Fandom nonsense: wuxia, xianxia, danmei, baihe, Kinnporsche. Also languages, writing, history, orchids. Yi Citizen. In my 30s.
AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katzenfabrik/pseuds/villainousfriend


Today, I'm taking the prompt Paper and recommending a really pretty mobile game: Kami, named after the Japanese word for paper, 紙. In fact, I just realised the one I've been playing for years is actually Kami 2. Maybe I should check out the original!

Kami is a geometrical puzzle game, where you try to transform a multicoloured pattern into a single colour in the smallest possible number of moves. What makes it especially enjoyable is that the game boards are designed to look like folded paper, and every time you touch a section to change its colour, the new shade ripples out from your fingertip with an unfolding animation.

It's very simple to learn, and engaging enough to distract from anxiety or keep my attention on a podcast, which are my two main use cases for mobile games.



This is a belated post, because I left it too late to do a DecRec yesterday. For the prompt Letter writing, I'm going to tell you about some email newsletters I like.

  • Crossing the River by Feeling the Stones is written by David Fishman, who works in the energy sector in China and writes about his travels about the country, visiting small towns and rural tourist spots. I really enjoy his view on everyday China.
  • Concrete Avalanche is a newsletter about independent music from China. I only recently subscribed to it and it's great!
  • Chaoyang Trap is a groupchat-style newsletter about trends, memes and subcultures on the Chinese internet. They post fascinating, illustrated deep-dives—currently they're on hiatus, but there's a good archive to dig into.

I do subscribe to some non-China-related newsletters too, but three recs on a loose theme seemed like a nice set. 📨



One of my fandom pet peeves is portmanteau ship names, or sm(oo|u)shnames. I refused to use them entirely in fandoms previous to CQL/MDZS—which, to be fair, was only the Vampire Chronicles and Machineries of Empire. I was a latecomer to participatory/transformative fandom.

When I got interested in Chinese media fandom, I admitted to myself that smushnames feel a lot less awful here. With Chinese languages being syllable-based, it makes much more sense to combine a syllable from each name than it does to grab a handful of letters from names written in a Latin script. It might not always make sense: I guess you could translate 晓薛 xiaoxue [1] as 'dawn wormwood', but would you? You also run into interesting questions of which character to take, and which order to put them in. [2] Still, at least it's not Spirk or Spuffy.

Fanlore informs me that I am not alone in disliking smushnames. It adds, however, that they were partially popularised because of technical restrictions on Tumblr tags, so now I'm stuck, because the adaptation of fandom to its platforms and vice versa is one of my favourite things to learn about.

My only [3] love, sprung from my only [4] hate! Too early seen unknown, and known too late!

[1] Picked only because I mentioned it on a recent post.
[2] My attention span is too short for me to have a fixed opinion on who tops, sorry.
[3] No.
[4] No.