#but man... hoyo knows how to make pretty men............

[lyss-sketchbox]

Ayo question, but do you play hsr? If so I must know your favourite character and fav path

I don't, i only know characters and general plot points lmao

BUT. But if you're asking my faves, then here's the lil shits that almost made me download star rail

Thats what happened in penacony right?

[livelaughlovesubs]

Lost-nut enlightenment sjdbbdhdhd I'm fuckin wheezing but you're so real for that

If hoyo didn't want me to Dom him then too bad, any male character can be Dommed if you're not a coward.

Deadass when I saw his leaks and saw the headphones I was like "oh, he's probably partially deaf and those are in-game's equivalent of hearing aids, that's pretty neat. He seems like he's either going to be overly friendly or I'm going to want to punch him type of personality"

And damn hoyo tried to portray him as this cool lone wolf scholarly guy who wants to understand everything about Teyvat that's aloof and blunt and a majority of the fandom looked at him (me included), especially after he mentioned that his headphones have noise cancelation, plus the stories about him going the Akademiya as a little kid and went "autism/neuro divergent havin ass 🫵😶" and they're so right for that. Literally nothing about him is neuro typical and I think it's neat.

He's such a dork, bro thinks he can hurt my feelings by being blunt he's not ready for me to take one good and psychoanalyze him. This is how we flirt, others are horrified but this man is literally the horny grip meme because I just know he'd be turned on by you doing something that shows off how smart you are.

I just remembered that his headphones can record lectures.

Nini, imagine recording JoI for him on a separate headphone set, general dirty talk, etc for when you gotta be away because you just know he'd be too stubborn to openly admit that he misses the sound of your voice.

He's so pathetic bless we really eating good

I'm trying not to spam your inbox with the rambling of madman but I'm just so happy to have fellow Doms to gush about subby men with since it's hard to find each other

-🐇

Nah it’s alright, I don’t mind. Also I noticed that was a typo- I wanted to write post-but enlightenment Ahahhahah

But the thing with the headphones? 10/10 would write. I’ll do it once my kinktober stuff are done. Imagine recording his own noises during smexy time without him knowing, and making some alternations to his headphones so that we can change whatever he’s listening to something else.

Then just jumpscare him with his own lewd moans and whimpers. At first he’d be so confused, like who’s this weird ass dude with the high pitched voice of a girl? Is it even a guy? Until he hears your voice, and the words you uttered were so familiar.

As soon as he notices that these sounds were in fact, he himself, god the embarrassment and lust swelling inside him would be 📈📈

I think he’d blush and smirk to himself, scaring basically any poor souls who had the unfortunate fate of witnessing such a scene.

[transmascaraa]

random but yes my final thoughts on all the new natlan chars with a conclusion in the end lmao

mualani .

i love her she's so cute help i knew i would love her ever since her first appearance i literally can't wait for her drip marketing tmrw

the tattoo typa things on her skin help?!????!??!? beautiful?!!?!!?!??

hydro women>>

~

kachina .

SHE'S ADORABLE HELP

i love all the genshin children sm they're so precious i swear even dori /p

i love her hair a lot tho

~

kinich .

LOOK.

MY FAVORITE CHARACTER(scara) HAS COMPETITION NOW.

I WILL REFRAIN FROM SAYING TOO MUCH BUT BASICALLY I LOVE HIM. (and ajaw lmfao that little thing about to become like boothill)

~

citlali .

ANYWAYS LOOK AT HERRRR

she's so cute i love her

something about her reminds me about hsr fu xuan but either way she's probably the cutest char from the trailer imo^^

~

xilonen .

help me i can't do this anymore the women are literally top tier(offtopic but she's almost identical to one of my ocs which i won't rant about rn lmao)

THE MAKEUP AND HAIR???? MY FAVORITE WOMAN FROM NATLAN?????????

SHE'S THE DEFINITION OF SMTHN LIKE "in war rn but at least i gotta look hot" AND IT'S TRUE

~

iansan .

somebody help why did we only get like 0,6sec of her😭

still i'm very excited for her

for the design at least since i truly have no idea of her personality lol

~

chasca .

i love this woman already

also the mole she has on her shoulder bro i have the one on the same place

cowboy vibes from her btw??

