Tag: China

This was almost a politics post

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

…which I have refrained from, because typing “Fuck Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin” three thousand times, while accurate and fair, is not exactly compelling reading.

Speaking of not compelling, let’s blogwank:

Seriously, what’s going on here? October 31 was the highest traffic day since 2015 until November 1, which was the highest traffic day since 2015 until yesterday, which was the highest traffic day since 2015 until– goes and looks— oh, basically right now, since I’m 7 views short of yesterday’s numbers. Engagement doesn’t really seem to be going anywhere and I’m not seeing anything weird in what limited data I’m getting from referrals, and while the immediate impulse is to suspect bots, if they are bots, has WordPress suddenly lost the ability to keep them from showing up in our statistics? Or turned it off? A lot of this traffic is from China but the last couple of days it’s been mostly American. Here’s the geography numbers:

The 7200 from the US would nearly be the best month of the year all by itself. October 2025 was the best month in years, and November should pass it tomorrow. It looks like my traditionally big posts are getting the lion’s share of this traffic, but the numbers aren’t adding up, which is weird, and I feel like this also pushes back on the bot theory– would thousands and thousands of bots be indexing the same post over and over again?

Somebody who knows more than me explain what the deal is.

Explain, pls

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

Anyone have any ideas about why China, and not the US, has been my #1 source of traffic for the last couple of days? And traffic has been up pretty considerably in both viewers and pageviews, so it’s not like a single bot is crawling the site or something.

I feel like this has to be nefarious somehow, and also like my suspicion is maybe at least a little bit racist. But maybe not.

Anyway, I’m bound and determined to get to bed as early as possible tonight, so this blogwanking update was brought to you by the letter Zzzzz.

#REVIEW: The Art of Prophecy, by Wesley Chu

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews3 Comments

You know this; I have somehow acquired enough pull as an Important Book Reviewer that sometimes publicists contact me to see if I want review copies of things. I almost always say yes; the only time I can think of that I declined a read was when the publicist made it clear that she was offering me a pure romance novel. I don’t mind romance, but I need it mixed with something, and I didn’t want to accept a book that I was already probably not going to enjoy.

At any rate, I got an email a few weeks ago about Wesley Chu’s new book, The Art of Legend, out today at finer retail establishments across the globe. Would I like a review copy? Absolutely, I said, except there’s one problem. It’s book 3 of 3, and I haven’t read the first two. I’ve enjoyed Chu’s work in the past but reading book 3 on its own kinda feels like a heavy lift.

No problem, the publicist said … and sent me the entire trilogy. Not even ARCs! Actual official copies! So I finished Book One today, and my intent is to read Katabasis and then read the next two back-to-back. I plan to review all three of them.

This plan would backfire quickly if I hadn’t liked the first book! So it’s lucky that I didn’t; The Art of Prophecy shares the strengths of the two Chu books I’ve read in the past, with great action, interesting characters, and a quick-moving plot that would have had the book read overnight if school hadn’t just started.

The premise, as you might have guessed, involves a prophecy: a young man named Jian, the Champion of the Five Under Heaven, has been groomed since birth to be the one who defeats the Eternal Khan, saving his kingdom from the forces of evil in the process. Jian has been trained by the finest teachers in the martial arts, but is still young; only fifteen or so, if I remember correctly.

A master named Taishi arrives to evaluate Jian and his training, and she finds both severely lacking. Jian is indolent and callow, his trainers little more than grifters, and his training has been more for show. The boy is more of a professional wrestler than a prophesied warrior.

So we already have a problem.

And then the Khan goes and gets himself killed in a drunken stupor, without Jian’s help in any way, and … all hell kinda breaks loose.

This was a lot of fun, y’all, and I apparently have a thing for impatient, irascible old one-armed women, because Taishi is one of the best characters I’ve encountered in quite a while. The fact that she’s a supreme badass who more or less melts her way through damn near any adversary she encounters for the entire book doesn’t hurt at all, and her complete lack of patience with Jian’s crap is breathtaking. I loved it. As I said, the wuxia-flavored action is great, and Chu avoids the trap of only describing battles using complicated names of moves. Sure, sometimes he’ll let you know that someone has deflected a Monkey Saves the Circus by using Monkey Ruins Christmas Dinner, but he’ll also describe what that means, which is my problem with the handful of wuxia books I’ve read. You’re also going to see this world from more than one perspective, as at least a couple of the POV characters are out to get both Jian and Taishi, and one of them carries a fragment of the Great Khan’s soul with her. Surprisingly, she doesn’t think her people are the evil empire.

