I know it's spring
Sep. 7th, 2025 11:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Yesterday I started watching Kpopped, the new song competition show that blends K-pop and Western artists. I watched the first two episodes last night, and I'm really enjoying it. I think the format is really great — everyone has fun because the stakes are so low. Each episode follows the same format:
There are no penalties for losing, no prizes for winning. Just performance and comradery between musicians.
The two episodes I've watched so far are:
A recurring theme is the Western artists having trouble learning the K-pop choreography. (Except for Patti LaBelle — out of respect for her age, they had her stay still and everyone danced around her.)
I'm currently reading Dragons of the Autumn Twilight[^1] by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman and it's given me a question about riding pegasi. I had always pictured pegasus riders as sitting behind the wings, probably leaning forward and holding on the bases of the wings. But in chapter 12, when the characters have to ride pegasi, Weis and Hickman explicitly describe them as "sitting in front of the powerful wings." This seems to make sense, because it would put the riders in front of the flapping of the wings (and the powerful gusts of wind that the wings would create), but at the same time it seems problematic from a point of view of equine anatomy, because it doesn't seem like there would be room for a rider to be in front of the wings. And as I write this post, I find myself wondering if there's really something here, or if I've just been struck by an oddly chosen word that the authors wrote and then never looked back at.[^2]
When you think about humanoids riding on pegasi, where do you imagine them relative to the wings?
[^1] I missed reading the Dragonlance books back when they were new, but I was recently able to grab a huge mob of them as ebooks from Humble Bundle and I'm enjoying them. It's brutally obvious (at least in the first book, which this is) that they're the result of someone recording their D&D campaign as a novel, but they're still fun to read. [^2] It doesn't help matters that the pegasi use magical/psychic powers to put the characters to sleep as soon as they take off, in order to keep them from freaking out during the course of the ride.[^3] [^3] Which then opens up the question of how unconscious humanoids stay on the pegasi's backs. Do the pegasi have magic for that as well?
When I read about the Ndlovu Youth Choir translating "Bohemian Rhapsody" into Zulu, of course I had to go check it out right away. I was absolutely blown away. Listening to the song is amazing, but then watching the video is just a whole other level. It's like a song that doesn't even belong in our universe somehow crossed over from its home to show us an alternate world we could have.
Direct link to Youtube (in case the embedding goes bad) is here
"Much of the Fifties existed in order to edit out of history the freedoms of wartime: a renewed McCarthyite puritanism drove homosexuality further underground with the inevitable psychic consequences. By the mid-to-late Sixties, there were all sorts of exposé! books, but not then: just a few coded, discreet novels (like James Barr's Quatrefoil), which would usually end in suicide or death."
Jon Savage (quoted in Loaded, by Dylan Jones)
I received an email tonight saying I had a comment on one of my fics, which is a rare enough event that I got extremely excited. Then I read the comment. The first sentence sent my heart soaring:
The way you write is cinematic.
Then I read the remainder of the comment:
I only do paid comic work, and I think we could create something amazing. Let’s chat on Insta: [REDACTED]
So I reported them to AO3 (this sort of commercial solicitation violates the site's TOS) and I'm going back to writing.
(Also, just out of curiosity, I went to their Instagram. Even if I was interested in hiring someone to make a comic based on my fic, it wouldn't be them — their work was sub-mediocre at best!) ^^
I imagine that a web search could turn up the answer for this (or at least it could have, before AI ruined web search), but I feel like one on you could probably explain it to me better, and you might even enjoy imparting your knowledge to someone, so I'm asking the question here.
This morning I was reading the interview with Chow Yun-fat in the Giant Robot 30-year celebration book, and I was hoping one of you could explain what he's saying here about the difference in space and cameras between Hollywood and Hong Kong films:
In the Hollywood studios, you have more room, more space, I mean for the dimension for the camera, for the screen. But in Hong Kong, our buildings, our rooms are narrow, so we must use a lot of action or movement because the depth is not enough to expand the whole images in the picture. So we must use a lot of movement. Also, we must use a lot of wide-angle lenses to enlarge the environment, the space. So every time you see actors in the movie we look wider, fatter because the lens can make the people like that [puffs up his cheeks for emphasis]. Usually here [in Hollywood] we are using 50mm lenses for the close-up or 85mm lens. But in Hong Kong we use 35mm or 28mm, because the depth is not enough.
I'm not understanding the relationship between size of the lens and depth of the picture (and TBH I'm not entirely clear on what he means by depth of the picture). I thought the different sizes of lenses were for different distances between the camera and the subject, but apparently there's more to it than that? (Or else I'm entirely wrong about that?)