#konger music

[jesncin]

chinoy lois truther™ anon again 😭 but i saw hong konger bruce wayne and had to chime in 👀 had no idea this already existed even tho it’s been an idea in my head for a while!

like you i’m not obsessed with the bats (seems EXHAUSTING) but i do like myself some bruce wayne. while staying in hk for a bit i saw SO MANY bats on the porcelain in the museums and it got my gears turning. a suit that looks like traditional representations of bats in chinese art would be so cute (maybe look a bit like man-bat tho… cool in its own way still tbh).

and batman reimagined as one of those triad gang stories would be wayyyy too fun. some guy with the name bat chi-kwong (super old fashioned names) bruce wayne (also super old fashioned sounding… THINK ABOUT IT! we dc fans are just so used to it but it’s old sounding!!) 😭 maybe he’d actually live in macau or something to keep the media off his scent LMAO. he can afford the commute!

We can't deny ourselves a little of that Bruce Wayne, amirite. Honestlyyy a culturally informed Batman suit that embraces the fauna aspects would be soooo bespoke.

OH MAN you've got my brain churning based on my time in Hong Kong!! Honestly Bruce Wayne is an old sounding name but is so right at home with the kind of names Hong Kongers would pick as an "english name" (right up there with Vicky/Vivian, Tiffany, Alfred, Peggy, Winston). Bruce living in Macau is absolutely destroying me, I love that. The Penguin's Iceberg Lounge is over at Central and Selina Kyle lives over at Sham Shui Po (or as I affectionally called it, Sham Shui-py Po).

A REIMAGINED GOTHAM ROGUES TRIAD STYLE WOULD BE SOOO!! Oh man I'd lose my mind over a Triad Leader Two Face, with personalized duality tattoos and everything. They get tattoos over at the now closed Tattoo Temple, and Harvey reluctantly asks for help from Bats to find out where the missing tattoo artist went. So many incredibly rich narratives in Hong Kong, it writes itself. Relevant music for the vibes.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

THIS SATURDAY (July 20), I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

#20yrsago Walkmen changed our social norms https://web.archive.org/web/20040803222231/http://www.belleville.com/mld/belleville/entertainment/music/9144361.htm

#20yrsago Ultima preservation efforts: a guide https://web.archive.org/web/20040721014058/http://www.nelson.monkey.org/~nelson/weblog/culture/games/ultimaPreservation.html

#15yrsago ATMs that spray attackers with pepper-spray https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jul/12/south-africa-cash-machine-pepper-spray

#10yrsago TSA employee to security theater skeptics: “You don’t have shit for rights” https://memex.craphound.com/2014/07/18/tsa-employee-to-security-theater-skeptics-you-dont-have-shit-for-rights/

#10yrsago Documentary on the making of the Homeland audiobook with Wil Wheaton https://vimeo.com/100956787

#10yrsago Ontario police’s Big Data assigns secret guilt to people looking for jobs, crossing borders https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/police-chiefs-call-for-presumed-innocence-in-background-checks/article_f479a149-f184-5824-80ee-0427abfe4b71.html

#10yrsago UK government “dries out” its “water damaged” CIA torture files https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10969535/Lost-US-extraordinary-rendition-files-have-dried-out-Foreign-Office-says.html

#5yrsago SAMBA versus SMB: Adversarial interoperability is judo for network effects https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/samba-versus-smb-adversarial-interoperability-judo-network-effects #5yrsago An Indian research university has assembled 73 million journal articles (without permission) and is offering the archive for unfettered scientific text-mining https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/18/an-indian-research-university-has-assembled-73-million-journal-articles-without-permission-and-is-offering-the-archive-for-unfettered-scientific-text-mining/

#5yrsago How deceptive browser extensions snaffled up 4m users’ browsing history, including Nest videos, medical history and tax returns https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/07/dataspii-inside-the-debacle-that-dished-private-data-from-apple-tesla-blue-origin-and-4m-people/

#5yrsago Thousands of elderly Hong Kongers march in solidarity with young human rights activists https://hongkongfp.com/2019/07/17/no-rioters-tyrannical-regime-thousands-hong-kong-seniors-march-support-young-extradition-law-protesters/

#5yrsago Interactive map of public facial recognition systems in America https://www.banfacialrecognition.com/map/

#5yrsago Sony’s copyright bots remove a band’s own release of its new video https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/18/sonys-copyright-bots-remove-a-bands-own-release-of-its-new-video/

#1yrago Let the Platforms Burn https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/18/urban-wildlife-interface/#combustible-walled-gardens

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

[fayewongfuzao]

I transcribed most of the parts that mention Faye.

Who is Faye Wong?

Earlier in Faye Wong's career, people wanted her to be anything but herself.

Because she was from the Mainland, they tried to force her to have this Hong Kong personality because they were worried that Hong Kong audiences wouldn't accept someone who was from the Mainland.

Wong's handlers gave her an anglicized name: Shirley Wong

She didn't enjoy it. She felt forced into a fake version of herself.

But none of that apparently bothered Wong Kar-wai. Because he saw an edge that her handlers had been trying to sand away.

He was very much taken with Faye Wong who's an interesting figure because she was a Mainlander and she had a particular aura that he thought was interesting. She seemed cooler than the people in Hong Kong cause there's something kinda otherworldly about her. And in fact, she seemed cooler.

Cooler than even the Hong Kongese who think of themselves as the coolest.

Yeah, you look at her and you think 'oh that's the cool person'.

He [Wong Kar-wai] could see it and that's part of his gift.

Faye Wong with the fake persona she hated was figuring out what was next for her.

She disappeared for some time and she went to study in New York.

She roamed The Big Apple for a few months and said: 'I saw so many strange, confident looking people. They didn't care what other people thought of them.'

And then when she came back, she became a different person.

In 1993, she dropped the LP, "100,000 Whys" doing covers of songs from Western alt rockers like Tori Amos and throwing in some killer pop originals like this one called 'Flow Not Fly'.

The Hong Kong kids fell in love with her.

She was the huge rising star because it was so cool to be a fan of Faye Wong.

She was like the Nirvana of that moment.

When you mention Nirvana, I remember the way she dressed at the time. She was wearing all these grungy style clothes. And there was no internet at that time so I had no idea about Nirvana or the grunge music scene. And people were commenting 'How come Faye Wong dresses like this?'. They're not glamorous outfits that people would be expecting a Cantopop star to be wearing.

