Rachel and Yoon visit, part 2!

[oyceter]

Vacation weekends: never long enough. I am especially sad yhlee and rachelmanija don't visit more often!

Friday was used bookstore wandering, which turned up both Seimaden (reincarnation, hell, and terrible art) and the mansion of Penetralia, as well as a showing of Capital Scandal (this not in the bookstore). The latter means there is now an audience of, count 'em, THREE for Japanese-occupied Korea noir. Now if only people would write it!

On Saturday, we went to farmers' market #1, which I snobbily do not think is as nice as my farmers' market, even though it did provide dou hua! After that was jjajangmyeon with rilina and then... KARAOKE!

Apparently both Rilina and I can sing until you pry the mikes away from our cold, dead hands, but we managed not to scare Rachel and Yoon off their first and second karaoke experiences, respectively. In fact, I count it as a great success that Yoon did not run off screaming after our voices met her perfect pitch! Also, Rachel went from "Weeellll... maybe... I'll sing a few things with people..." to rapping Eminem to "Ooo, it's too bad we didn't get to Les Mis. Next time!"

We also watched Red Cliff 2, which has Tony Leung and Takeshi Kaneshiro being immensely slashy at each other, Zhuge Liang borrowing arrows and the wind, big boats on fire, maps, more fire, little boats on fire, fish oil bombs, and:

YOON: Are there repeating crossbows in this?
ME: I have no idea? Had they already been invented then?
RILINA: Doesn't Zhuge Liang invent them?
TV: Wow, Zhuge Liang! These repeating crossbows are great!
YOON: \o/!!!!!!!!

Sunday was my farmers' market, silat and weaponry geekery with yeloson, and then siccing Gundam Wing on badgerbag!

In between, there were also mentions of flesh-eating fish, wasp-like human torsos, what may be the most histrionic funeral scene ever, Cherubus the Manager being scarier than Angelus the serial killer, Spike/Angel slash portrayed with toilet paper, the problems of when dead raccoons don't decompose fast enough, and the ultimate MY HED IS PASTEDE ON OFF YAY scene, which really needs its own entry to fully explain.

And now I am sad to have to go back to an empty house =(.

Comments

[colorblue]

I'm glad that you had a good weekend, and also that you are expanding Capital Scandal's fanbase! It's one of my favorite kdramas, and I don't understand why it isn't more popular.

[oyceter]

Eeeee! You have seen it too! I am only up to episode 2 because I was waiting for Yoon and Rachel to come to watch it, but I am so excited about watching the rest!

The fedoras! The pink suit! The bad swing dancing! The music! The Korean resistance movement!

[colorblue]

YES! I want so much to talk about this, but I watched some time ago and have no idea which scenes are from the first two episodes and which come later, so I will just, um, handwave wildly in your general direction to express the awesomeness of the show? XD

Also, Cha Song Joo is one of my favorite heroines ever, and I love the actress who plays her, was mesmerized every time she appeared on the screen (which was quite often!).

[oyceter]

Oooo! So you have finished? Cha Song Joo stays awesome? I am always worried because sometimes kdramas do the secondary heroine/rival really well, and sometimes they... really don't.

We were all very mesmerized by her and her gorgeous red suit in episode 1!

[colorblue]

She stays awesome! There are a few cliche-type things that I wasn't too excited over, but her overall coolness made them easy to ignore. The show gets a bit strange by the end, though; did not enjoy the last couple of eps nearly as much as the rest of it.

[oyceter]

Yaaaay!

Heh, I think I am getting really used to not-so-great endings to good dramas...

[rilina]

I have grand plans for any future karaoke outings, which involve looking up song numbers on the Joysound website in advance, printing out lyrics with timing cues, and generally being a huge geek. I keep thinking of songs we should have sung and going, "Doh!"

And of course, next weekend there will be the Triple extravaganza!

[oyceter]

BWAHAHA YES! We didn't even get to My Chemical Romance!

Also, I totally need to memorize more Korean songs b/c I don't sight read fast enough and the romanization confuses me.

I am so looking forward to Triple! It makes me less sad re: empty house.

