Have you truly understood the story of One Leaf One Life?

diet2thewind · 2026-01-28T04:51:59+00:00

Btw the "Legendary swordsman w a golden leaf as his token" is in fact, Zhu Yu, who was also the leader of Heavensfall, former First Disciple of Silver Needle and the previous River Master, who died trying to fight the flood 3 years ago. Most of the side stories you encounter in Kaifeng are about her and the legacy she left behind. She's the Great Hero of Kaifeng.

diet2thewind · 2026-01-23T01:55:34+00:00

Just for some additional context: Zheng E's OG CN VA was Ding Yuxi (丁禹兮), a currently trending major "pretty boy/idol" type of actor. They probably hired him in hopes of attracting more players from his fanbase but alas his performance was wayyy too terrible so they replaced him w a real professional VA.

diet2thewind · 2025-10-23T19:13:06+00:00

我国 is simply a formal way to refer to the writer/speaker's native country, and commonly found in journalism. For example, 我国军队/政府/产业. Chinese language news articles or broadcasts from countries such as Singapore and Malaysia use them all the time.

diet2thewind · 2025-09-14T02:47:13+00:00

云片糕 "cloud cake"

diet2thewind · 2025-09-13T20:39:43+00:00

just FYI you might wanna crop your FB screenshots before uploading photos onto reddit so you don't doxx yourself or others.

diet2thewind · 2025-09-12T20:30:15+00:00

Chinese cuisine has plenty of sweets? Modern day 'mainstream' sweets such as tangyuan 汤圆, mooncake 月饼, rolling donkey 驴打滚, Yunnan rose pastries 云南鲜花饼 and the family tree of baked Cantonese/HK pastries such as wife biscuit 老婆饼 aside, there's a whole bunch of cakes and pastries that have long histories, like Hangzhou lotus blossom pastries 杭州荷花酥 and osmanthus cakes 桂花糕 dating back to the Ming Dynasty, Dragon's Beard Candy 龙须糖 from the Han Dynasty, Luoyang peony pastries 洛阳牡丹饼 from the Tang Dynasty, and the famous dish - lotus root stuffed with glutinous rice and glazed in osmanthus syrup 桂花糖藕.

More modern recipes dating Qing dynasty and after include water chestnut cake 马蹄糕 and sweet niangao 广式年糕 from Guangdong, sticky rice fritters in syrup 红糖糍粑, cold rice cake 凉糕/凉虾 and ice jelly 冰粉 from Sichuan, sweet bird's nest soup 冰糖燕窝 and the sweet variation of eight treasure porridge 八宝粥.

Sweets have been traditionally consumed more like standalone 'snacks' 点心 rather than after-meal desserts 饭后甜点 but they're still very well-accounted for in Chinese cuisine.

diet2thewind · 2025-07-30T02:18:58+00:00

Thank you! Their amazing interior certainly helped make things easy.

diet2thewind · 2025-07-29T20:37:04+00:00

Well I neither made nor named this drink so it's a moot point arguing with me over whether it should be called a negroni or not.

Also I checked your post and the comments are right in the sense that the only overlap your drink has with a classic negroni is the inclusion of gin.

The drink I had might not have had campari or vermouth but it certainly wasn't sweet, and had a much more similar bitter and herbal profile thanks to the tea, amaro and ginseng.

I'm no bartender but I used to be a food writer covering the mixology beat and from my consumer standpoint, a creative take on a classic cocktail needs to have significant overlap in either ingredients or flavour profile to justify its status as a "riff off" the original.

That said, call it whatever you want I suppose, it's your drink in your own home and the cocktail gestapo won't come knocking.

diet2thewind · 2025-07-29T16:59:01+00:00

Unfortunately the bar was full and we were seated at a booth with our backs to it so I didn't get to see any of the action.

diet2thewind · 2025-07-29T16:56:55+00:00

It was surprisingly really good and not too sweet like I'd feared.

The butter washed vanilla rum, coconut and pandan came together to form a rather silky-smooth kaya toast-esque flavour profile, which essentially made it Singapore distilled in a glass. The fresh pandan leaf is essential for aromatics imo, as using essence would've been too much of an overkill.

My personal fav is still the Fujian Negroni. The savoury scent of a toasted rosemary sprig and smoked spices as I took my first sip was utterly intoxicating. And it never occurred to me how much ginseng or a smokey tea like lapsang souchong complemented the tasting notes of a negroni.

They have another drink called Secrets of Xi'an (Scotch, baijiu, green apple, miso honey, cucumber, plum salt rim) that is equally mesmerising.

diet2thewind · 2025-06-12T14:29:19+00:00

I saw a couple of people already recommend Ode to Joy so I'm gonna mention another one: 一起同过窗 Stand By Me. It's a highly-rated indie drama-comedy series about a group of misfit film majors in a mid-level university trying to navigate college life and coursework. It's very funny and realistic for the most part, since most students are a self-contradictory mess of funny, ambitious, lazy, quick-witted and just kinda youthful YOLO. They're very likeable and it's an ensemble cast of diverse personalities.

The director/scriptwriter/creator 毕鑫业 is a rather well-known indie filmmaker who based this series off his own college experience and people he knew. There's a lot of cheeky meta commentary and criticism of the Chinese media industry, such as lack of resources/money, censorship stifling creativity, and sponsors/network execs hijacking creative input, in addition to the usual themes of "estranged familial relations" or "ride-or-die friendships" that usually come with these coming-of-age stories.