You know a lot of people obviously try to entertain and that's great. But with Faye Wong, you had to come to her. She just did her thing. She couldn't be put in a box.

In other words, Hong Kongers finally saw what Wong Kar-wai had seen years before: a Mainlander who out-cooled them all. Something totally modern which made her and her music the perfect fit for the director's next movie - a snapshot of modern Hong Kong in 1994.

Chungking Express

Story #2 featured a food server on hip Hong Kong Island played by Faye Wong, named Faye, and was like real life Faye in every way the music audience would probably recognize.

The movie-Faye dreams of leaving Hong Kong for the West. She's constantly blasting The Mamas and the Papas 'California Dreamin' like Faye Wong, movie-Faye does leave for the West. And like Faye Wong, movie-Faye also comes back changed.

Now she's an airline attendant and she's come to pay a visit to a guy she was obsessed with but never quite dated played by Tony Leung.

"WHERE DO YOU WANT TO GO?" she asks him.

"WHEREVER YOU WANT TO TAKE ME." says Tony.

Will they stay in Hong Kong? Will they go? Instead of telling us, Wong Kar-wai smash cuts to the end credits, accompanied by Faye Wong's cover of a different song about dreaming.

Her version of The Cranberries tune is called 'Dream Lover'. It's as joyful as the original with Cantonese lyrics that add a hint of trepidation. They're about waiting to fall into a long kiss with an enticing stranger.

It could be movie-Faye singing to Tony.

'Dream Lover' came out a month before the movie debuted. The tune was already a smash. But now the tune was about to get bigger.

Chungking Express Goes Global

And the other thing international audiences took from the film? Faye Wong.

In that great sequence when she's at the snack bar and she's dancing to California Dreamin', the first time it ever played in North America at The Toronto Film Festival, after she finished dancing, the crowd applauded because it was such a magical sequence. And people came out thinking: 'Who is that woman?'

That's the other thing about Faye Wong. Hardened film critics came out thinking 'Who was that?'

For sure, Chungking Express was a great introduction of her to a much bigger international stage. She became quite popular in Japan thanks to the film. And so she did quite a few concerts in Japan and she did the themesong of Final Fantasy the video game. So she was that big.

Noel Hogan of The Cranberries

And as for 'Dreams', after Faye Wong's cover blew up in Hong Kong in 1994, Noel Hogan and his band had some inkling it was out there.

"We knew it happened and kinda forgot about it because we were so busy touring. But then bit by bit you'd kinda hear that 'Dreams' had taken off in this country and that country . But it really really didn't hit until we went to Hong Kong and later to China that we saw the full impact of it and how big it was."

"We were absolutely shocked."

Turns out Faye Wong had popularized 'Dreams' and the band who'd written it.

Emma Lee Moss (on her cover)

"It's just such a crowd-pleaser. People are like 'oh i know that song'. It takes them awhile to figure out what it is. Unless you're in Hong Kong, in which they know exactly what you're doing."

"Everywhere you go, there's someone who loves Faye Wong. I played in China and I couldn't communicate with anyone because my Mandarin was so terrible. But the moment we started talking about Faye Wong, we're talking in Faye Wong song titles. That's how we were communicating."

An Irish kid writes a song in his room. A Mainlander sings it to Hong Kong. Then a movie sends her music everywhere.

(SOURCE: MUBI PODCAST)

[hrtiu]

Oof flashbacks to the ABRSM music exams my hong konger piano teacher made me take, even though we lived in the US where the proper name is 64th note

therapist: the semihemidemisemiquaver isn’t real, it can’t hurt you

the semihemidemisemiquaver:

[don-dake]

『即使輸掉了一切也不要輸掉了微笑』

“Even when I have lost everything, I don't want to lose my (knowing how to) smile.”

Another vid (I think the programme is simply called “Smile”? But not 💯 certain) featuring Gregory Charles Rivers (aka 河國榮 Ho Kwok-Wing) that I think is interesting and as always, great for Cantonese listening practise too!

Like the previous video, I'm just going to do an English summary, but it won't be as detailed this time (because I'm tired) and I'll just highlight the parts I find most interesting (for the odd person who may actually enjoy my Cantonese centric posts/translations, featuring usually “not-globally-famous/old people” from a small part of the globe…😸) in the screenshots below.

(Date of interview: c. 2017–2019?)

Rivers's optimistic outlook on life at this time is especially poignant and awe-inspiring because in hindsight, not only is it known what eventually happened to him 😿, but at this time around 2017–2019, he had been hit by some deeply challenging life obstacles that may have overwhelmed and defeated another person completely.

Having undergone 2 major health scares (cancer and heart problems that resulted in two major operations) almost simultaneously, and that had left him in serious financial debt for a while, it's pretty admirable he could still keep his optimism in life! (until he couldn't anymore…😿 — but that had nothing to do with financial troubles, rather, it was a grief no one could really help him with…😿 RIP)

(full article can be read here.)

Brief summary of video:

Why and how he got into Cantonese and came to stay in Hong Kong for the rest of his life…basically, when he was still a medical student in Australia in the 1980s, he hit it off with the overseas students studying at the same university and most of them happen to be from Southeast Asia (Singaporeans, Malaysians and Hong Kongers, but mostly Hong Kongers), so he got surrounded by a lot of Cantonese, and gradually fell in love with the language and in particular, HK Cantopop culture.

Eventually, he lost interest in studying medicine and was failing his grades, and finally decided to move to Hong Kong to try to make a Cantopop career for himself. So he set out to do 3 to 4 part-time jobs for a whole year in Australia in order to save up enough for a one way ticket to Hong Kong…

(description of Instagram screenshot in the ALT Text)

…and he never looked back since!

🇭🇰🇲🇴 「儲錢，跟住買一張單程機標就飛到嚟香港。」

“So I saved up, and then bought a one-way ticket and flew off to Hong Kong.”

🇭🇰🇲🇴 「1987年5月31號夜晚九點幾。」

“The date was 1987 May 31st, around 9 at night.”

This was the day he arrived permanently in Hong Kong and was clearly a very significant and fond memory for him! 😺

🇭🇰🇲🇴 「一個鬼佬喺澳洲可以飛過嚟，想唱歌…雖然係嚟到30年嘅…」

“A Caucasian guy like me from Australia being able to fly over here (to Hong Kong), with only a dream of wanting to be a singer…even though I had to wait 30 years…”

🇭🇰🇲🇴 「不過終於都攞到最受歡迎男歌手奬嘅 (羞笑)」

“Even the likes of me can finally win a ‘Most Popular Male Singer’ award…(bashful laugh)”

I was unaware he had won any award for singing and in truth, it was likely not exactly a prominent music industry heavyweight award, but it clearly made him very happy and was a memory he definitely cherished and was grateful for so…good for him (sincerely)! 😺

(and winning ‘Most Popular’ was a sure sign he had been recognised for his efforts and approved by his adopted countrymen! Definitely meaningful and worth something too!)

