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I've recently gotten into perfume in the sense that I keep trying new samples to try to find a new One True Scent, so here are some recent perfumes I've sampled:

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None of these compare with My Love, which is Killian's Imperial Tea, which is a very realistic rendition of a fragrant cup of jasmine tea, but sadly that is discontinued and I've only been able to get an oil perfume dupe of it, so the hunt for a new favourite scent continues. I have quite a few more perfume samples to work through, but once I work through some more of my samples I'm going to get the Le Labo discovery set and hope that either their Thé Matcha or Thé Noir work for me.

Movies
Recently, I watched a series of short films at the Vancouver International Film Festival centred around family, and Everything Everywhere All At Once. The short films were great; Mumu, the Chinese film about CSL and audism was very well acted and emotionally intense; I loved how Bebe depicted preteen angst so well (the child actress was so good), and the twist in Ellie was superb. The landscape photography of Cambodia in the last film was incredible.

Everything Everywhere All At Once was enjoyable; it's not exactly my Asian-American experience, but it was incredibly fun with a solid emotional core. I loved the cinematography.

Music
I haven't listened to much new music; most notable new music I've listened to is probably Epik High's most recent album released last year, Lesserafim's new album, and Taylor Swift's Midnights. Loved "Snow on the Beach". Love "good parts (when the quality is bad but I am)" by Lesserafim. I love it when idols are involved in producing their own music, and Huh Yunjin is like, a revelation.

Books
I finally am over the worst of my brain fog (yay!) and so I read two novels recently.

The first is Kaijiu Preservation Society by John Scalzi. This novel read as if Pacific Rim was a Marvel film; it was incredibly well-paced and entertaining, with a lot of dubious but entertaining science and a decent amount of kaijiu screentime and a satisfying villain. Most of the characters  felt underdeveloped, but the villain was good.

The second is Siren Queen by Nghi Vo. I was very pleased with this book; the making the magic of Hollywood literal was incredibly well done, the wlw romance as well. The book is about a queer Chinese-American actress in the 1930s, and it did a good job portraying a realistic look at the discrimination the main character would face without descending into misery porn. The book balanced well ambition and thirst and fear, with joy and empowerment as well. Highly recommend.

Winter must be the season of feminist science fiction or something, because both these stories start on icy worlds.

I had high hopes for Left Hand of Darkness, and wasn't disappointed, in the end. The story follows a more familiar sort of human named Genry Ai, who goes around on a planet named Gethen, or Winter, trying to fulfill the mission of having the planet join an inter-galactic pan-humanist sort of organization called the Ekumen. In between, intrigue, exile, long bitterly cold journeys and love happens. The story started a bit slow for my liking, and the exposition is quite heavy. I'm not sure if this is just because Le Guin was writing this from a different era, when novels were less like the new TV, or if it was just a quirk of this book. The story does pick up when the action sequence starts, though, and culminates in a breath-taking climax that fully justifies the title Left Hand of Darkness. (Spoilers: the left hand of darkness is light.) I think the story is a quieter, more ponderous exploration of sex, the body, and cold and light than an action-adventure story set in space, though it is that too. But mostly it's about bodies, how they occupy space, how they freeze and thirst and starve, never joining together physically in the story, but ultimately coming together as one. It was a slow read, but a good one, and slowly I think it is at least as good as The Dispossessed, though it was a very different sort of book.

As for Ancillary Sword, I'm not sure anything I write can do this book justice. Sequel to Ancillary Justice, gender ambiguous pronouns in space opera plus action plus post-colonialist discourse plus witty, realistic, intelligent characters all around made for a fast and extremely satisfying read. I'd buy this book for all my friends if I could afford it. Though one could complain it's less...ponderous than Le Guin, and perhaps lacking the same sort of depth that a focus on one person on one planet would result in. They are very different books, though, even if one might categorize them both as feminist sci-fi. One is a mystical exploration of sex with no sex happening on screen at all, and the other is a post-colonialist space opera where everyone is gendered as female until otherwise notified. Both definitely worth the read, I think.

Finally, on a very different note, what is up with Harry Styles' hair??