you should've seen the other guy

Reading
Well, I now have even more books out of the library AND more new books on my kindle (In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan!), but in fact, I haven't read any original fiction this week, just Les Mis contemporary AUs of the Combeferre/Enjolras/Grantaire variety, including a very good White Collar AU: Still the Same by tears_of_nienna.

Next up, probably Kept by Y. Euny Hong, since it's the library book that's due back soonest.

Kdramas
Finished Strong Woman Do Bong Soon, about a small young woman with super-strength, who's hired as a bodyguard for the CEO of a video games company. It started out intriguingly wacky and cartoony but turned into a giant mess: endless pointless subplots and a tonally whiplashy crime plot about a serial kidnapper. Similarly, the romance began promisingly but became obnoxiously cutesy by the end. Like, to the point where the leading man's secretary, Mr. Gong, on several occasions, had to politely interrupt their cooing at each other because it was making him super-uncomfortable. At which point, the couple would go, "Oh, are you still here?" and immediately resume giggling and fawning over each other, the moral apparently being that love makes you an asshole.

Also finished Capital Scandal, which was excellent. I chased it down solely for the time period (1930s, during the Japanese occupation), since I hadn't seen anything else set then, and I wasn't at all sure what to expect, but it was adorable and fun (and appropriately distressing in places), and did a great job of balancing romance and revolution. The female leads were outstanding, and the guys eventually caught up, more or less. :-)

Started Suspicious Partner on Sunday and am now nearly halfway through. Ahem. It's about ( spoilers for the first few episodes. )

Next week: starting a re-watch of Goblin with J.

Other TV
Last Week Tonight. That's about it.

Films
The Midwife (French): The last of our film festival films. It was good, and I liked the no-nonsense main character, but I wasn't quite in the mood to appreciate it, due to Life Things, and it didn't make much of an impression on me.

Writing
I had a plan to write pining fic for the Disguise challenge on fan_flashworks, but let's just say it hasn't been a fruitful week.

Crack. Possibly unrequited Neal/Elizabeth(/Peter), who even knows, I mean it's only 100w.

( Temptation )

Reading
Finished You Could Make a Life by Taylor Fitzpatrick. It was cute, but I don't think I'm ever going to care about hockey bros, and the present tense in such a long work gave me a constant feeling of impending doom which was disconcerting in such a non-doomy story. Still, an enjoyable read with better characters than most other original longform m/m I've read (admittedly a very small sample).

Next up, I have Kept: A Comedy of Sex and Manners by Y. Euny Hong (author of The Birth of Korean Cool) out of the library, and three newishly acquired ebooks on my Kindle: Let us Dream by Alyssa Cole, Spectred Isle by KJ Charles, and The Bedlam Stacks by Natasha Pulley. Not sure which will grab me first.

Kdramas
Oh, man. Okay. I'm now three episodes from the end of Strong Woman Do Bong Soon, and it feels more and more like someone threw an enormous tray of tapas (or, I guess, Korean side dishes) at a wall and turned the resulting chaos into a show. Like, WHAT IS HAPPENING?! Why is there a roving gang of school kids? Why do we need the kidnapper-traumatises-random-women bits? Or the barely acknowledged domestic violence? What’s with the Indian-not-actually-Indian monk? The problem is I don’t care! I think the bits of this drama I like would make a great 8- or 10-episode show.

Also, really not happy with the conclusion of episode 13. However, the leading woman is still pretty great.

Capital Scandal continues to be excellent, but they're doing that operatic thing where people loudly sing discuss their secrets, and I’m finding it very stressful because the bad guy is smart and evil and arrrgh, stop yelling at each other in public about being undercover revolutionaries!!!!!! And remember your walls are made of paper!!!! /o\ /o\ /o\ I'm worried someone's gonna die. (Don't tell me!)

Chief Kim is still good. There's a chance it'll head down the Do Bong Soon route and turn into a giant mess, but on the bright side, no serial kidnapper, so even if it does, it'll be fine. *crosses fingers*

Moonlight Drawn by Clouds is as adorable as the first time around. I love everyone in this bar.

Other TV
Still nothing much besides Last Week Tonight and a slew of stand-up comedians on Youtube. (Latest crop includes Celia Pacquola, Zoe Lyons and Sarah Pascoe.) This absence of a current show is unusual for the boy and me, but we've been seeing a lot of movies, so.

Films
Claire’s Camera (South Korean): I was a few minutes late for this (having gone to the wrong theatre), so I spent the whole movie wondering if I’d missed some crucial plot point. (My sister, who saw it at an earlier session, assures me I didn't.) Low-affect cast. Possibly improvised dialogue. Would have made a better short story.

Yourself & Yours (South Korean, same director): Like being stuck at a drab party with boring people. Camera locked off, Dogme-like aesthetic, very repetitive and uninteresting dialogue. No close-ups. I did actually like one of the characters (the man with the folding bike played by Kwan Hae Hyo), possibly because I recognised the actor from dramas, but he wasn't enough to get me interested.

Pop Aye (Thai): A perfectly fine first film about a disillusioned architect who encounters an elephant from his childhood and buys it to take it back to his home town. I didn't love it, and there was some ambivalence at the end that bothered me, but it's always nice to see a different culture/country, and it was fine. Road movie + elephant.

The Big Sick (US): The true story of how comedian Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon met and got together, with Kumail playing himself. Romcom with a twist. Really good. Highly rec.

Writing
I don't know if I'm continuing with the drabble-a-day regime, or whether I should try to knuckle down and work on one of my WIPs. Some of the drabbles have been based on old notes/ideas/scraps of dialogue, which seems a satisfying way to declare them complete, and some are new, which means my brain is occasionally coming up with new material, but I'm still not feeling sparky. At the same time, there are two WIPs I would dearly love to finish this year, and time is zooming by.