🇭🇰🇲🇴 「即係證明咩都得啦！」

“So it goes to show anything can happen (dreams may come true if you never give up) !”

[dustedmagazine]

Bolis Pupul — Letter to Yu (DeeWee)

Bolis Pupul’s mother died suddenly in an auto accident in 2008, leaving the artist bereft in the ordinary way but also beset with questions about his own identity. She was a native Hong Konger, married to his father, a well-known Belgian cartoonist, and although Pupul grew up biracial, he had never fully connected with his mother’s country of origin. Not that he hadn’t thought about race and colonialism and prejudice. “Blenda,” from Bolis Pupul’s Topical Dancer album with Charlotte Adigéry included the repeated line “Go back to the country where you belong” (difficult to do when you’re half Belgian/half Chinese). Still with Letter to Yu, Pupul immerses himself in his heritage, weaving the sounds and culture of his mother’s world into thumping, memory-haunted elegies. It’s an extraordinarily moving tribute, propulsive and dreamlike at once.

The disc begins with distant whoosh of traffic sounds, and Pupul reading a letter he wrote to his mother when he finally reached her birthplace. (Pupul’s mother is the “Yu” in “Letter to Yu.”) He reads through a voice alterer against a backdrop of ghostly bells and restless percussion, an elegant setting for pure loss. Murmurs the artist, “My heart is in my throat/My eyes filled with tears/This is where you were born 59 years ago/and I’m finally here/why did it take me so long.”

This cut sets the tone for an album that uses the sounds of the dance floor and busy Hong Kong to explore deep human longing. “Completely Half” flutters silkily on disco percolations, while contemplating alienation from one’s own language and culture. “Mau Tau Wai Road (with Salah Pupul)” folds the sweet female-voiced romanticism of Chinese pop into a syncopated dance beat; it commemorates the address where Pupul’s mother was born. The instrumental “Spicy Crab” splays Eastern-sounding string plunks across eddies and cascades of synth arpeggios. Then Pupul turns the singsong, tonal sounds of spoken Chinese into something like a riff in “Doctor Says.” Against a pounding, pulsing club beat, a man speaks a phrase, maybe something ordinary, but by repetition it becomes part of the melody. “Frogs,” too, intersperses brief, Chinese language phrases into blotchy beats. Peering over the language barrier, we catch glimpses of the familiar wrapped in the unknown. It’s also catchy and dance friendly as hell.

There’s something very moving about Pupul’s attempt to understand his mother by vacuuming up the sights and sounds of Hong Kong and fitting them carefully into his Western-style DJ art. It works on a human level — we can all relate to losing people that we love — but also as music. Letter to Yu is poignant and powerful.

Jennifer Kelly 

[thevalleyisjolly]

7, 10, 25, 40!

7. Fire by Barns Courtney. Still the quintessential Vyce song to this day!

10. Proud Corazón (Coco soundtrack). Watched this movie for the first time this year and am now obsessed with its music.

25. 半斤八兩 by Sam Hui. I like to describe this song as The Internationale but make it old Hong Konger style. Essentially a song about how hard life is as a worker, how much your boss sucks, and how little you earn for how hard you work, all set to an upbeat Cantopop bop.

40. Ring of Keys (Fun Home soundtrack). Because gender.

[parkerbombshell]

MaWayy Radio 74

First Thursday of the Month 10am-11am EST bombshellradio.com  #dance, #EDM, #pianohouse, #progressivehouse, #bigroom, #house, #electronic ,#chill, #MawayyRadio, #BombshellRadio  www.mawayy.com The Billboard charted duo “MaWayy” is a musical collaboration of Iranian-American Emmy Award-winning Brian Wayy and Iranian producer, artist and DJ Masoud Fouladi Moghaddam known for leading the electronic dance community in Iran. Together, from Los Angeles and Bandar-e Anzali, they have combined their production skills and created a sound The Huffington Post has described as ‘sizzling electropop’. 1. Going Deeper, Rich Fayden, Samantha Leon - Clocks 2. Going Deeper & Polina - Talk 3. JLV x Justin J. Moore - Dollar 4. Disco Fries x Sarah de Warren - The Edge 5. Karen Harding - Wide Awake 6. Steve Angello, Saturday, Monday ft. Julia Spada - The Ocean (Still Young & BRØMANCE Remix) 'MaWayy's Favorite' 7. Zakes Bantwini, Kasango – Osama (Claptone Remix) 8. Elekfantz & Bruno Be - HALO 9. Redondo ft. Sydney Jo Jackson - Automatic 10. HUTS, Louis III - Brand New (Lucles Remix) 11. Wave Wave - Overdrive 12. EchoStorms & Yasmin Jane - Another Life 13. okay & JSTJR - All I Wanna Do 14. Saint Punk - Hooligans 15. Showtek x Ida Corr - Let Me Think About It Again 16. Vion Konger, KYPT, East Dawn - Cynical 17. Wuki - Sunshine (My Girl) 18. Sevek, Future Class & RYVM - Stand In Line 19. Bhaskar & JADED - When I See It (ft. The Vic) 20. S7AR - My Way 21. Lady Bee - Can't Talk Right Now 22. Dannic - Feel Your Energy 23. Matisse & Sadko ft. Justin J. Moore - Promise You 24. Almero - Everyday Read the full article

[potteresque-ire]

Ooooooooh ..... (Under the cut: Video analysis by one Hong Konger who lived in the city during the era referenced by the video)

The first 30 sec with the rock song is very (very) likely a reference of, and tribute to, Hong Kong Jiang Hu films, the street gangsters 古惑仔 with a heart of gold that they feature, which I talked about yesterday (Link). The music aside, the typography choice, exemplified by the characters 香港 Hong Kong at 1:05, is also very "street", commonly seen during the 1980s-90s in the older districts like Mong Kok 旺角 where street gangsters gathered and many of the Jiang Hu films took place. Similar fonts was often featured on the city's famous neon lights:

Neon lights in Mong Kok, Hong Kong, pre-2000. Similar fonts can be seen on, for example, the sign with yellow background on the right and the sign with the red words and green edge on the left. Places that called themselves nightclubs, karaokes, and saunas often offered sexual services, and were frequented by the street gangsters. Mahjong houses were for gambling.