~

capitano . and ororon(olorun?) .

about capitano; first, i'm very excited, and second, i wish he said more than just "hmph."

about ororon(olorun?); heard that he turned out very bad based on who he references and even his name is very messed up i'm pretty sure?? basically the same situation that happened with candace/kandake EITHER WAY i'm excited to see him more and like will he be the first tall male anemo help lol i like his design

can't wait for them although i have other preferences for now

~ ~

mavuika .

THANK GOODNESS SHE'S NOT LIKE THE LEAKS

i absolutely love her design and everything sm about her literally please don't die and yeah she's now my third favorite archon along with furina and nahida

also despite the outfit not being revealing and all and literally a 10/10, i have a feeling she's gonna get very sexualized because of that zipper😭

~

in conclusion, i absolutely love the characters.

the only problem is that there's not really many dark skinned characters aside from iansan and kinda tanned mualani and xilonen ig

here's a link to a petition to try and stop hoyo from making the skin colors as light as they always do😭 i personally didn't look into it too much at first because of which countries the nations were based off of, but now this is supposed to be africa/south america and there's not really much skin representation

yeah, sure there's representation, but not of skin color other than iansan(and mualani and xilonen too)

finally, i think that all the designs are truly 10/10 it's just the skin colors bothering me aka hoyo's typa racism due to them being a chinese company. again, don't get me wrong, shitty company and i hate racism(as a white person) but the characters are great in all honesty and all the other types of representation are great^^

~

(good thing i personally don't play the game because of my phone storage and i'm just in the fandom from it's release bro and i love the lore so that's how i know the characters and story in the first place)

~

update:

my honest thoughts on the drip marketing(no pictures)

KACHINA IS ABSOLUTELY ADORABLE SHE'S SO CUTE AND PRECIOUS TO ME THAT'S IT(what animal is she supposed to be btw??)

MUALANI LOOKS SO PRETTY!!!!!!! I LOVE HER SM PLUS HER SHARK IS ALMOST AS CUTE AS HER

KINICH JUST LOOKS SO GOOD. I LOVE THAT MAN. I AM NOT USED TO LIKING TALL MEN AT ALL BUT HEAR ME OUT...........

I LOVE ALL OF THEM FR I'M SO EXCITED FOR MORE CHARACTERS

~

(is it just me but do they look like they all have the same skincolor on their drip marketings???? like are kinich and kachina a bit darker OR is mualani lighter than she looks???)

[mprimn]

2.1 update, and a dream come true.

Happy 1st Anniversary to Honkai Star Rail!

I'm so glad the update came a few days before my flight or else I'd be distracted from everything. Though, I already am distracted because I should be packing my stuff right now. I'll leave that to me in the future.

As someone who used to play Guns Girl Z it's nice to see how far miHoYo had come, especially HOYO-MiX. While I couldn't say much about the story (I unfortunately am a dialogue skipper), I've always loved their music. Sometimes I would boot GGZ up only to go to the OST section and listen to my favorite tracks for hours. Even after I dropped Genshin Impact from burnout, I still find myself checking out OST of newer updates from time to time. Heck, whenever my brain gets too loud at night, I would calm myself down with Liyue or Dragonspine playlist. Yet somehow, it's different when it comes to HSR.

But before that let me slide one of my favorite tracks from GGZ here ;

There is something about older music that sounds simpler yet enjoyable when compared to what we usually hear now. A banger from the past. Not saying one is better than another, of course. HOYO-MiX always delivers.

HSR OSTs are really good. I honestly don't know why it didn't hit me as hard as the other two games. There is only one track so far that strike my interest enough to make me hunt it down on YouTube so I can loop it while laying on my bed as I stare at the ceiling (the one named "Stade du Miroir" if you're curious). I've also said above that I'm a story skipper. Then what exactly keeps me on hook? To be fair, I've always felt neutral about HSR.

Until he arrived.

Look at this man.

A beauty bestowed upon Xianzhou Luofu.

I was intrigued.

From that day on, my goal was set.

Meta or whatever.

If he isn't E6 I'm not pulling for anyone else.

It was a miracle that I managed to get Luocha to E2 on his first banner. I couldn't remember how much I pulledーNo, I'm not a whale. I'm but a little dolphin who purchased a couple of monthly passes. Welt also came home on one of the pulls along with Luocha. Maybe he's trying to stop this pretty blonde from reaching me. After all, his past encounters with similar looking men didn't end well. I had a feeling I got the 3rd Luocha on a solo a day or two before the banner disappeared too.

