the wages of sin don't adjust for inflation

I picked up The Epic of Bidasari (and other tales) during a book fair ages ago in trying to support a local publisher, Silverfish Books, though sadly since then said publisher has gone under, apparently due to business troubles during lockdown. The book is a 2012 republishing of a 1901 publication by The Colonial Press (actual name!) which was a translation work from Malay to English of the older text, though it's unclear if they also did the Malay transcription from the oral form.

I adore the 1964 black-and-white film Bidasari starring Sarimah and Jins Shamsudin. (Shockingly, I can't find an upload of the full film on youtube to share here!) It's because of that I picked up this book, and I really enjoyed reading the full English-translated poem, which makes up the meat of this book, though I do wish I had a Malay original as well because you can just SEE glimpses between the words of what the original was, plus as with all translations the vibes would just be different. Also, the dialogue of the Bidasari film is almost entirely in verse, and I would've loved to see if they'd ported anything over from the poem.

Bidasari is a folktale/fairytale about a princess, Bidasari, who is abandoned as a baby by her royal parents when they (the parents) are chased by a garuda and have to flee into the desert. Bidasari is rescued by a merchant of another kingdom, who prospers as he raises her. Bidasari grows up beautiful and kind and flawless (etc etc) which puts her in the radar of the queen, who is beautiful but not that beautiful, and fears that her husband the king will take Bidasari as his second wife if he sees her. So the queen has Bidasari brought to her and locks her up to abuse in the hopes of ruining her beauty, eventually seemingly killing her, but due to certain magical shenanigans Bidasari isn't dead dead, but only partly dead. Bidasari's body is returned to her merchant father, who puts her in a secret house-tomb in the woods that the king eventually stumbles upon while hunting.

Obviously there's some similarity to Snow White, and the filmmakers of the movie saw that, too, and made the queen a witch of sorts who has a magic mirror that she uses pretty much the same way as the Snow White queen does. But the biggest change, which surprised me, too, is that instead of Bidasari being the queen's stepdaughter, she's the queen's rival for the king's love, and that just makes so much sense! Of course that only works in a folktale setting where polygyny is a thing, and vanity is a good enough sin for these kinds of stories regardless, but the queen's intense, preemptive jealousy just feels more organic this way, which I thought was neat. Like, the queen created her own problems by targeting Bidasari, more or less. (The Bidasari movie has the love interest prince be the evil queen's stepson instead.)

( Cut the rest for length. )

I'm watching the fourth case of Crime Scene Zero, and is it just me, or is someone in the crew/costuming department a fan of Sweeney Todd? Park Ji-yoon's look is a riff on Mrs. Lovett, right? I would've been more sure but the case has absolutely nothing to do with pies or any other foodstuff of dubious origin.

I picked up John Man's Genghis Khan: Life, Death and Resurrection so long ago that the bookstore chain I got it from is no longer doing business in this country. So, years ago! And I got it for reasons I no longer remember either, because I think I've been subconsciously avoiding John Man's works the same way I've been avoiding Tom Holland (the historian, not the actor!)'s because they're so everywhere and easy to find.

As a biography it's fine? I'm not familiar with Mongolian history beyond where it briefly touches other areas that are familiar to me, so this was nice as a primer, and Man's prose is solid and has a lot of passion for the topic. That said, there's an undertone that didn't work for me, I hesitate to call it paternalistic but maybe it is, in the way that Man describes certain beliefs and people. Man is very thoughtful and sympathetic to the struggles of modern Mongolia, and of the ways that the memory of Genghis is complicated by Mongolia-China's history as interpreted by modern day, but at the same time... To use specific examples, he describes some Buddhist-influenced ceremonies that honour Genghis as "strange", and he calls certain enemies of Genghis as "arrogant" and despicable without really giving further detail or giving said figures the same grace he gives Genghis, whom he fully acknowledges caused tremendous amounts of death and destruction in his conquests yet also speaks admiringly of. There's a line, I guess, in acknowledging the man's tremendous wartime skill and strategy and adaptability, without being breathlessly excited about the carnage he exacted.

Also, for a book that goes on a lot at times about the tactical moves Genghis made, I don't feel like I got a good grasp of how Genghis was so effective for so long and over such a large area. Yes, horses; yes, ruthlessness; yes, trusted generals -- but the logistics elude me somewhat, especially as for a great deal of it, the main moves made by Genghis's armies were to strike, grab, and then leave, with only some portions of the China side including any sort of effort to hold land and implement taxes, for a culture that valued the nomadic wilderness over the uselessness of farming. I think I need more comparisons of scale to better understand.

Anyway, the book is not just a history of Genghis Khan, but it's also about the cultural impact Genghis had as a figure of influence, memory and national identity. Those parts are absolutely fascinating but they by necessity come hand in hand with the partial memoir sections of Man's exploration of Mongolia in trying to follow Genghis' footsteps, to the place of his supposed birth to the place(s) of his supposed death and/or memorialization, with all of Man's misadventures of hiking in the wilderness, getting lost while climbing a mountain, stumbling upon helpful people in unexpected places, and so on. Makes for good stories, and it does bring the modern Mongolia of 2002 and 2009 to vivid detail, but it's there particularly that Man's idiosyncrasies come out in the telling, and my eyes glaze over.

I carved out some time to watch Alice in Borderland's season 3, which I've then described to various people as an OVA to the first two seasons, i.e. a shorter (6 episodes, in this case) side story that isn't as necessary to the main story, which is already complete. I didn't enjoy it as much for a couple of reasons, the main one being is that the emotional throughline just isn't strong.

Season 3 uses some of the unused games of the original manga that weren't in s1-2, doesn't use anything from Border Road, but I THINK does use some elements of the short Borderland sequel, which I haven't read but I have osmosed does include Arisu reentering the games while Usagi is pregnant. I might be wrong, but my impression is in the manga sequel, Usagi doesn't reenter the games, and if so, the show's season 3 had to invent their own reasoning to get Usagi into the games, because it's just better that way, plus it changes Arisu's motivation from "survive the games so he can return to Usagi" to IMO the more compelling "find Usagi and get her out".

( Spoilers and so on. )