Gg, of course, didn't forget to switch to traditional Chinese used in Hong Kong from simplified Chinese used in mainland, starting with his own name (肖戰 — Traditional; 肖战 — Simplified). (There had been confusion before of how exactly Gg would write his surname, which was one of the few "double simplified" characters found in Chinese surnames, in traditional Chinese. The possibilities were 肖 or 蕭. Confusion solved! :) )

One thing that was, perhaps, already really obvious in the photo above is that Hong Kong had / has severe light pollution (and this Hong Konger here loves it this way :) ). Street lamps in Hong Kong during the 1980s-90s was quite yellow; the multiple light sources (from street lamps, the crowded shop fronts and neon lights) meant that people there basically lived in a glowing kaleidoscope. Everyone and everything were lit by a complex juxtaposition of different colors of different intensities and warmth, and sculpted by the many shadows they made. This creates an aesthetics that many has come to associate with the city, which Chinese netizens calls 港風, short for Hong Kong style.

This video of Gg is a demonstration of the 港風 aesthetics. It carries a noticeable yellow tint, reminiscent of the street lights when such aesthetics was developed (1980s-90s), and while lights were heavily featured, so was darkness — it was dimmer and more shadowy than most of his other videos. One of my favourite frames is the street view from the taxi (1:15), which showcased the city's perennial light show feel. That the quality of this video was less crisp than other GG videos also appropriately added years to the video's appearance, and the round lights at the Cultural Center (the pink bricked building where Gg was walking around), one of the city's landmark that opened in 1989, further hinted at the age of the aesthetics.

Hong Kong Cultural Center in daylight. Prince Charles, now King Charles III, cut its ribbon. The next 30 sec of the video is a clear reference to the director Wong Kar-Wai 王家衛. The BGM, Always in My Heart by the cuban guitar duo Los Indios Tabajaras, was famously used in one of the later scenes of Wong’s Days of Being Wild 阿飛正傳. 阿飛, by the way, literally Ah Fly, is an older Cantonese slang that meant bad boys — a term that, to me, connects the two halves of Gg’s video to each other.

The Ah Flies, the older generation of bad boys, might or might not have been gangsters; they were generally young men who were very fashion-forward, who mostly loitered on the streets doing little or no proper work, and spent their time wooing the pretty girls passing by.

You can hear the same BGM in the following clip from Days of Being Wild (start 4:32). How iconic has this music become? When I heard it just now while watching Gg's video, I immediately saw palm trees in my mind:

A trivia, perhaps, for those who are interested: while especially Westerners associate Wong Kar-Wai with Hong Kong, the arthouse films that have made Wong famous worldwide were actually far from popular in the city before the millennium. Days of Being Wild (1991), despite starring the most talked about young actors and actresses of the time, was a well-known box office flop, making < 25% of its HKD 40 million investment. For more than 2 decades, Wong's work with the highest box office remained to be As Tears Go By 旺角卡門, his directorial debut and more importantly, a Jiang Hu film with some rather famous friend-hacking scenes.

In the eyes of many locals of the time, Wong was the city's ... foreign movie awards bait, plus the butt of many jokes surrounding the pair of sunglasses he never took off.

Quality "friend-hacking" in As Tears Go By. This movie has supplied memes that continues to be in use today, the most famous being a shot of Jacky (in the background) spitting out "Eat shit, you!", which isn't very art-house Wong Kar-Wai at all.

Anyway, where was I? Right ... let's wrap this little essay up. There were two Cantonese sayings in Gg's video:

唔係生活有無意思，係你熱愛生活，才有意思。 （0:49） It's not if life has meaning or not. It's you loving life, and that has meaning.

I've got to say, this line ... doesn't feel to me as Hong Kong of the 80s and 90s as the rest of the video; and I can't remember it as a reference to any famous quotes of the time (I may be wrong). On its own, it's to me a little too properly inspirational, perhaps a little more China now than Hong Kong then :) . The sentence structure also deviated from the spoken Cantonese used in the city. Hong Kong Cantonese is very slang-ish and has its own phrasings, and 才有意思 is more written than spoken Chinese. (先有意思 would've sounded smoother to my ears). I wonder if it was dubbed by someone from Guangzhou.

And finally:

月亮，係獨一無二。你都係。（0:10） The moon, is one and only. You are too.

Probably some of you have read about this in turtle talk already, with its reference to the moon that is such a common theme in turtlelore. For those who'd like an extra piece of candy for dessert, I hereby point to the mention of "one and only" :) . While full accuracy of translations between Chinese and English is often not achievable, I stand behind my choice behind this particular translation, with 獨一無二 literally meaning Alone One No Two.

If that doesn't translate to One and Only, then what does? ❤️💚

GG HK Vlog

[michaelise]

Hong Kongers - Bauhinia Rhapsody

[indiegamesofcolor]

[I.D.: A photoset containing three gifs of the game so obscure;

Gif 1 displays the game’s title in a computer window against a desktop background. A text cursor is blinking at the end of the title. 

Gif 2 shows a login window for the program MZN Messenger. Once the player logs in, the window says, “It looks like you haven't finished setting up your profile yet! Start by uploading a display photo.” The player then has four portrait photos to select from. 

Gif 3 shows a text conversation between the player character and Brandon, another character. As the text scrolls through the chat dialogue, the player character is given two dialogue options to select from as responses. 

end I.D.]

so obscure; is a game about navigating a friendship between two isolated high school students! Play as Sam (who can be renamed), a born-and-raised Hong Konger with an eclectic taste in music as they meet Brandon, a transfer student adjusting to his new life in his parent’s home country. With four endings, explore their chat conversations as you share insecurities and your favorite albums!

For free for Mac, Windows, and Linux. 

Developed by STARDUST★SODA, a 2-person dev team made up of SWEET★STRAWBERRY as a writer and PEROXIDE★PRINCE as an artist, programmer, and additional writer. Together they are trying their best to make inclusive narrative games. 

[beardedmrbean]

The crowd gathered in a wood-paneled London hall struggled to contain their enthusiasm: Like music fans catching a glimpse of their favorite act peering out from backstage, people excitedly clapped and chattered when Chris Patten, the last governor of Hong Kong, entered to take his seat. They later rose to their feet in raucous applause as he delivered his speech, a lament about the diminishing freedoms in Hong Kong under Chinese rule. Hours earlier, in Hong Kong, Chinese President Xi Jinping had offered his own view, a stern defense of the city’s forceful integration with the mainland carried out through the introduction of a sprawling national-security law, the reengineering of the election system, and the mass arrest of prodemocracy figures.