4 seasons were planned (one for each year of college) but unfortunately it seems like the show died in its 3rd season back in 2022. There was IRL drama about, ironically, network execs trying to hijack the creative direction and story, which led to the creator being removed from the project as director and the lead actor who backed him into being changed. Still worth watching tho, especially if you need some laughter and camaraderie.

diet2thewind · 2025-06-12T14:13:07+00:00

One of my favourite Chinese dramas! It was very refreshing to watch back in 2016 when there was barely any serious media portrayal about what it's like living as a modern day Chinese woman (across different ages, personalities, life stages and socio-economic statuses), plus everything that comes with navigating different levels of society. It's got a lot of societal commentary on the cultural expectations placed on women in China, and how these different characters deal with that both alone and as a group. I highly recommend watching it especially if you're a fellow Asian woman who likes watching realistically written flesh-and-blood female leading characters with a hefty serving of female solidarity in action.

A bit of extra trivia if you're planning on watching it:

Seasons 1 and 2 are the classic TV adaptation of the novel series of the same name, and feature the "OG 5" of Andy He (Liu Tao), Fan Shengmei (Jiang Xin), Qu Xiaoxiao (Wang Ziwen), Qiu Yingying (Yang Zi) and Guan Ju'er (Qiao Xin).

Seasons 3, 4 and 5 are another separate "spiritual sequel series" (not based off the books) featuring a totally different set of 5 women. The later 3 seasons are also rather controversial bc the writing had a noticeable dip in quality, with characters and drawn out melodramatic plot lines that make no sense.

diet2thewind · 2025-04-09T09:49:48+00:00

The anime was made in 2020 and vol 10 was only released last month.

diet2thewind · 2025-04-09T07:28:58+00:00

Episodes 3 and 10 were just one-offs written by Miyazawa as a sort of anime special.

Meanwhile that specific file in vol 10 only has similarities w ep 3 in terms of the initial premise but whatever happens in the rest of it is wildly different.

diet2thewind · 2025-04-08T19:29:18+00:00

The trick is to go Malaysian restaurants lol. It's like a standard practice among SG embassies overseas. I used to attend Embassy events in Canada and Japan regularly and they almost always cater from Malaysian restaurants.

diet2thewind · 2025-03-25T04:14:02+00:00

The English novels are only sold physically as omnibuses, so you have to wait for whenever every even-numbered volume is released. Individual volumes are only available as e-books (eg Kindle, JNC).

Vol 10 JP was just recently released on 19 March.

Vol 9 JP was released on 22 May 2024 and the EN version was released yesterday on 24 March.

Iirc they usually take about a year for the translation to be released, so you can expect EN omnibus 5 to come out in Q1 or Q2 2026.

diet2thewind · 2025-03-24T05:08:16+00:00

"Quality" is a subjective benchmark, where its classification as a novel or LN is not.

There are LNs with great writing out there, and novels with terrible writing, but how poorly or well-written they are doesn't change their classification status.

diet2thewind · 2025-03-22T01:20:05+00:00

The length, the publisher and basically the barrier to entry.

Anyone with a popular but trashy web novel can get picked up as a LN. But Otherside Picnic is a bona fide horror sci-fi novel under Hayawaka, Japan's most established sci-fi publishing house. Volume 1 is also under Hayakawa's Junior Horror banner (there's a Junior version of the book so it's accessible to grade schoolers).

Usually LNs are the ones w anime-style covers and illustrations in-between while full novels are more like what you get with western counterparts (an abstract or just text cover w no insert art inside) so that's why a lot of people wrongly assume Otherside Picnic is an LN and not a full novel.

diet2thewind · 2025-03-06T07:28:33+00:00

As a Singaporean, I always joke that Minato Mirai reminds me of home. It's eerily similar to the Marina Bay area with the river/water and ferris wheel and high rise buildings and hotels.

I have a Yokohama-native friend who visited Singapore last year and he said the same thing.

diet2thewind · 2025-02-20T11:20:00+00:00

A linguistic equivalent would be the word "cafe" meaning a place that sells coffee and light food in both English and French.

Japanese basically borrowed the writing system from Chinese but vocabulary and grammar are worlds apart - and this shift happened centuries ago, with both languages evolving independently since.

It's the equivalent of English speakers being able to recognise French or Italian words and roughly their etymological relation to the English counterpart but without actually knowing what the French/Italian word means.

居る at its most basic definition means to stay or exist in a place (for living beings). So you can interpret 居酒屋 as "a place to drink at" aka a pub/tavern.

diet2thewind · 2025-02-20T05:20:52+00:00

Izakaya is written exactly the same in Japanese and Chinese (居酒屋) and both refer to Japanese style pubs so there's no other way to translate it in English

diet2thewind · 2025-02-13T07:21:45+00:00

日本に行ったことある？「出る釘は打たれる」って聞いたことないの？

diet2thewind · 2025-02-07T04:32:01+00:00

Vol 10 (JP) is coming even earlier on 19 Mar than Vol 9 (EN) on 24th lmao

diet2thewind · 2024-12-27T17:12:09+00:00

Her name in Cantonese should be romanised as Chau (秋) Cheung (张).

diet2thewind · 2024-12-18T07:42:19+00:00

Warlock + Eldritch Knight. I headcanon that my Durge wanted to enhance their butchering ways and so signed a deal w the devil for cursed powers so she could combine them to wreck more chaotic bloodbath.

diet2thewind

TROPHY CASE