RIFFS

People think of stories like real life, and real life like a stories. We are overlapping them way too much. We need to forgive each other for our mistakes, and we need to accept that stories are NOT real life.

I used to think living your life like it was a story was good, now I think its a terrible way to live.
I used to think the moral of my life was that nothing mattered, as depressing as that sounds.
More accurately, when something bad happened and I couldn’t find a fault in myself or someone else (usually the former), I’d just think “oh, the moral of this story is that sometimes things happen for no reason.” - but that’s just rationalising and retrofitting a moral to reality itself.

Reality has no inherent meaning, which means we shouldn’t pretend its meaning is that there is no meaning either.

If I had the power to change the first-world zeitgeist, I’d do a few things:

1. make hats and long coats mainstream again
2. make love letters acceptable again
3. make dating start with a nonlegal contract stating boundaries and conditions
4. make relationships across any racial or ethnic boundary encouraged
5. make international media more popular outside its country of origin
6. make teaching as respected as being a doctor or lawyer
7. make prose writing more accepted as an extremely difficult form of art
8. make bouldering and climbing a core sport like running or swimming
9. make watches actually mainstream — basically everyone wears one
10. make working out as important as showering

Why do old tradies lowkey always have some poetic shit to say when it comes to complaining about bad practice?

The older you get the less acceptable it is to zone out in public. If you’re like 60 and stare into the distance in a restaurant you look like you’re judging the girl across the room for having short hair or something.

I might just be a little traumatised (regarding learning languages).
Cause my brother and parents and everyone around me is South Korean, they urged me to get back into learning Korean so i could speak with my grandparents and cousins.

But I didn’t vibe with them at the time. I didn’t have any passion or reason to learn it.

So when they forced me to learn it, I just hated it. Still, as a good student, I still kept up with it and even had some fun learning.
I’m slightly better and can read - albeit slowly - Hangeul, but the fact remains that learning a language to me is something I’m pretty hard on myself about.

Would you rather only be able to use a scalpel, or only be able to use a hammer?

It’s too early for me to say “It’s impossible to be okay with what you have.” because what I want and what I need are overlapping circles right now.

I’m in a three-way Venn diagram of
“Will I always be this way?”
and “It’s okay, it’ll mostly go away when your needs are actually fulfilled.”
and “You should be okay without your supposed ‘needs’ as well.”

The logical one telling me I’ll be fine, the annoying moral stoic who says I should stop thinking about this, and the quiet, sad motherfucker who can’t stop dooming.

It’s exhausting, really.

Suits has the perfect pilot episode. It’s basically a short movie, and it seriously packs a punch.
Anyway, that’s the last Riff for May. See you in June.

People always ask me how I get good academic results when I don’t study. I always reply that I don’t know.
But today, I went home and stared at classic electromagnetism texts, diagrams, and models just for the fucking love of the game.
I guess it’s not that I don’t study—I just find the most of the stuff I learn (key word: most) interesting enough to play with it.

I’m in no hurry to grow up into adulthood, but I am excited to go into work immediately.
Maybe it’s just because my life has been feeling oddly stagnant lately, or maybe because it’s because I just don’t like being broke and jobless.

The more I write, the more I realise the advice to “just write” becomes completely useless. You NEED direction to have a vector. Writing is not a scalar quantity.
At least, for me. Some people just have that intuitive grasp of prose to be able to write without structure (I am not one of those people). Or they just write volume to make up for lack of intentional practice, which is just too slow for me.

Storytelling is inherently a discipline meant to be shared amongst people, which is funny cause the modern version of storytelling has decoupled itself from that social aspect. When a modern writer writes, they must write selfishly, I think.
I mean, you must be selfish in most circumstances, but specifically for writing you should not write for the general audience, you should write for yourself.
Let’s just hope that you are a harsh critic so you don’t do things that make no sense.