Charming new characters appeared left and right as the story progress, but I stayed strong (I didn't. I accidentally got Blade while trying to build pity, tried for Argenti and stopped before I hit 50/50 then lost about 50 pulls to Ratio LC). Sunday and Aventurine worried me because oh boy, how would I be able to resist those two. Thankfully, as I'm writing, Luocha's rerun came together with Acheron. I would've lost it if Aventurine was first.

Long story short, this is the final result after around 250 pulls.

I have 21k stellar jades left, so I may be able to save enough for Aventurine (or Sunday if he is confirmed to be playable). Though, I'll have to wait for guides to help me collect chest because my head still hurt after completing the main story. Penacony maps make me feel dizzy and somehow the main story makes it even worse.

Now I have an excuse to stop playing HSR for a few days so I can continue preparing for my flight.

Sigh...Can I skip every process and just warp there?

[how2to18]

THERE’S A CERTAIN BRAND of criticism reserved for overstuffed, bizarre stories — it consists of the critic throwing up her hands in despair and saying: “Sure, whatever, why not?” It usually has to do with a lack of narrative cohesion or consistency — but mostly it’s about the element of surprise. Whodunits rely on surprise by flouting expectation: when the audience least expects something, swerve. Poke the bear after insisting it’s harmless, then reveal it is the murderer. Avant-garde works rely on surprise by flouting tradition: baffle, provoke. Poke the bear, make it dance and tell you a campfire tale about a murderer with a heart of gold. Two men called Vladimir and Estragon wait, forever, by a tree, and it’s probably much ado about nothing? Charles Kinbote pretends to care about a long poem, but really he cares only about himself, and some country named Zembla? Sure, whatever, why not?

The Argentinian writer César Aira — I bought all 16 of his English-translated books, including his most recent, Birthday — is precisely the sort of writer to elicit that reaction. Take a centuries-old epiphany about a pirate treasure by a translator who appears at the exact location, and is immediately made rich. Or a headless dog who, without any semblance of a brain or any kind of nervous system, survives to adulthood. These are Aira stories, and if I’m being totally honest, they don’t strike me as particularly avant-garde. Most things that actually happen in an Aira story, in the sense of a plot, happen pretty quickly. The rest is digression, mostly Aira straight-up messing with the reader. On the basis of sheer experimentalism, there’s no Pale Fire–like flouting of formalism here. The prose is candid. There’s always some narrative. On the basis of grand metaphor, again, no dice. If you’re waiting to understand something, you won’t.

But that’s not true. Aira isn’t without tradition or precedent — he’s just hard to pin down. The provocations are too capricious; the subversion is undercut instantly with a cruel reminder of reality or lack thereof. The closest tradition is probably Dadaism in its insistence on nonsense verse. Then again — at least according to a profile in The Nation — Aira’s destabilizing of reality is supposed to be deeply political, the works of a man who was “a young militant leftist, with the notion of writing big realist novels.” But at least from the translated works that precede Birthday, there is little narrative coherence to his radicalism. If there is, it’s like an editor returning a draft with the sentence, “TK TK capitalism TK TK.”

Who says that’s a bad thing? There’s a big show of laziness, too, which is very much a conventionally bad thing (Aira claims to improvise entirely and never rewrite). In Varamo, the titular character contemplates the disbursement of his salary in counterfeit money:

After all, Panama was a young nation, and situations of this kind require a minimum of history. It was complicated enough to establish the laws that govern the legal printing of money, an operation which, in its early stages, is bound to resemble counterfeiting. So if he were caught trying to use fake money — as he was sure he would be — the case would set a precedent; the sentence and the legal concept would have to be invented, made up from scratch, given a comprehensible form and surrounded with discourse to make them plausible. All of which would involve intellectual and imaginative work, but that didn’t make the prospect any brighter for him.

Is this also what Aira the writer is doing? In the very first paragraph, the narrator promises us a book about how Varamo wrote a celebrated masterpiece of Central American poetry in one night. We never get that book, so it doesn’t matter.

Or actually, maybe it does matter, because on the night in question — before the writing begins — Varamo meets two spinsters who smuggle golf clubs and pontificates that for them, “the national was a categorical imperative,” the same as for printing money, even counterfeit money. A little detective work: Varamo the character, a hapless bureaucrat, writes his masterpiece in 1923 when Argentina was still one of the richest countries in the world (soon to change in the wake of a military junta taking power in 1930). It makes some narrative sense that the novel seems so very anxious about the black market and counterfeit money (in 1920s Argentina, an abundance of counterfeit money was quite real). In which case the plot is the digression, and everything else is vital.

