You know you're officially Grown Up(TM) when you're actually excited about taxes and insurance, specifically achieving savings. No, I don't have an offshore paper company funneling billions of dollars: I saved the equivalent of a few hundred bucks in liability by tracking down discrepancies between figures and making use of all my available deductions. It's a tiny fraction of the total sum owed but significant in the day-to-day, so it was a good moment when I finally tracked down a missing deduction. I got a lead on insurance premiums savings, too, and plan to follow up on that with my insurer and maybe change insurers altogether if necessary.

When not being a sensible adult (which is most of time, lbr) I've been going down fun rabbit holes like building a Dreamwidth posting app in Emacs, the Lisp interpreter that comes with a text editor. I've set it up to auto-complete tags and icons and stuff, and I'm pretty satisfied with how it works though I have more testing to do before it works fully as envisioned. This post itself made use of these auto-complete functions, in fact.

I've also gone through two playthroughs of Volcano Princess (火山的女兒), the Chinese roleplaying/simulation game about raising a beloved daughter and also having her solve human-monster relations if that's how you want to play it. I saw the "true ending" on my second playthrough and have many thoughts about the gameplay, which I'll probably talk about in another post. It's also a queer and polyamory-friendly game so I had fun romancing characters of different genders and multiple partners.

July has been slow work-wise after a very busy June, but I've been getting inquiries from several places about future availability so keeping fingers crossed. It's been a slow year overall for work, what with the political crisis we've been through and the recovering economy. I'm also trying to take advantage of the free time while I have it, though. That's just life, I guess.

KPop Demon Hunters was an experience for sure. It felt slightly weird to watch because it uses distinctly Korean materials but from an outside perspective. The girls' exaggerated comic acting was very Western animation-y, and the traditional Korean medical clinic scene bore no resemblance to real life, obviously.

Even with Korean dubbing it had the distinct feel of a foreign film, because it was! Korean-speaking actors and dubbing artists speak very differently, and the voice acting was obviously dubbing-style because the original was in English.

I also felt like the story had a lot of potential that it didn't quite reach, and foreshadowed things that didn't actually happen. But that's pretty deep in spoiler territory so maybe I'll go there in a different, spoiler-cut post.

Where the movie truly shone was its stylish, energetic representation of K-pop, including in no small part its earworm soundtrack. Fans have been pointing out all kinds of K-pop tropes like the tiny powerhouse rappers Zoey and Baby, the similarity of the two bands to legends like Blackpink and BTS, and the way the male band debuted with a catchy bop ("Soda Pop") before coming back with a darkly cynical, technique-heavy number ("Your Idol").

It wasn't just the stars who got the spotlight; so did the fandom and community, from the fans who filled stadiums for their faves to online challenges and breathless anticipation for new releases. The movie also went into some, though by no means all, of the darkness behind this adoration, and made a good case for the potential destructiveness of such massive franchises and fandoms.

The love of the genre and the fandom, backed up by extraordinary music and production, was what gave the movie its heart and turned what could have been a gimmicky throwaway into a snapshot of an era. The depiction in KPop Demon Hunters of the love and fragility, the beauty and hollowness at the heart of K-pop was arguably more powerful than its scripted story. That's not a knock on the story so much as a statement on the nature of the narrative: K-pop is an age to be experienced in all its glory and corruption, not a tale to be told from a comfortable distance. It is one's own story to live and not someone else's to watch, and that is arguably the true power of KPop Demon Hunters.