Both events earlier this month marked the 25th anniversary of Hong Kong being returned to China. Patten’s appearance capped a string of events that had drawn activists, former lawmakers, and exiles to London for a week of lobbying, commemoration, and nostalgia for the protest movement. It was a remarkable scene, the aging head of a former imperial power emphatically cheered by former subjects who had fled their ostensibly decolonized homeland. Most of the Hong Kongers at the London event, a show of hands revealed, had arrived in the United Kingdom after the British government had broken with long-standing immigration policy to welcome them in. Many seeking refuge in the seat of the former empire have done so because it allows them to live and outwardly express an identity that Beijing is intent on stamping out as it imposes its own form of colonial rule and imperialist tendencies.

Some 120,000 Hong Kongers have taken part in the program in the 18 months since it was launched, according to outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The initiative, which is an expansion of the British National Overseas passport scheme, a special status created before the 1997 handover, potentially allows millions of Hong Kongers to stay in the U.K. on a pathway to citizenship. It also helps them avoid the grinding bureaucratic labyrinth of Britain’s asylum system. (The government refers to it as a “bespoke immigration route,” as if it were tailored on Savile Row.) The Welcoming Committee for Hong Kongers, a nonprofit umbrella group assisting new arrivals, estimates that up to half a million could come to live in Britain over the next few years. Sunder Katwala, the director of British Future, a think tank that houses the Welcoming Committee, said this month that the influx could “reshape Britain.”

This acceptance of Hong Kongers marks an extraordinary turn for the British government, which for decades staunchly defended the practice of denying its former subjects the right of abode. In 1982, as focus turned toward Hong Kong’s impending handover back to China, then–Foreign Secretary Peter Carington wrote to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, warning of the threat of mass migration should things not proceed smoothly. The U.K., he cautioned, “would be faced with demands of Hong Kong people for guarantees of protection and, more than likely, for the right of admission of fairly large numbers to this country.” Not long after he wrote the memo, Argentina invaded and occupied the Falkland Islands. Carington resigned from his post, but his position toward keeping Hong Kongers out of Britain remained.

In 1989, the Tiananmen Square massacre brought the issue to the forefront again. Then–Hong Kong Governor David Wilson traveled to Downing Street shortly after the crackdown and argued that allowing Hong Kongers the chance to migrate to Britain would, counterintuitively, boost confidence in the city, and, in an attempt to sell the idea to Thatcher, said he believed that not many would actually take up the offer. Murray MacLehose, a former Hong Kong governor, called for an amendment to the British Nationality Act to allow for Hong Kongers to obtain citizenship. His plea went unanswered. Instead, full British passports were issued to 50,000 priority Hong Kongers, though even this consolation was condemned by Beijing. It was “not a glorious outcome,” the journalist Michael Sheridan recounted in his book The Gate to China: A New History of the People’s Republic and Hong Kong.

By the time Patten arrived in Hong Kong in 1992, much was already set for Hong Kong’s future ahead of the 1997 handover. He pushed to expand democracy but met fierce resistance from Beijing and some in London. In recent years, he has cast himself as an outspoken crusader, enraging Beijing with his numerous media appearances. His criticism of China and his defense of Hong Kong have, in a way, helped absolve the British of some of the uglier aspects of their rule over the city, including police violence in the 1960s and draconian laws that remain on the books. These relics of empire have been almost gleefully embraced by Beijing loyalists. Colonial laws drafted by the British have been revived by Hong Kong’s new rulers; the charge of sedition has proved particularly popular. The police force that cracked down on the protests and has been transformed into an arm of the ever-expanding national-security apparatus is a distinctly British creation: The title Royal has been dropped from the force’s name, but a few high-ranking British officers remain in uniform.

Jeppe Mulich, a lecturer in modern history at City, University of London, told me the rosy vision of Hong Kong’s past that is often projected within the U.K. is troubling, with much focus on commemorating the last few years of British rule but little on what came before, because “it really is not a very pretty picture in any way.” Patten, who recently published his diaries detailing his time as Hong Kong’s final governor, is “a reliable symbol of the good old days of colonial Hong Kong,” Mulich said, but in reality, “he was a Band-Aid put on a big bleeding wound at much too late a stage.”

Those in attendance at the event I went to in London were hugely sympathetic to the former governor. One audience member asked him about what he made of the colonial legacy in Hong Kong. Patten responded by musing on the astronomy of empire: Britain prepared former colonies such as Singapore and Malaysia for their futures, “put them all onto the launching pad and lit them with touch paper and blasted the whole thing off into outer space,” hoping that they would take to orbit as an “independent and successful country,” he said. But, “with Hong Kong, because of the lease, we couldn’t do that,” he told the audience, referencing the 99-year agreement signed with Beijing in 1898. Instead, Patten explained, the city was “fired off not into orbit on its own but into a docking mechanism with mainland China and that caused a very, very different set of problems.”

Contemporary Hong Kongers are often criticized for harboring too much sympathy for colonial rule. I frequently saw the old colonial flag flying at the numerous marches I attended in 2019. A protester hung it inside the Legislative Council chamber when it was stormed by demonstrators at the height of the prodemocracy movement. Before Xi’s visit this month, a series of videos showing Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Anne made the rounds on social media, with commentators praising the royals for meeting Hong Kongers and visiting housing estates on their visits to the city, in contrast to the imperious distance typically maintained by Xi.

A certain level of colonial nostalgia is understandable given the changes in the city over the past decade, Mulich told me; some view Britain as the lesser of two evils when set against Beijing’s increased influence. Claudia Mo, a former prodemocracy lawmaker who covered the lead-up to the handover as a journalist, told me that she questioned at the time, “Why are we being ruled by foreigners?” and was nagged by the feeling that there was “something not right” about Hong Kong’s governance during colonial times. She had been excited to see Hong Kong return to Chinese rule, but eventually soured on Beijing’s control of the city and became a strident critic in the legislature. Mo was arrested last year and faces the possibility of life in prison for violating the national-security law.