I’m not going to spoil a whole lot of details about what happens next, but there are a lot of assassins, and Jian has to go into hiding in a martial arts school and masquerade as a novice and an orphan … which after years of wealth and pampering, doesn’t go quite as well as everyone might have hoped. Not everything gets wrapped up, as this was clearly written with a trilogy in mind from the start, but since Book Three is already out, the only thing making you wait is how fast you can read. I’m particularly interested in finding out more about a particular side character who starts having panic attacks during battles partway through the book; we’ll see how much of him we see in Book Two.

Definitely check it out. I’ve got a three-day weekend coming, so hopefully I can have my review of The Art of Destiny up within a week or so.

Two reviewlets

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews, video gamesLeave a comment

I have two things I want to review, but I don’t have the patience to do a full-length review of either of them, so you should fully expect that the actual writing in this post will take up less space than the pictures. Short version: buy both of these things!

The Fury of the Gods, by John Gwynne, is the third and concluding volume of his Bloodsworn trilogy, and as luck would have it I finished the book I was reading the day it showed up so I was able to dive right into it. I have ten of Gwynne’s books, all read over the last couple of years, and Bloodsworn is definitely his best series, but I’d need to reread the whole trilogy to tell you for sure if Fury of the Gods is my favorite of his books or not. One way or another, this showcases everything Gwynne is best at: a deeply Norse-inflected world, with very cool magic and absolutely brutal action, that starts off with all of the gods dead and gone and ends with them very much neither of those two things. The last hundred and fifty pages of Fury is one long battle scene. It’s amazing. His character work remains exceptional and the way this series swaps POVs between both sides of the major conflict in the book is great; I think it’s fair to say that there’s a bad-guy side but everyone’s reasons for fighting the way they do make sense and damn near everyone was interesting.

Also, my God, the covers for these books are remarkable.

He’s also doing this thing in this series where men and women exist in a society of complete equality and yet he never bothers to draw attention to it. There’s a lot of stuff in The Bloodsworn that is drawn from Norse/Viking culture, including the alphabet, but he sets aside historical accuracy whenever he feels like it, and gender differences are one of those places. If you’re looking for woman warrior characters (and everyone in these books is a warrior), you need look no further.

I finished Black Myth Wukong yesterday, finally, and I’m playing at least partially through it again because this is one of those games where I feel like I need the Platinum trophy and there’s no way to do that in one play through. This game is Chinese the same way that The Bloodsworn is Norse; it’s more inspired by myth and legend than historical reality, and frankly if you’re not already a student of Chinese culture (and I’m very much not) there’s a lot in this story that’s going to leave you behind. It’s apparently a video game version of Journey to the West, one of the five Classical Chinese novels, and … uh, that’s all I know about the five Classical Chinese novels? All I know is the story in lots of places makes no sense at all to my American ass but that doesn’t matter even a tiny bit because monkey man hit monster with stick.

Seriously, outside of the Nioh series this may be my favorite non-Fromsoft Soulslike (and anyone who claims it’s not a Soulslike but an “action RPG” should be shunned; this is absolutely a Soulslike) and I think I might like it more than I liked Nioh 1 anyway. There are some technical issues; I’m still hoping for an optimization patch, and there’s a stuttering issue that gets worse the longer you go without either restarting your PS5 or actually closing the game out and reopening it, but beyond that? No gripes. You’d think that build variation would be a problem given that you’re limited to the staff as your weapon, but 1) it doesn’t matter because the staff is hugely fun and 2) there are enough different stances and other ways to set up your build that there are going to be a million ways to approach any situation anyway. I talked about the difficulty yesterday; I’d say this hits the sweet spot of being difficult but fair pretty precisely, but people who haven’t been mainlining Souls games for years like I have may want to gird their loins. I hear there’s a big DLC coming eventually and I’m going to buy it the second I hear about it.

Haha LOL you go to hell

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Reviews1 Comment

You might remember a post about some new shoes I ordered a couple of weeks ago, and how before the shoes had even been shipped much less arrived in my home the company was hassling me about becoming a “brand ambassador” for them, to the point where I eventually dropped the name of their company into my spam filter.

Well, they have committed two additional sins since then: first, the shoes shipped directly from China, which, well, I’m fully aware that a number of the goods I use on a daily basis originated there, but each and every time I’ve gotten a tracking number and it’s been from a Chinese shipping company I’ve had to brace myself to either receive nothing at all or to get a piece of fucking junk. I’m fairly sure that’s been a literally universal experience. Every single time.

Then I did something I really should have done before ordering the shoes, and Googled reviews of the company, and to put it charitably they are utter shit. I have got to learn how to deal with any new company that I’ve never ordered anything from online; I’ve gotten caught up in stupid shit too damn many times at this point and I’m too old to be this Goddamn dumb.

Today, the shoes showed up. These fuckers didn’t even put the shoes in shoeboxes. There are literally four shoes wrapped up in a polybag and taped up.