So I suppose it is political after all: the idea that the bizarre is also real, from the writer who once chastised other Argentinian writers for being too unconcerned with the country’s “social and economic problems.”

How does one tell the difference? Conversations is easy. The post–Cold War United States manipulated the lives of people in ex-Soviet states, causing reality itself to having a strange in-between-y status. Others are harder. In The Literary Conference, giant silkworms engulf and destroy a whole city, by way of a cloning machine. In The Little Buddhist Monk, a suicidal Chinese pony imported to Korea jumps off a pagoda, because it has no knowledge of the toxic Korean herbs it would have otherwise required. In The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira, Dr. Aira tries to cure cancer using “screens” that include or exclude everything in the universe: “[H]is right hand […] divided up the joys and sorrows of Muslims; his left was pulling a little on another screen that excluded too many apples.” In The Seamstress and the Wind, a woman drives a car “as light as a yawn” which can contain “only one not very fat person […] and only if they were tightly-folded up.” It’s going somewhere, or nowhere. It’s a mystery or, a soda bubble, or a magnet car. It may or may not occupy space. “The proverb says mystery does not occupy space,” Aira writes. “All right, fine; but it crosses it.”

If that isn’t the writer’s version of throwing his hands in the air and saying, “Sure, whatever, why not,” I don’t know what is.

¤

But there’s a pretty major problem with all that I’ve said thus far, though it’s the consensus view — and that is the idea that Aira is somehow colossally enigmatic. Alena Graedon in The New Yorker calls Aira’s novels “difficult to classify.” K. Reed Petty in Electric Literature insists that the reader not “try to understand.” Aura Estrada, for the Boston Review, wrote that Aira’s work showed that “the literary enterprise […] [is] pregnant with possibilities.”

The problem is that those pregnant possibilities do indeed mean very real things: both for Aira and fellow Latin American absurdist writers with whom he shares a tradition. The literary scholar Ericka Beckman reminds us that what people find colorfully absurd about Latin American fiction is often very real. A Latin American dictator in Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch sells the entire Caribbean Sea to the United States; the body of water is subsequently moved to the Arizona desert. But it’s the actual privatization of ordinary things in Latin American countries that lend the story its gravitas. “In 1999,” Beckman writes, “the Bolivian government signed a $2.5 billion contract to privatize the city of Cochabamba’s water supply.” Under the proposed agreement, a San Francisco–based consortium “was to own all of the city’s water resources, even the rain that fell from the sky.” The tradition also extends to Borges and Bolaño, the latter of whom called Aira “one of the three or four best writers working in Spanish today.” But whereas Bolaño is considered to have written some of the most innovative critiques of globalization and fascism, Aira is merely “not meant to be understood.” If that’s all Aira means to us, then we’ve lost something of immense value.

Indeed, much of Aira can be construed as a new articulation: not an idiosyncratic style from an exotic backwater, but something creatively new, a giant middle finger to the Western literary enterprise. In The Proof, for instance, a teenage lesbian couple (“Mao” and “Lenin”) try to seduce a shy girl and subsequently commit a violent act in a supermarket as a “proof of love.” According to Latin American literary scholar Héctor Hoyos, The Proof is about “destabiliz[ing] sexual orientation” and the inherent violence of ordinary commerce in the supermarket. That’s reasonable, and strikes me as a far better way to understand Aira than claiming he’s not meant to be understood.

How to explain the gonzo story that is How I Became a Nun? The story is narrated by a six-year-old child (boy or girl?), and begins when the father treats the child to ice cream for the very first time, only to become incensed when the child despises it, tries it himself, finds it revolting, and violently kills the ice cream vendor. Soon after, the child reports that “my body began to dissolve … literally … My organs deliquesced … turning to green and blue bags of slime hanging from stony necroses … bundles of ganglia.” Turns out there is a wave of lethal food poisoning, by way of cyanide contamination, across Argentina and neighboring countries.

