Why Why Love, ep. 21-22 (partial)

Note: thanks to wonky Taiwan DVD episode re-cutting, all my episode numbers are off.

I give up! If I watch one more minute of this, I will die of a brain aneurysm.

( Spoilers )

Ju Ming museum + even more food

Random things about Taiwan:

1. I am grateful beyond expression that most bathrooms in Taiwan now come with toilet paper. Some even come with toilet seat covers! Still more amazing is the fact that people now seem to be sitting on the toilet seats as opposed to squatting on them and leaving the dirty marks of their shoes on the toilet seats.


2. Continuing the theme of toilets, I went to a restaurant that has toilets that are smarter than me. They are the fancy Japanese toilets that are multifunctional, and though I have seen those before, these were different! As in, when you walked into the stall, the toilet lid would automatically open up for you.


3. And one more: Din Tai Fung, my favorite Shanghai dumpling place and tourist trap extraordinaire (it's popular because it's GOOD!), is apparently appealing to its Japanese tourists by having the fancy Japanese toilet seats (albeit without automatic toilet lid opening) and the little thing that makes flushing noises when you press it so people won't hear you.


4. Every time I think it cannot possibly get hotter or muggier, it does.

In other news, after discovering Nan Kongyuu, my manhua-reading hasn't been going very well. I read a one shot by Wang Yi Something, which seemed to be a nice, quiet shoujo piece on a grumpy, solitary painter and a politician, and I was enjoying the grumpiness of the heroine, which seemed genuine. Then I stopped reading when the evil fiancee started acting evil (boo random misogyny!) and flipped to the end to see if anything had happened.

Turns out, the painter boards a plane to her painting school, and the two stare longingly into space, presumably at each other. Then, the plane explodes! She dies thinking how wonderful it was to have known him, and he muses on her as the love of his life.

The end.

On a less randomly depressing and WTF-ish note, I have a huge batch of picture spam this time! Amazingly, not all of them are of food, as we went to visit a museum on Sunday.

( Giant pictures )

Xiao Jun - Shadow of Visions, vol. 01-02 (orig. Chi.)

(Title in Chinese: 幽夢影)

Que Ying Shuang's life is going very nicely until she runs across a half-dead Shan Yu Mu in the streets. She takes him in and finds out that he wanders from village to village because he has the ability to draw the future (like Kaitlyn in Dark Visions!) and most people tend to think he causes bad things to happen. Sure enough, bad things start to happen to Ying Shuang, and soon, she leaves to wander about with Yu Mu.

While the plot is somewhat interesting in a "bad things happen to those who think they can change fate" kind of way, the art is pretty terrible. It's very much like Yi Huan's: round and strangely stiff, and I can't help but think that the proportions are all off in some way. I did like that it was set in Song Dynasty China, but outside of that, everything seems fairly standard, and even if the plot moves away from one-offs and focus on the main villain to developing the relationship between Yu Mu and Ying Shuang, I'm still not sure I would be into it. There's just not much depth or sophistication in the story or the characterization, although Xiao Jun does have narrative drive down.