Capsule 2504

April is the cruellest month

Playing

I played my first new game in a while, and a non-gacha one at that. It’s a simple cosy game called Homecoming Haven that can be completed in one sitting. The premise of this game is that you boot up a game that someone else used to play, and more than a decade has passed since then. You find yourself in the village square of an abandoned island, and the only NPC in the game tells you that the previous player had left a lot of projects in the town incomplete, and that the villagers had moved out. Basically, a simple reimagining of and homage to Animal Crossing: New Horizons, imagining your abandoned island and villagers (or lack thereof) after you’ve stopped playing the game. It was cute and bittersweet.

I also finally updated for Genshin Impact for the first time since late January/early February, and all because the game announced that the the main quest in the upcoming patch update will see us returning to where it all began, with the characters we’d first met in the game—and best of all, a fan-favourite character and one of my favourites as well, the alchemist Albedo, will make his first ever main quest appearance. My timeline exploded with players saying they were reinstalling the game for the first time in ages (even years, in some cases), as well as fan artist re-draws of two very specific images of Albedo: one being a cut-scene screenshot from the trailer, and another being a shot of him from the upcoming story’s banner. I was not immune to the hype, and tried drawing him as well. I spent my last weekend in April trying to catch up with the main quest storyline so I don’t have to speedrun it when the new update is released.

Watched

I’ve been watching Pantheon, a sci-fi animated series based on three short stories in Ken Liu’s The Hidden Girl anthology: "The Gods Will Not Be Chained", "The Gods Will Not Be Slain" and "The Gods Have Not Died in Vain”. I remembered those being amongst my favourite interlinked stories in that anthology, but before I picked up the series, I couldn’t imagine how those three stories could have enough content to span two entire seasons of an animated series. While Pantheon does indeed draw inspiration from Ken Liu’s stories, the series expanded on the world of those stories, weaving in complex plots and conspiracies on an international scale, as well as introducing new characters like Caspian and his pretend-parents, in the project to bring about a new era of Uploaded Intelligence (UI).

I caught the Wicked musical on its last day in Singapore; my only prior exposure to this musical was through the 2024 film of Part 1, which I was a huge fan of for all the homoerotic subtext between Glinda and Elphaba. While I did enjoy the performances and the movement of the sets in smooth transitions between scenes, and particularly the songs, in the musical proper, I realised that the story moved along almost dizzyingly quickly in comparison to the film. I enjoyed the first act, in part probably due to my familiarity with the songs, but the second act moved along far too quickly, and the ending felt almost abrupt. The second act felt like whoever wrote the musical was trying too hard to hit certain key points/images (e.g., how the wicked witch of the east, the tin man, the scarecrow, and the cowardly lion came to be in this retelling of the Wicked Witch of the West’s story), that there wasn’t enough thought given to how the story progressed between these points. I think Les Miserables and Hamilton remain the best musical stages I’ve watched to this day.

Books I read

1. Ithaca by Claire North

2. Lightfall by Ed Crocker

3. Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-Zi

4. The Accidental Malay by Karina Robles Bahrin

5. Those Who Burned the Brightest by Kayla Morton

6. House of Odysseus by Claire North

7. The Last Song of Penelope by Claire North

8. The Disappeared by Amy Lord

9. Other Parents by Sarah Stovell

I finally finished reading Plato’s Republic! Cue that meme of the silhouette of the woman in the sunset, breaking chains over her head. What I’ve learnt from those 2.5 months was: 1) I can’t stand Socratic dialogue and 2) I am extremely rusty and need to get back into practice of reading more challenging texts that aren’t just literary fiction.

Next, I’m planning to borrow John Pickles’ A History of Spaces and Denis Wood’s The Power of Maps from my university library within this year, probably while on my self-imposed ban from borrowing books from the public library or on Libby, so that I can make some headway with my backlog of ARCs and the books that I’ve accumulated on my physical shelves at home.