The boy/girl is, as are many of Aira’s characters, named César Aira, and the child’s affliction affects not just the body but the telling of stories. It’s all very paradoxical; insistent that language is “anti-mimetic” and bears no resemblance to reality. In Conversations, a story-within-other-stories, the narrator immediately digresses: “[A]n aside: a memory can be identical to what is being remembered; at the same time it is different, without ceasing to be the same.” This is all the stuff of Barthes and Derrida, the idea being that nothing in the novel is real (or even helpfully un-real). If Aira really is Barthes and Derrida in plot form — poststructuralist children’s books, imagine that! — then thank goodness that these stories are so fun. With a lesser writer the hand-wringing would never end.

So, let me contradict myself again. Once you get the hang of it, Aira’s politics aren’t particularly difficult to suss out. Most of the time, when Aira says something, you should probably just believe him. One of his major themes is: People get these ideas, and it doesn’t really matter if they are true. A second major theme is of Authorial “exclusion”: a litany of unreliable narrators wax lyrical about closed loops or circles in narratives (Barthes would be proud). A third: If we wrap something simple into something indirect and symbolic, people are drawn in, even though we’re cheating. Boy/girl César decides to deceive a doctor: “The aim of my ruse was to make her think I had something ��difficult’ to express.”

Let’s do Aira a favor and dispose of Barthes and Derrida because, simply put, we don’t need them. I’m not scoffing at literary theory. I simply think it makes more sense to privilege Aira’s own words. Here’s a stronger case. Every so often, you find something that has to be Aira the writer speaking directly to the reader. In Conversations, the narrator laments the plot weren’t more outlandish: “That […] would have resulted in a much more interesting story, right?” In How I Became a Nun, Aira is baffled by a singer, broadcast on television, who cannot sing: “[To] the Tone Deaf Singer herself … perhaps she is still alive, and remembers, and if she is reading this … My number is in the telephone book.”

I’m fairly certain that Tone Deaf Singer is really out there somewhere. I hope she got in touch with César Aira, and that they talked.

¤

So much is made of Aira’s oddities, plot twists, and diversions, but I want to convince you that it’s the emotional effect that should make you stick around. I read Ghosts last of all, and I was entirely unprepared for it. Shorn of quick swerves, Ghosts is perhaps his most poignant. Set at a construction site for a bourgeois condominium, the world-building is exquisite; no other translated work of his is as detailed or as tremulous. There aren’t surprises in the manner we’ve become accustomed to: the eccentricities feel familiar; the philosophizing logical.

Set over the course of a New Year’s Eve, Ghosts is only somewhat about ghosts — the ones that the workers and the immigrant family squatting at the site see, but the families soon to move in don’t. It’s a book preoccupied with the juxtaposition of the rich and the poor, while also fixated on the sadness and peril in the lives of an enormous cast of characters, slowly spiraling down to focus on the oldest daughter of the central squatter family.

It is uncommonly gentle and empathetic for Aira. But then it was with Ghosts that I realized that although Aira ensures the ludicrous to keep the pages turning, almost every one of his works also contains within it much sincerity and earthiness. The Proof reminds me of the wonderful film Tangerine in its spiky, breakneck earnestness. The Linden Tree proudly wears its heart on its sleeve: at turns nostalgic and charmingly silly. In almost every one of the others, something makes me go weak in the knees. It may even be called a “realist” oeuvre. Birthday — the most recent translation, released in February — makes this case best of all. A beautiful memoir inspired by Aira’s 50th birthday, Birthday is worthy of serious philosophical attention: lengthy digressions tell one explicitly how Aira perceives the past, the present, and the future, but what clarifies all his work is how he how he wrangles strangeness out of the quotidian. The phases of the Moon are a source of self-deprecation; the first encounter with electricity, fraught with worry; politics, a consequence of some remaining static as others charge ahead through life; death, as a proxy for history and how much we miss every day, “like Rip Van Winkle.” Everything in life is ultimately pretty strange, a cheeky rejection of the idea that “avant-garde” even exists.

So, ultimately three very simple things about César Aira: 1) He is exactly the sort of writer to elicit the response, “Sure, whatever, why not?” 2) He gets people all in a tizzy about his “tradition.” Okay, sure — though he’s already said a whole bunch about Borges. 3) He is most certainly meant to be understood. Of course he is. Don’t be daft! Just listen.

¤

Kamil Ahsan is a biologist and historian with a doctorate from the University of Chicago. His work has appeared in The Rumpus, Dissent, The Millions, The American Prospect, The A.V. Club, and Jacobin, among others.

The post Meant to Be Understood: On César Aira’s Complete Translated Works appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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