I’m not even opening the packaging; I’ve already initiated the return. It’s gonna cost me a few bucks to ship them back and I’m anticipating additional bullshit once they receive them (the refund is apparently contingent upon “inspection” of the product once the return center, which is in Utah, receives it) but I feel like “the package was literally never even opened and I’m returning these because I hate you” is about as ironclad a reason to return something as I can give them. If I didn’t open the damn package, it’s hard to suggest I ruined the shoes.

So, yeah. Fuck Gatsby Shoes. Don’t give them your money or your email address. That’s me being a brand ambassador right there.

I remain open for actual brand ambassadorship if Kizik decides they need a fat Internet guy to hawk their shoes, though.

I don’t know how to talk about this book: HOSPITAL, by Han Song

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

Take a moment and soak in that cover, which is amazing, because it is absolutely and undeniably the best thing about Han Song’s Hospital. I do not write a lot of negative book reviews around here– there are definitely some from time to time, and usually if I take the time to shit on a book it’s because I found it specificially offensive in some way or another. This is not that. This is, I think, a very bad book, and I don’t want you to read it, but I need someone else to read it so I can be sure I’m not crazy, so basically what I’m looking for here is someone to take a hit for the team, possibly literally steal this book from somewhere, and read it.

I’m not going to spend much time talking about the plot because frankly it doesn’t matter, but basically the main character gets sick from drinking some mineral water while on a business trip, ends up in the hospital, and then everything, including the narrative, goes directly to hell, and by the end of the book the entire universe is a hospital and just roll with it because it’s not gonna make any sense. The book starts off with a prologue where a Buddhist astronaut is going to colonize Mars; it sounds really interesting at first, but once the prologue is over that storyline will never be referred to again and the book very definitely takes place in China and on Earth.

That’s not a joke, and it’s not something I missed. The prologue appears to belong to an entirely different book.

The narrator is unreliable, the narrative is unclear, internally incoherent, and inconsistent, people die and then are not dead any longer for no reason, there are some of the worst sex scenes I have ever encountered, no one anywhere talks like they do in this book, and despite huge chunks of the book being devoted to people holding forth on philosophy the book has no overall point that I was able to decipher. It is translated from Chinese; while it is definitely not a good translation of a good book, I cannot tell you if it is 1) a good translation of a bad book, 2) a bad translation of a good book, or 3) a bad translation of a bad book. It’s entirely possible that things flew over my head that would be clear to Chinese readers. It’s also possible that the whole book is bullshit.

Here’s the problem: it’s unimaginable to me that this book is actually as bad as I think it is, because I still have some shred of belief that publication is not just purely luck, and someone somewhere had to find some literary merit in this thing and I’m completely missing it. There are two sequels in Chinese and the second one in English is coming out in a couple of months. The whole series is being translated, and if the translator’s note at the end of the book can be trusted, Han Song himself prefers the English edition of the book. So this isn’t just one book, like, slipping through quality control somewhere, or an insane editor’s pet project. That’s six books, plus the added cost of the translator!

Please, someone, take the hit for me, read this Goddamned thing, and help me figure out what’s going on.

In which I read The Witcher

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews3 Comments

… or, rather, I read the first two hundred pages of Blood and Elves, which I’ve come to discover is technically the third Witcher book, after two books of short stories, but is branded as the first book because it’s the first novel.

And it’s terrible. Absolutely unforgivably terrible. I went and looked at other bad reviews of it on Goodreads, and many of them seem to feel like the first two books (the short stories) were pretty good and then this one shit the bed, but that sentence with all the arrows pointed at it up there is where I decided I really was going to put this down, and then I read a few more pages anyway, and it’s just a Goddamned awful book. I’m going to lay a bit of the blame on the translator– I am willing to wager a small sum that the words she translated as “bite your own backside in fury” are a Polish proverb expressing angry frustration, but if that’s the case it should never have been translated literally. As a guy with a couple of degrees in Biblical studies I take translation pretty seriously, and there is no good reason to ever translate a proverb literally when you’re translating for a different culture. But it wasn’t the translator who wrote the endless conversations where characters explain things to each other that they already know, or the utter disgrace to women everywhere that is Triss Merigold’s character, or who decided to write two hundred pages about a guy called a Witcher where he does no Witching of any kind.

Seriously, the dude’s supposed to be a monster hunter. There is none of that in this book, or at least not in the first half. It’s dreadfully boring. And I was dumb enough to jump straight to the box set of the first three novels, so I not only have this thing sitting on my shelf now but two other books that I have no intention of reading. Bah.

And so long as we’re talking about works read in translation, the book before dipping into the world of the Witcher was Jin Yong’s A Hero Born, which is the first book of a massively successful series in China that has only recently been translated into English. This is one of those books that I ordered because I got flooded with people talking about it in a short period of time, and the phrase “Chinese Lord of the Rings” kept coming up.