Book Clubs & Possible Communities

I went for my first ever session with The Other Book Club (a queer local book club), which was reading The Accidental Malay for the month. Since that book had been on my TBR since I first saw Epigram announce that it was shortlisted for their Fiction Prize, but I never got around to picking it up, I figured signing up for this book club would finally pressure me into reading it. Which I did.

Unfortunately, I did not like the book, even though I’d really wanted to. The only thing I properly liked about it was the author’s writing style, how certain turns of phrase or images linger as I read her words. The plot and characterisation were far too messy for me, and it seemed that a lot of the attendees at the book club felt the same way.

One thing that struck me from attending that book club, which had nothing to do with the book, was how starved I’d been for a queer space—it’s too premature to call it a community. I made conversation with a sapphic couple, one of the male attendees joked about how he wouldn’t date a certain male character in the book, and another man casually spoke about how he’d had his heart broken by different guys from different parts of Malaysia. I feel like I’d been inundated by so much heteronormativity throughout my daily life, and particularly at work, that being in space where strangers could be open about their queerness felt like I was gulping in lungs full of fresh air, not realising until then that I’d been breathing in haze particles for ages.

A few days after The Other Book Club, I went for my second session with the Quiet Readers Club. To my surprise, I bumped into not just a number of familiar faces from my bookstagram or the previous QRC session, but I also recognised one of the attendees from The Other Book Club (and she recognised me too!), and probably most surprising of all, I spotted a friend I hadn’t seen since our undergraduate days.

As we made our way to the MRT station, my new friend and my reacquainted friend and I talked about our reasons for joining these different book clubs. A reason we all had in common was that we wanted to find people who shared the same introverted hobby and to spend time with them. I’ve been a huge fan of parallel play ever since I first heard of the concept, and I love that QRC creates that space for parallel play of a sort between readers.

On being a casual fan

Ever since I dropped FTIsland, I’d been on the lookout for bands I could get into, to fill the void that has been left by the music I stopped listening to. Funnily enough, a few of my online friends who’d dropped them at around the same time I did, had been getting into this same k-rock band, Xdinary Heroes. I’d listened to a few of their songs before, and I did like them, but I wasn’t particularly invested in them just yet.

They’d recently released a new album, Beautiful Mind, which I listened to in its entirety and on repeat, and found that I really liked their sound. And what perfect timing too: they announced their upcoming world tour, in which they’d be making a stop in Singapore. I figured I needed a concert to look forward to this year, after having gone for two in the first two months of 2025, so I ended up buying a ticket to see XH in July; since I was still not particularly familiar with the band and its individual members, I didn’t need good seats close to the stage, I just wanted to be in that concert hall, listening to them perform live.

I’ve been listening to more of XH’s music on loop since then, and I realised I really do love their sound—their music sounds like the direction in which I’d hoped FTIsland would take theirs, even without all the questionable scandals that two of their members have embroiled themselves in. Apart from XH, I’ve also been listening to a few of Woodz’s newer rockish songs, a few other kbands that I’d taken a passing interest before, and the Japanese project band Acid Black Cherry, and I’ve been putting together a playlist of these songs which I titled “rebound” for probably obvious reasons.

Another thing I’ve had a casual interest in for the past few years is VTubers, with my favourite still being Ike Eveland from NijisanjiEN. So when I saw him post a letter on Twitter about leaving the VTuber scene, I was more devastated about it than I imagined I would be. It was funny how, just that very morning before I saw his post, I’d been thinking about how I hadn’t seen any updates from him, and entertaining the thought of watching one of his old streams of Omori or Persona 5—that can’t happen anymore, because all his videos have been cleared from YouTube. I’ve seen people get upset over the “graduation” of their favourite VTubers before, I just hadn’t expected myself to be in a similar situation and with absolutely no preparation for it whatsoever. Just a “Ike Eveland’s has graduated from NijisanjiEN as of today” post from the company and that was that. Perhaps I need more practice in being casually into things.