Often I struggle with characters.
I always think they’re simple but they are probably the hardest thing in all of writing to do (other than pacing management). Getting them to talk and think believably is difficult as all hell. Why does x talk to y? They’re the only thing there is to talk to, I’d talk to them too! Is the audience or me satisfied with that answer?
Do they (the character) need to want something from the other character? If they dont, is it bad writing?

TL;DR don’t listen to writing advice like gospel, treat it like a test parameter.

One of my favourite short romcom manga, No Matter What You Say, Furi-san is Scary!, is written by this mangaka named Seiichi Kinoue.
They’re a relatively unknown mangaka who hasn’t written anything else but some shorts in manga anthologies. They are apparently serialising another work on Comic Walker (based on info from a Twitter post in July 2023), but their last Twitter post was in April 2024.

I feel like I’m genuinely looking at a Spotify artist with 400 monthly listeners while I’m stalking this random mangaka, but I seriously love their artstyle and tight pacing.
It’s not even a masterpiece, but it is undoubtedly one of my favourite works of all time.

I think I’m gonna email them.

My first ever fan mail to any author ever is below.

となりの布里さんがとにかくコワい。/ Fan Letter from Australia To Kinoue-sensei,

Years ago, I read your manga “No Matter What You Say, Furi-san is Scary!” (English localisation).

To this day, I reread your work sometimes because it is so perfectly written.

You have inspired me to think deeper as a writer and critic. Even if your manga may not have been extremely deep, it was flawlessly executed! I originally read your work through a pirating website, but it has made such a difference to me that I plan to buy physical copies of your manga.

I checked your social media and noticed you haven’t posted in a while, but I would feel guilty if I never expressed my gratitude to you, Kinoue-sensei.

I know times can be difficult, but please do not overwork yourself. I will always support you.

お返事は不要です。先生のご健康とご多幸をお祈り申し上げます。

Chan Jeong

Thinking more about my previous Riff, I answered a question that I didn’t even know I was asking myself.
Which would I like more:

1. an 8/10 premise with 8/10 execution
2. a 6/10 premise with 10/10 execution

The answer is #2. Every. Single. Time.
This is kind of worrying to me though, cause it means I’m not writing the stories I’d personally want to read - just what I want others to praise me for.
I am not doing #2 when I write, I’m doing #1 but worse.

I don’t want to write for critics, but I do want to write for someone who is critical. Ya’ll get me?

I am currently reading Love Me For Who I Am, a story involving a non-binary protagonist. And it’s good, even though the emotional balancing and pacing could use work.
To be honest, the more I dive into queer fiction, the more I realise that it’s a damn drought out there for great, honest, queer fiction (not to say LMFWIA sucks or anything).
I mean, identity is such a fertile thematic ground for good stories, but apparently it’s just hard to make people actually want to write about it. It’s not writers wanting to make queer narratives; its queer people wanting to make narratives, usually.
I know that might sound bigoted, but all I mean is that we don’t normally include queer people in nuanced ways in stories without the author also being queer as well.

Hardcore Henry isn’t the best action movie I’ve ever seen, but it is most definitely top 3.
Better than the Nobody series? I think so, yeah.
Better than Novocaine? Also yes.
Better than Kingsman? Maybe…
I love action movies.

When something is shit for a long time, any tiny good thing about it seems 10x better by comparison.
Basically, the ROBLOX platform.

On The Ramparts of Ice…
Reached chapter 107 out of 117, but unfortunately the scanlations are literally not released despite the original run of the manga ending in 2022.
Despite that, I can’t give it anything but the highest possible praise. Genuinely, it is a flawless story. There is no flaw in it. It is a perfectly executed masterpiece of high school thriller romance.
Review coming soon!

On The Ramparts of Ice…
WOW. There is just so much to say about it, really. Koucha Agasawa is a great writer, and even by Chapter 52 I’m more invested than I’ve been in the climaxes of most other manga.
I could go on for a long time about everything it does well, and the character arcs. But just one thing for now: significant flashbacks are coloured in black and white, while present-day is in colour; it’s just a fun detail.