I don’t know what the Chinese Lord of the Rings might be, but it is not Legends of the Condor Heroes. To be honest, having read it, I cannot for the life of me imagine what the hell possessed anyone to compare those two books to each other, other than the knowledge that it would get my specific subtype of nerd to order a copy. They were both initially published in the fifties. That’s all I’ve got. What A Hero Born is is a perfectly serviceable wuxia novel, or in other words a book set in ancient China that is all about powerful martial artists going around and doing things.

What things are they doing? Hard to say, because rather than describe the action most of the time Jin Yong just names the move and either expects you to know what that is (which I can’t believe is actually the case, but I suppose might be) or expects you to fill in the details yourself. In other words, you might have one character attack another with a Rooster Masturbates the Moose move and have that move be countered with an Insipid Charlatan, but the variant from the Batman Eats a Blueberry Crepe school of kung fu, not the normal one.

What’s that mean? Hell if I know. And clearly this works in China, and I didn’t hate the book by any means, but it was sort of a slog.

So, yeah. So far, not regretting writing my Best Books of the Year post with a couple of days left in the year.

#REVIEW: THE DRAGON REPUBLIC, by R.F. Kuang

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews2 Comments

I was a big fan of the first book in R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy War series– it ended up being very highly ranked in what was a very good year for reading– and I jumped on the sequel as fast as I could when it came out.

And … well, brace yourself. This is not one of my usual hyperbolic slobbery OMG GO READ THIS RIGHT NOW reviews. I still think you need to read it, but there’s gonna be a proviso or two, some quid pro quos … anyway, read on.

Trigger warning, for, like, everything that is bad. If you’ve ever needed a trigger warning of any kind do not read this book or this review.

The Poppy War starts out almost sorta feeling like a Harry Potter knockoff set in a China analogue, only Hogwarts is a military academy and Hermione is the main character instead of Harry. Oh, and she’s explicitly described as being an ethnic minority rather than being shoehorned into being one years later on the strength of her hair being described as curly, but that’s a whole different conversation. That conceit will last you about a third of the first book, and then Hermione, whose name is Rin in this book, burns out her fucking uterus with drugs because menstruation distracts her from her studies and then all the sudden it ain’t Harry Potter no more and it really never goes back. It goes dark and it goes violent and it goes really war-crimey and this is a book that I enjoyed reading quite a lot but it absolutely 100% is not for everyone. Rin eventually acquires the ability to produce and control fire, and … well, she doesn’t really use it to keep people warm.

I mean, they are warm, for the second or two until they burn to death, but not, like, in a good, comfy sort of way. The bad kind of warm. Where you’re screaming. And then you die. There’s lots of that. And the book honest to God ends with Rin committing what is basically genocide. Spoiler alert, I guess. That was book one, you should have read it by now.

Anyway.

The thing about The Dragon Republic is that it doesn’t start off with the comforting (ha, “comforting,” he called it) Harry Potter-esque maybe this is sorta YA beginning. No, the Rin in this book is already jaded as fuck and is basically a war criminal leading a gang of war criminals, and she spends the first 2/3 of the book drug-addicted, angry, depressed, suffering from massive holy shit-level fucking PTSD, and mostly unable to use her powers for various reasons. Oh, and also racism. Like entire groups of people in this book refuse to even treat Rin like she’s human. Lotsa racism.

The first book got dark. The Dragon Republic starts off dark, stays dark, and then trades that dark for a chic slightly darker dark once it gets going. And by the end of this one, we’ve completely upended everyone we’re fighting against and everyone we’re fighting against and the status quo is status gone, and everyone is miserable or dead or a refugee or all three except the ruling class, and fuck those guys anyway.

I four-starred it on Goodreads, but this is one of those books that really resists a star rating, because in many ways it’s just as good a book as the first one, and again, I really liked the first one. It’s just that it’s so fucking unrelentingly gritty that you want to wash your hands when you’re done reading it, and it’s hard to read because of that. It may end up on my end-of-year list anyway despite four-starring it, because it is what it is very, very effectively. It’s just that it’s a book where terrible things are happening all the time to main characters who are really only moderately sympathetic to begin with– saying Rin is kind of an asshole is a muted understatement– and … well, if you don’t want to read something like that, I’m not going to get mad at you. The first book Ain’t for Everybody. This book, I think, is for a slightly smaller subset of Ain’t for Everybody, because I think there will be people who read and enjoyed The Poppy War who will check out of this anyway, and again, I can’t be mad at them about it.

If you liked the first book, definitely pick this up, but if anything about this review made you think that you might be part of the Everybody that this Ain’t For, I’d gently suggest you listen to that intuition. R.F. Kuang is absolutely a writer of staggering talent, and I’m just as in for Book Three as I was for The Dragon Republic, but I just can’t recommend this book unconditionally. Enjoy, but enjoy with care.