and the world is still sleeping

I got Anaïs Mitchell's Working on a Song: The Lyrics of Hadestown a few years ago after I first listened to the Hadestown OBC ago, watched a couple of bootlegs, and slowly realized hey, I'm into this. It isn't show I love end to end, like there's whole sections that don't do anything for me and I can only appreciate on a technical level, but the moments that hit hard, they hit very hard.

So I got Anaïs Mitchell's book because it was the only thing to do with the show that I could get from my side of the globe (still hoping for a touring production to drop by Singapore one day!), though I didn't read it properly at the time. I've read it now! It's all the lyrics as of the time of the Broadway opening, but Mitchell also goes through the creative process and shares lyric variations, some of which I've heard through the London production and Broadway previews. Some of the decisions that I found a little strange or disappointing (like the placement of "Why We Build the Wall" and the loss of Persephone's verse in "Chant II") are explained, as are the adjustments of the characters as time went along (especially how audiences tended to find Hades and Persephone more interesting than Orpheus and Eurydice).

Of course listened to the music and watched clips as I read the book, and got those feelings all over again. May have cried a bit, and so on.

Chris Horton's Ghost Nation: The Story of Taiwan and Its Struggle for Survival was a spontaneous recent get, and also published this year, so I figured I'd better read it quick before uh........ the situation changes.

I'm not very familiar with the issues surrounding Taiwan, though living somewhere that's been affected by China's recent oceanic expansionist policies, it's not difficult to pick up at least some of it casually. I have also been to China to attend international exhibitions multiple times, so I'm well-aware of the sensitivity of maps and flags which are always, ALWAYS pre-checked on everything you bring into the exhibition area (backgrounds, flyers, posters, etc.) and they WILL boot you out and/or destroy your materials if they find anything not fitting the accepted standard.

Anyway that, plus my previous reads about Mao, WWII Shanghai, and that book about the triangulation of Japan-Korea-China relations, means that I knew of the broader history of Japan's occupation and the ROC's fleeing to Taiwan when the CCP took power, but not much that's more modern than that. The book's a good read for learnings, through Taiwan's history through colonization and resistance to cultural oppression through the changing periods, with pain and trauma forming their modern self-confidence into one of the freest democracies in the world. I feel like I have a better grasp of some of the nuances of Taiwanese identity, too? Like, I knew about Taiwan's indigenous tribes, but not their roles in the evolution of the island through its modern societal development and with immigrants coming across the strait.

Horton, who has lived in Taiwan for a while, is I think very clear about the potential benefits but also the potential cost that would need to be paid for annexing Taiwan (islands are just harder to invade, etc.), plus the arguments being made for the supposed historical justification of it, which isn't really an argument because it's not about justifications, it's about location, economy and resources. Look at those resources! Fascinating stuff about Taiwan's massive semiconductor industry, as the greatest supplier in the world, and I wonder how that's been going with the AI boom as well.

Ahhhh remember when FuckYeah[Thing] was everywhere in the fannish parlance?

Anyway some years back I was an avid watcher of NerdCubed's youtube channel, because as someone with horrible hand-eye coordination I found his irreverent skill and enjoyment at taking video games to their absurd limit really fun, and such LPs as I still remember for "Bully", "Shadow of the Colossus", "Psychonauts", "Outer Wilds" and one of the Jurassic Park games where you can actually build a theme park (and the raptors kept escaping, which enraged him to no end). These days I still have him subscribed but don't watch him as often, as there's way more content I follow now.

Regardless, back when he announced that he'd written a book, I ordered it as a way to say thank you for all those hours of entertainment, which is why I have a copy of Daniel Hardcastle's Fuck Yeah Videogames. It is, in my opinion, near incomprehensible if you don't already know Daniel and his brand of humour, as it is an irreverent list of various video games he loves and some he does not, the history ("history", in places) of various video consoles, plus a healthy dollop of semi memoir in the little stories he tells about himself, his family and friends, in explaining the way various video games make him feel. It's less a book and more like longform stand up in text form, I think. Maybe the audio version would be better, as someone who's enjoyed his rambling, but in text form I found it a bit tiresome.

At the back he lists his 100 favourite games of all time and I was shocked to see Outer Wilds was not there (he introduced me to the game!). Then I checked, and oh the game came out in 2019 and he finished writing the book in 2018, which explains it.