumed it would be the same here.

It was not. The director Wei Shujun showed up at the end with an interpreter, and fielded a bunch of questions with flair. There were a lot of stylish young Asian women in the audience, and half of the questions were in Chinese.

Why did he pick the Albert Camus quote at the beginning? He got a laugh because he'd forgotten the exact words, but the gist was that he wanted to signpost the absurdity of the story at the beginning. I think he used the word 'absurd' (or whatever it is in Chinese) three or four times in all.

Why did Ma Zhe insist on smoking when that would have been so bad for the baby? This made me laugh, and the director apologized for the bad influence but it didn't feel like a heavyhanded moment, and he added that it was both a stylistic and a historical touch.

Then I screwed all my courage to the sticking place and asked my question, which was along the lines of “In this role Zhu Yilong seemed to play a very interior character - was that due to your direction?” My head was red as fire during this but the audience lights were still low, good for me.

Wei Shujun said that Zhu Yilong had read the book and arrived on set with a specific idea of how to play the character, and they worked on it together. They rehearsed a lot, even for moments that might look spontaneous or like they would only need one take, because they kept adjusting how many words Zhu Yilong would say and how much movement he would show. Basically wanting to do a lot with very little. Also because film is expensive, they couldn’t shoot a lot of takes. He mentioned the moment Ma Zhe discovers the suitcase under the bed, and the moment he lies down on the bed, as examples.

My thoughts on the movie: I didn't fully get what the story was doing, and possibly that was the entire point, but I really enjoyed it anyway. Seeing it in a slightly dilapidated theatre (my chair seat cover was ripped into shreds and so was my seatmate's) added to the ambiance and the vibe. There were a lot of beautiful little human moments as well as stylish set pieces, and I thought Zhu Yilong absolutely pulled off the minimalist, interior acting that still made me feel intensely connected to his character. Also I'm glad I went into this movie unspoiled because I feel like that's part of the experience, watching it unfold, so I'm hesitant to give any details.

I want to see it again and I'll watch it on the Spanish streaming site I mentioned earlier. As a first experience of seeing Zhu Yilong in a theatre, this was a total joy.

Quick headsup (thanks to wenella's feed and lunarriviera pointing out that this service is accessible outside Spain) that Zhu Yilong's latest movie Only the River Flows is available streaming on this Spanish streaming service: https://www.filmin.es/pelicula/el-silencio-del-agua

With Chinese audio and English subs available, hooray. I was hoping to get to see this in cinemas, but the trek to Germany to see it there was too much for me right now, alas.

You pay 8 eur for a monthly subscription, which you can then immediately cancel (I don't speak any Spanish but it was easy enough: go to top right for your profile, hit Configuracion, and you'll get an option to cancel your subscription) and still have access to content for the next month.

for my own mental health, I haven't been following political news particulary closely, and when I voted yesterday I had the sincere hope that it was finally time for a leftist coalition to rise to power in the Netherlands. welllll...nope.

I am sad, mad, worried, and disgusted. The only thing to keep morale bolstered is that we have a multiple party system and there will not be a single party ruling the country, but a coalition, and other parties to vote against their plans. But this is a massive step back in almost every way imaginable, and one I'd hoped we would never take.

So I fell down a Hikaru no Go rabbithole. The plan was to watch the new Chinese live action, which I haven't done yet except for an episode or two, because I read the manga and watched the anime instead.

Did I learn to play Go? No. What's so fun about HnG is that it's still appealing even when you don't know the game.

I'm also fascinated that the mangaka, Takeshi Obata, went on to work on Death Note. I know he was the artist and not the writer, but I love the idea of Ryuk in Death Note (nightmarish demonic shinigami accompanying our protagonist, invisible to everyone else) as an alternate version of Sai in HnG (charming, brilliant, puckish, only occasionally ruthless ghost accompanying our protagonist, invisible to everyone else). Or the frenemy/rivalry of Touya and Shindo at a Go board turning into a similar relationship between a serial killer and a detective.

Mostly, having just finished the anime, I want to sit with Sai and make him ghost tea and listen to his stories about Heian court life. It's mentioned in canon that he played with Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shonagon, but what did they talk about? Did Sei Shonagon try to flirt her way out of defeat? Did Murasaki base any of her Tale of Genji characters on him?

once again I am mesmerized by Zhu Yilong even though he's in a commercial for awful looking fast food pizza (it has mashed potatoes on it??)

rude of him. why does he have to look like that. "Do you know the taste of longing?" is quite the slogan for, I have to repeat myself, a pizza that features mashed potatoes as a reasonable topping.

Here's the video and yes I did link it to start at the best moment, you're welcome. i am not responsible for the way his cheek hollows out.

I posted the final chapter of my Guardian AU today:

Close Your Eyes and See Me (88053 words) by marycrawford
Chapters: 17/17
Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan
Summary:

It seemed like a good idea to Zhao Yunlan at the time. Take a job as a life drawing model, observe the students, try to figure out if one of them murdered the previous art professor.

Get paid to sit on a chair, basically. Piece of cake, right?

It was a whole new thing to me, posting a story in chapters, and I enjoyed it (people yelled at me about the cliffhangers, which was delightful).

Except for my dilly-dallying over the final chapters, which I started rewriting back in October as I posted the first chapters, and then...kept going. Or rather, not so much going as opening the file and closing it again before running away in a complete collapse of confidence. Without a dorinda to gently poke me into actually Doing the Thing, it might never have gotten there. But now it's done, happy sigh, and I can start poking at other ideas that have been lying fallow (and the other AU that I wrote 20K of in the before times, do I even remember where I was going?)