Deference toward the British was also actively fostered prior to the handover. Decades of colonial education “helped cultivate a sense of belonging to the British empire amongst those who were born and raised before 1997,” Vivian Wong, a lecturer in modern Chinese history at the University of Bristol, told me. Members of Hong Kong’s civil society have also “long deployed the rhetoric of imperial cosmopolitanism as a strategic tool to counteract Chinese nationalism,” she added, though this “rosy understanding of British colonial rule” was not universally held.

Prior to Patten’s speech, I made my way into Parliament, past groups of summer tourists and groups of pro- and anti-Brexit protesters engaged in a heated exchange, to attend a roundtable on Hong Kong. One of the speakers was Timothy Lee, a former district councilor who was elected in November 2019 when prodemocracy candidates nearly ran the table in local elections. I had last interviewed Lee after his first district-council meeting. Then, he had been buzzing with nervous energy, words tumbling out of his mouth at a pace that was at times hard to follow. Yet his tenure as a politician was short-lived. Lee left Hong Kong on March 1, 2021, a day after 47 prodemocracy figures, many of them his friends, were arrested for violating the national-security law.

When he landed in London, it was his first time anywhere in Europe. He initially entered as a visitor, moving from place to place, before heading to Taiwan. Though Taipei had been supportive of Hong Kongers during the protests, its immigration policies remain restrictive. Lee found the limitations on his right to work onerous. He returned to London three months later and successfully took part in the new immigration program. He has since settled into an office job and in his spare time does advocacy work. His business card describes him as “one of the last elected district councilors from Hong Kong.”

Lee now lives in a crowded part of London where the streets are busy, like back home. The double-decker buses and the city’s underground remind him of Hong Kong. His decision to leave wasn’t driven by fear of imprisonment so much as by the collapsing space for free speech and the threat of self-censorship. “If I remain in Hong Kong, maybe I won’t get arrested, maybe I will. This is one uncertainty,” Lee explained to me. “But one thing I can be sure of: If I remain in Hong Kong there are many things I used to be able to say that I will not be able to say anymore.” (Shortly after we spoke, an elderly activist with Stage 4 cancer was sentenced to nine months in prison for a protest that had been planned but never took place. The same week, several men were arrested for sharing a Facebook post calling for people to cast blank ballots in the December 2021 elections.)

Others who have fled Hong Kong’s shrinking space for any views or identity beyond those deemed sufficiently patriotic have found a more welcoming home in Britain too. One notably bright Friday, I stepped into the dimly lit foyer of Prince Charles Cinema near Leicester Square and followed a set of signs down a flight of stairs to a theater showing Revolution of Our Times, a documentary about the 2019 protests. The award-winning film was released last month on the video-streaming site Vimeo, but Hong Kong’s police chief has warned the city’s residents against viewing it, and the title is a portion of a now-outlawed protest slogan.

The name of the cinema struck me as ironic. Charles had attended the handover ceremonies 25 years earlier, saluting the Union Jack in his white military dress uniform as the flag came down for the final time. The film was shown at midday, but the theater was almost full. In the lobby, a table was covered with mementos of 2019 for sale, most of which would put the seller at risk in Hong Kong. As the documentary played, sniffles and muffled sobs from the audience offered something of a secondary soundtrack to the film’s original score. Tissue packets crinkled in the darkness as strangers offered them to those sitting nearby. As the documentary ended, people sang along to “Glory to Hong Kong,” an unofficial anthem that was written during the protests.

Among those I met in London was Lilith Leung, a social worker in Hong Kong who was arrested twice during those protests, and who came to Britain via the immigration program. She cried, she told me, as she watched Hong Kong disappear below the plane as she flew out of the city in October.

Leung struggled with English when she first arrived, but being forced to use the language daily has helped her improve. Since moving to London, she has also begun to transition to living as a woman. The prevalence of the term prodemocracy at times obscures the fact that the victims of Beijing’s overhaul of Hong Kong reach far beyond the realm of election politics: civil society, progressive action groups, and individuals who depart from the authorities’ view of the norm. Leung previously worked with the city’s oldest prodemocracy party and its largest trade union. The union closed in the wake of the national-security law, along with dozens of other civil-society groups.

Leung told me she was reluctant to live as a woman in Hong Kong under the more authoritarian political regime now in place. She took the acceptance and encouragement she had received from new friends in London as a sign of the city’s openness compared with Hong Kong, where she saw such openness in steep decline. “It is interesting,” she told me, “that a place can give you the courage to live as yourself and trust yourself. It is a great expression of freedom.”

[safelynte]

Thanks, Xeno Even tho I don't really understand music, I love sharing it and appreciating it. I see lots of League of Legends songs up there 👁 I watched the Worlds Opening Ceremony this year and it was amazing. GODS and Paranoia are great and Warriors still gives me chills. I'm glad Riot never stops coming out with those.

I recognize Mad Hatter as well lol It was on one of my old YT playlists. That one has a really weird video.

Here's mine, just from my whole list of liked songs on shuffle:

1 Rockstar Everyday - Halflives 2 Reloaded - Drummatix 3 Finish Line - Skillet (God, I listen to this one so much while prepping TTRPG) 4 Good Enough - Lø Spirit (This one make me feel things 😔) 5 Ehle - Dark Side (Another one of the songs that remind me of AE) 6 In Control (Sotschi Remix) - Armen Paul feat. Olivia Reid (Absolute banger I love dancing too) 7 Lion Heart - KSHMR x DIVINE x LIT killah feat. Jeremy Oceans & KARRA 8 I Detach - ESA (Industrial/Aggrotech... A genre I used to be really into but I grew apart from it eventually. Still a vibe, though.) 9 Drama - Vion Konger (Aggressive, electronic... banger!) 10 Happy Meal - MOTi feat. Kristen Hanby & Junery

rules: shuffle your likes or your favorite playlist and post the first ten tracks

Tokyo (Vampires and Wolves) by the Wombats

Streets - Silhouette remix by Doja Cat

The Lightning Strike (what if this storm ends?) by Snow Patrol

Twin Size Mattress by the Front Bottoms

Fallin' by Alicia Keys

Golden Hour by JVKE

Through Glass by Stone Sour

Adeline by Alt-J

Little Dark Age by MGMT

I Can't Decide by Scissor Sisters

tagged by: @stonedpiece thank u tox bby

tagging (if you'd like!): @chibikuroneko13 @markwatnae @l-uffys @yourvibe-sucks @heart--pirates @kaar-ne @guccidueldisk @deadboyswalking, and anyone that wants to honestly I love seeing people's music tastes! c:

[cofferi]

mulan (2020)

boring and lame but what did we expect.

