Damn you, Pandora!!!

Pandora.com continues to play music at me that I've never heard before but am instantly compelled to click on their "buy this album from Amazon" links. So far they're just accumulating in my shopping cart, but still.

Today's damage: Secret of the Runes, by the group Therion, is a concept album based on Norse mythology with heavy-metal instrumentation and operatic choral voicework; the selections I've heard so far sound like Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" turned all the way up to eleven. All Wood and Stones, by Joh Batdorf and James Lee Stanley, covers the Rolling Stones' greatest hits in a mellow acoustic style that still somehow manages to retain the essential intensity of the originals. Pandora still needs to get a better grip on soundtracks and cast albums, what with randomly indexing them by show/film titles, character names, performers, composers, lyricists, or I don't know what-all else; also, I wish they could provide a continuous stream of something like the Coverville podcast, though I was delighted to hear Pat Boone's cover of "Stairway to Heaven".

Slashfic dollhouse!

Well, not as such (at least not that I know of), but someone is bound to construct itty-bitty lovingly detailed yaoi dioramas eventually, given the existence of dollhouse crime scenes and dollhouse fanart.

Distant family history and other wanderings

Courtesy of Wikipedia, with some abridgement:

The first wave of immigration of the gentile class arrived in the province in the early 4th century AD when the Western Jin Dynasty collapsed and the north was torn apart by invasions by nomadic peoples from the north, as well as civil war. These immigrants were primarily from eight families in central China: Lin (林), Huang (黄), Chen (陈), Zheng (郑), Zhan (詹), Qiu (邱), He (何), and Hu (胡). The first four remain as the major surnames of modern Fujian.

I'm pretty sure those transliterations are from the Mandarin pronunciations rather than the local dialect. Which is just as well for security purposes, though even within the specialized context of Lan-nang, my mother's family isn't quite sure how they ended up with most of the current aspects of their surname. (Some of them theorize an earlier transliteration accident based on bad handwriting.) I feel oddly balanced between "Hey! I really do belong somewhere on both sides!" and "Bah, in context, my specific family names seem so boring if everyone has them back home."( Read more... )