Recently started The Ramparts of Ice, a rare webtoon-style manga made by the author of You And I Are Polar Opposites, Koucha Agasawa.
I loved the character work in YAIAPO, so I was pretty excited for Ramparts.
It did not disappoint. Hikawa Koyuki is such a good protagonist, and Minato Amamiya is an excellent antagonist AND love interest at the same time. I didn’t even see the “rom” or the “com” of this romcom until the literal end of Volume 1, which is just brain nourishment against all the “love at first sight” nonsense I’ve been consuming for years.
Minato is a deeply relatable character, and to an extent so is Koyuki. The supporting main characters like Miki and Yota are also extremely good, which is amazing because romcoms are like 50% their supporting characters and I’m tired of pretending they’re not.
Anyway, I’ll probably write more on each individual character as I read. Happy Thursday!

VALORANT sucks because the macro-game is waiting around and the micro-game is killing or dying in 0.1 seconds. Then you have to wait 5-90 seconds for the next round to start so you can repeat dying. There’s just no time to recalibrate your aim because it takes so long to respawn.
To people who say “Just play deathmatch” - I say: you’re right. Just play deathmatch.

I’m just lazy.

Marriage Toxin seems like it would be great, and honestly a huge draw for me is Mei - the crossdressing “guy” character.
However, since it’s a mainline action shonen, I’m extremely sceptical about the potential paths the story could take.

Of course, the obvious and easiest path is that the MC Gero and Mei will remain purely platonic the entire story. This would be fine - but also boring.
The second path is the worst path; if Mei suddenly reveals near the climax, “Aha! I’m actually a cisgender woman pretending to be a cis man who crossdresses so you wouldn’t fall in love with me / me with you!” that would be the biggest, most disappointing cop-out of all time.
The third and most exciting path is if Mei and Gero end up in an actual yaoi relationship. This would frankly be revolutionary, and I’d love it, but it’s also just… not looking likely.
We’ll see when I start reading it (even though I have a rule to not start reading ongoing manga).

Now at Chapter 258 out of 265 of I Am A Hero. To be honest, the story has cultivated such an “unlikeable” cast that we don’t really care if any of them die. We just dont want them to because… it feels wrong?
The act of survival itself is what we want? I don’t know, because even though I “dont want” the MC Hideo to die, if he did, I wouldn’t really be upset. Unless he died cruelly and painfully, which would just seem like an authorial troll.
This whole manga is pretty much an extended philosophical shitpost.

The fact that the manga Go For It, Nakamura-kun! wasn’t axed or cancelled or the author died, but the author was HARASSED into quitting the entire industry by western fans is frankly insane.
It was going so well too and I was actually getting kind of invested, but at a measly 19 chapters the story ended.

Until now, I’ve been thinking about blogging as some sort of completable activity.
Or more accurately, like it’s a goal I need to hit - like 100 stories reviewed, or a site coded with every sort of functionality I can fit in.
But I’ve realised that blogging isn’t like a game you can 100%; It’s a continuous activity.
I have to allow myself to feel successful without having to reread and review every single thing I’ve ever read. And that’s actually kinda hard.

Reached Chapter 185 of the manga I Am A Hero and noticed a very clear but subtle parallel between the protagonsit Hideo and deuteragonist Hiromi.
Hiromi spends a lot of time with her conversations with the other adult characters saying, “Don’t treat me like a dumb kid.” But Hideo frequently makes clear to the audience and occasionally to other characters that they “shouldn’t put everything on me (Hideo) just because I’m a man and an adult!” which is very funny, considering their positions.

The best watchmakers only use overly complicated, un-standardised codenames.
That’s why I wear my shiny LCW-M100TSE-1AJF every day, rather than my trusty dusty F-91W.