i’m going to preface this by saying of course this is every chinese girl’s childhood movie. you don’t need to be chinese or a girl to watch this, but if you’re a chinese girl, need i say more. i’m not going to go into everything because there was probably no part of this new movie that i liked. literally none. and yet some part of me can’t bear to think of this as less than a 5/10 simply for being a mulan story. like why disney? why are we here? so anyway here are my main points of contention:

this movie has NO emotion. there are seriously no highs or lows. they gloss over every single story beat which i knew they would, but it’s done so very crudely like they’re embarrassed the original ever did it in the first place (e.g. mulan never cuts her hair, the others don’t even know she’s the one who triggers the avalanche, she doesn’t bring back (new) shan yu’s wiggly sword to show her dad -- by far the biggest disappoint to me). there is no music at all. or if it’s there, it’s very very barely there. i don’t need this to be a musical, but the only emotional part of this entire film was the second ending song, yes after the first ending song, that had the rendition of “reflection.”

new characters. don’t understand why they’re there. what’s the significance of mulan now having a sister? is she even her sister? she doesn’t contribute anything, she has two appearances, it just now makes me wonder why does mulan go in their father’s place in contrast to her sister? what does she have that her sister doesn’t? what’s the point of her sister??? also the antagonist witch lady. i’m assuming she’s supposed to be like the powerful queen piece to the (new) shan yu’s king piece that mostly does nothing. she has “chi” and is an animagus but i don’t understand the limits of her power. she can basically do anything which means there are no dramatic stakes. anything can happen and anything does happen. i can kind of understand her speech to mulan about them being similar because they’re both women amongst men -- typical “join me and we can rule together” antagonist speech. but mulan very easily says no. and then i don’t know why the witch later SACRIFICES herself for mulan??? extremely random. i don’t think her very weak one-sided kinship with mulan warranted that at all...

language/accents. i really hate how inconsistent this is. some characters speak english fluently, some speak with a hint of an accent like they’re trying hard to have one, and mulan speaks with a pretty full accent. i don’t know anyone’s names because i can’t hear them. pls tell me i am being racist to my own kind because i can’t hear half the shit people are saying. i kind of thought this when i watched the aladdin live action -- like, what if everyone had an arabic accent? and i still think that could’ve worked in order to be a little more authentic and feel more cultural. but here it’s horrible. there are other shows that have characters with accents with better enunciation like fresh off the boat or kim’s convenience.

liu yifei. i was never enthused about the initial announcement of this movie and then i really wasn’t enthused when i heard about her shitty comments on hong kong. i can understand some celebrities had to possibly put out something in support of the CCP simply for their own safety or their family’s safety or what have you. it’s unfortunate but i’m not going to call them cowards or whatever because i can’t in good faith believe that what they’re saying are their true feelings. but did she really have to be so disgustingly rude about it when she made hers? when hong kongers are fighting for their lives but they should be ashamed of themselves and if we disagree then we can basically all go fuck ourselves? she didn’t say that exactly. but i dislike her on a purely emotional and personal level and that’s on me. but on top of that, her acting in this movie just seriously sucks. one critic apparently said before of her “she is pretty, but she’s too afraid to look ugly.” and that’s basically the standard for a lot of asian films/dramas. but that doesn’t make it good. it’s hard to draw the line between where the character development fails and where the acting fails because they’re both not there. i really hate to see this story of mulan where she breezes past everything with no real struggling, no hard work, no exertion beyond some beautifully painted dirt on her face, and not even one actual facial expression the entire time. i don’t think i saw her smile once. they really stripped bare this story of a woman trying to make it in a man’s world, using cleverness and strategy because she had to because she didn’t have the physical strength, and instead gave her this random “chi” that i still don’t understand anything about and they never explain. she’s good at sword fighting and roof parkour from the beginning, but she struggles only at carrying buckets of water up the mountain because the plot dictates it so.

i knew what i was getting into, and this movie still hurt me in a very shallow wound sort of way. like i knew there was a 0.5% chance i would enjoy it, either on an “it’s so bad it’s good” kind of way or even an “it’s actually not so bad” kind of way. but i’m still hurt nonetheless because i know this movie is going to be the only mulan some kids are ever going to watch. and i can’t bear to think this is going to make the reputation of chinese people look even worse, just in a very generalized back-of-the-mind unconscious way. this sort of watered down, cheap, barely serviceable “made in china” product that this technically isn’t but is all the rage in wanting to avoid now. and i don’t blame anyone for it. well i blame disney for it.

[djblendsky]

✘ BLENDSKYS Festival Radioshow #16 ✘

*Note*

Not a bored regular radioshow! Fast transitions!

30 minutes / 1 Hour the best Edm tracks all over the world!

Soundcloud: https://bit.ly/BSRadioshowVol16Soundcloud

Mixcloud: https://bit.ly/BSRadioshowVol16Mixcloud

💬 Download here: https://www.slammes.com/gate/10894/

➥ BLENDSKYS Festival Radioshow playlist on Mixcloud: bit.ly/3uPJ0zf

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Mixcloud: https://www.mixcloud.com/jonathanverhoye

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➥ Contact: dj.blendsky@outlook.com

Demo: dj.blendsky@outlook.be

❤️ Support: https://bit.ly/SupportDJBLENDSKY

🔊Tracklist:

1. Andrew Rayel feat. Sam Gray - Wild Feelings

2. Nils Van Zandt X BACKFLASH Ft. Basti Woods - Gone (Take On Me)

3. Megan Thee Stallion & Dua Lipa & David Guetta - Sweetest Pie (David Guetta Dance Remix Extended)

4. Endless Summer, Sam Feldt, Jonas Blue, Sam Derosa - Till The End

5. Dubdogz x Selva - Are You Down

6. R3hab - My Pony (Kryder Extended Remix)

7. Nikk & AVIIZ - Won't Leave Tonight

8. Manse x Jac & Harri - Nobody

9. Nick Havsen & Mike Miami - Harmonia

10. Krevix & Miami Boys - Just One Touch

11. KURA - Bananza

12. Öwnboss, Sevek - Move Your Body (Saint Punk Extended Remix) 