[rilina]

Strangely enough, I find romaji much easier to follow than the standard Korean romanization, even though I am obviously much more familiar with Korean as a language.

Also, I think I could totally sing that Loveholic song with more practice, but I have decided that one Ikimono Gakari song is totally beyond me.

[oyceter]

*nods* I wonder if it has to do with Korean being a less phonetic language than Japanese? I mean, it is very phonetic, but the bits with the silent patchim and carrying the consonants over and k+n=n and etc. make it more confusing.

Yay! I think I will start learning Byul or something similarly cheesy...

[yhlee]

*sigh* Technically Korean is written morphophonemically rather than phonetically. This is the long fancy linguistics way of saying that Korean spelling reflects the underlying root (which is pronounced differently is different context) rather than reflecting the plain pronunciation. If you want me to get more detailed about this I can, but it will have to be at some later point when I am not tired and am not preparing for a cross-continental flight. The morphophonemic spellings are actually very logical if you know what the rules are, but there is an additional investment in learning those rules.

[oyceter]

Heh, someday I will actually learn proper linguistic terms....

Post-vacation question:

Er, just to note, I have zero idea about morphophonemic spelling, so this question may not be about it at all. But when the word for "chicken" (talk, sorry cannot type Korean here) and "read" (ilk) have the same lk patchim, how come you pronounce the "k" for chicken and the "l" for read (assuming that there's no ieung in the next syllable to carry the k over)? Is that related or something completely different?

[yhlee]

My personal theory on this is that Japanese has fewer phonemes (I need to double-check the vowel situation, since I do know vowel length is phonemic in both languages but I'm not sure about the compound vowels in Korean). Korean has a three-way stop distinction where Japanese has a two-way distinction (like English, voiced and unvoiced), plus because of all the damn vowels in Korean the modern romanization resorts to digraphs, so you have to memorize letter combinations that represent a single sound. Japanese's vowel system, on the other hand, is a thing of simplicity and beauty; even the diphthongs are all pretty straightforward. I kind of want to elope with it.

(Someday I should actually knuckle down and learn Japanese instead of just reading about its grammar and stuff.)

[oyceter]

Heh, I feel the difficulty in reading romanized Korean vs. romanized Japanese is less that Korean is harder per se, but more that it doesn't fit the Roman alphabet as easily as Japanese? Ditto with romanized Mandarin, which also confuses me while reading.

Ooooo, what is so lovely about the Japanese vowel system? I mean, I personally think it was very easy to learn and pronounce, even romanized, but have zero idea of how it functions systemically.

[yhlee]

Dude, I don't understand how anyone can pay any attention to actors, who are not nearly as interesting or spectacular as the big boats on fire, maps, little boats on fire, repeating crossbows, and siege engines I sadly could not identify because I didn't have my Chinese siege engines book on me. (Which is just as well, really, or I'd've been making us pause every ten minutes while I looked things up.)

I realize I am in a minority here. :-)

[oyceter]

I am so sad the picture quality wasn't that great! Also, hey, if I am in your area any time, I would totally sit with you and pause and look up siege weapons!

[yeloson]

That's ok. I would have totally been interested in hearing what you found from the book.

If we had more time, I would have pulled out my books on chinese weapons and the English longbow ("strong enough that the verterbral columns of archers were warped from the stress...").

[bravecows]

Rachel went from "Weeellll... maybe... I'll sing a few things with people..." to rapping Eminem to "Ooo, it's too bad we didn't get to Les Mis. Next time!"

This made me chortle with joy. Hooray for converting the karaoke-reluctant! \o/

[oyceter]

YES!! Maybe I will drag her to karaoke in Taiwan too when she visits!!!

[badgerbag]

p.s. there are at least FOUR baby raccoons right now on the porch! I'm so relieved!

[oyceter]

Bwahahaha! Phew!

[litalex]

I saw Red Cliff 2 in Hong Kong and some of the Zhuge Liang/Zhou Yu scenes were so slashy that even the audience were laughing and rooting for them. :)

[oyceter]

So TRUE! Especially that last scene in which they are seriously only standing a handspan apart for no reason whatsoever!