13. Mr. Sid & Serdar Bingol - Electric

14. We Do Voodoo, Amfree, Dj Shog - Braveheart

15. Winning Team - Party

16. Sputniq & Retrika - Break Down

17. Steff Da Campo - Hot in Here (Öwnboss Extended Remix) 

18. Gabry Ponte, Djs From Mars - Killing Me Softly 

19. Nick Havsen & David White - Ocean

20. Martin Jensen x Fastboy - One Day

21. Bastille, Alok - Run Into Trouble (Jonas Blue Extended Mix)

22. Stan Kayh & Oskana - Elephants 

23. Milky Bass - Transcendence 

24. Yellow Pvnk - Rythm of the Night

25. NWYR x Wiwek - Cocoon

26. Pete Tong & Becky Hill - You Got The Love (Tiësto Remix)

27. Alesso & Zara Larsson - Words 

28. Alle Farben & Keanu Silva - Music Sounds Better With You 

29. Vion Konger, Ken & Rebetz - Never Gonna Stop

30. Faithless - We Come 2022 (NoizBasses Remix)

31. Tiësto & Deorro - Savage

[don-dake]

《降魔的》 (2017)

Even though I have largely given up on TVB series since the early 2010s, childhood nostalgia is still keeping me from abandoning them completely and I still check out their stuff now and then, even when I know it will be largely utter cr*p.

I did hear good things about this though, and the plot summary sounded interesting and atypical of TVB's usual fare — TVB hardly ever does ghostly-supernatural stories and when they do, it often ends up well, super boring/just plain bad…anyway, I had been half keeping an eye on this. Finally got the chance to check it out recently.

Season 1 did pleasantly surprise me! The characters were interesting, plot pacing was good, few dull moments especially in the latter half, when the story and characters really started moving along.

Even though I thought the resolution with the main villain was handled rather lamely, and I wish the series had concluded nicely rather than led on to a Season 2, overall, Season 1 indeed lived up to its hype (among TVB viewers at least) and I found myself easily managing to binge-watch and finish all 21 episodes within a week!

Acting wise, nothing much to say, really. Kenneth Ma is a likeable guy but those who have followed his progress long enough know he's a limited actor. He's great at these nice guy, rather lackadaisical kind of roles, but any role that requires more than that and he falls short. Didn't expect and didn't get any character growth from him.

As for the other main/main-supporting actors, besides veteran Susan Tse (謝雪心) who's great in almost whatever role thrown her way (and she gave a great performance as usual), I can't say I know them well enough to judge.

In short, everyone's acting was…serviceable. Nothing outstanding, but nothing extremely bad either.

Besides the general enjoyability of Season 1, there was the added bonus of seeing a guest appearance by Law Lan (羅蘭) in Episode 1, which I thought was a very fitting and amusing cameo appearance considering 羅蘭姐 (Sister Law Lan) has made much of her later career through playing ghostly old ladies or ghost mediums in numerous movies and TV series before!

↑ 羅蘭 in Ep. 1 (S1)

廣東話：「又危險，又容易嚇親人」

Spoken Cantonese: “It's dangerous (to move about at night), people may get frightened (of you) too.”

I also enjoyed seeing the brief — don't think hers are considered as ‘guest’ — appearances of Winki Lai (賴慰玲) as the younger version of Susan Tse's character.

↑ 賴慰玲 in Ep. 4 (S1) & Ep. 3 (S2) respectively

Have liked Winki since first seeing her in 2014's 《女人俱樂部》 (Never Dance Alone), where she also played a younger version of another older character, in this case it was Angie Cheong's (張慧儀) character.

↑ 賴慰玲 & 張慧儀 at a promotion for 《女人俱樂部》 in 2014

Speaking of NDA, I'm finally watching this again too since it's currently available! Still really funny and relatable in many ways!

I also recently learned that Asako will be starring in the Japanese musical version of “Sunny” (the Korean movie upon which NDA was based, and there's also a Japanese movie remake) next year, if all goes as planned.

Even though I didn't enjoy the original Korean movie much (I actually preferred TVB's adaptation), and a musical version of a movie I didn't much enjoy doesn't sound very promising, it's still kind of exciting to know Asako will be in a project that is somewhat related to something I like, even if not the original! Heh!

(P.S.: I do wonder how Winki came about her Western moniker…very HK flavour I must say! I've noticed Hong Kongers tend to choose some of the most unusual sounding “Western” names for themselves sometimes! Sometimes, you can tell it's derived from their Chinese name, other times…it can be a real head-scratcher! Heh!)

Third bonus, I especially loved the cute rendition of the 石敢當 (sek6 gam2 dong1, aka shí gǎn dāng, aka ishigantou) that played a pivotal role in this series. 石敢當 aren't usually so cute, from what internet research tells me…

Someone in production obviously got heavily influenced by Japanese/Okinawan culture as the rendition in this series looks more like the 石敢當 found there. In the series' 2nd season, this was even affirmed by the introduction of the miniature souvenir figure version. Susan Tse's character supposedly bought it from Okinawa.

(P.S.: thanks to this series I guess, there seems to be copies of the exact same 石敢當 sold on the likes of Taobao now!)

↑ Ep. 5 (S1) & Ep. 2 (S2) — cute! (=^・^=)

《降魔的 2.0》 (2020)

Sadly, this rare success from TVB (nowadays) could not last beyond one season…

While S1 was great and a refreshing take for TVB, looks like S2 is back to the same old TVB problems: lack of focus, pacing issues and probably going out on a whimper.

S2 started off well enough, continuing directly where S1 left off. I was happy to revisit the characters again and follow whatever development was in-stored for them. Up until around Ep. 8 or 9 I was still quite enjoying this sequel, but it began to lose focus soon after that. Sigh…and it was going so well…

Can't say it wasn't expected though! Most sequels fail to live up to its predecessor, and TVB sequels have an especially bad track record. That was also the main reason I wished things had ended nicely in S1.

Thinking of this sequel thing, Hong Kong series in the past (say…around more than 15 years ago) rarely did sequels, most series wrapped up in a season (and this term ‘season’ wasn't even used back then), but lately I've noticed more sequels happening…can't say I like that! I hope this isn't going to become a standard! I like my shows short and sweet!

But not too much of a problem for me I guess, if I'm mostly going to stick to old (very old, by some people's standards) series from the noughties and before! Heh!

Anyway, back to ��The Exorcist's Meter》. In summary, enjoyed S1 a lot, S2, not so much but given that it's TVB, it's not the worse series they have churned out in recent years and now that I'm more than halfway through, I guess I'll see it to the end.

At least the theme and sub-theme songs from both seasons sung by Hubert Wu (胡鴻鈞) are nice! Putting a note here to check them out in full at another time:

S1: 《到此一遊》，《遙不可及》

S2: 《十字路口》，《凡人不懂愛》