Sometimes I look for behind the scenes or video clips from the Chinese dramas I’ve been watching and that leads me down a rabbit hole of video recommendations. That’s how I first came across this cool dance that is inspired by traditional Chinese dance elements. It was fascinating to watch for so many reasons:

• great choreography matching the music
• amazing gracefulness combined with powerful moves from these guys
• incredible wrist and fan work
• beautiful costumes
• omg the facial expressions of Bai Xiao Bai 白小白 on the left!

At first I took it as a wonderful piece of entertainment and moved on. Days later, I was looking some other things when I came across more of the work from Bai Xiao Bai and his TranScend studio. [Side note: I was trying to find a website for them but came across this fascinating breakdown of their branding/logo instead!]

That’s when I started to realize the first video wasn’t just two random dudes who did a cool thing, but that Bai Xiao Bai is a choreographer and dancer who is quite prolific! From then on, I started to watch of a ton of his productions, which then led me to a bunch of covers that other groups have done of his pieces. These two are probably the most popular:

Here’s one of my favorite compilations of the 燕无歇 dance challenge:

And this is probably one of the more high-profile performances of 芒种, by an actress so seems to pretty popular in China. I love that she actually plays the guzheng/zither part of the song in this performance.

And finally, I wanted to end by highlighting a really cute one that Bai Xiao Bai did with this kid. It’s playful and fun! I hope you like him and TranScend as much as I do and I hope you enjoyed watching all these videos that I absolutely adore.

Update: omg I just saw this remix! Love it. Had to add it in.

The other day, I was discussing favorite types of pens with my colleague Beezmo and came upon a revelation: ink pens are oil-based! I had never really thought about what exactly it was made of, but when we write we are essentially rubbing oil trails onto paper lol.

This led to an entire discussion about the types of writing utensils and what they are made of. Here’s what we determined:

• ink = oil-based paste
• gel = water-based gel
• marker = fibrous tip (usually felt)
• crayon = wax
• pencil = graphite

If you ever take out the tube of an ink pen, you’ll find it’s much thinner than a gel pen. Markers tend to have an even thicker tube since the actual fibers are being soaked, and crayons are even thicker since they are the actual part of the pen you hold.

I’ve always leaned slightly more towards gel pens, but they do take longer to dry so they’re not always the greatest choice. I generally like them because they tend to flow better and don’t get stuck like a lot of ink pens do. I hate when they don’t start dispensing right away or they leave uneven globs. But when I find an ink pen that flows well, those are a treat!

When I was in my teens and twenties, I was really into colorful pen sets and most of those (I never noticed) are gel. I had a phase going through glitter gel pens, metallic ones, milky ones, and scented ones too. There’s something so satisfying about the glide of them and I even like the slight scratch of the ball as I wrote. For awhile I was really into 0.5mm tips for how beautifully thin they are, but now I don’t mind if it’s 1.0mm if it glides well.

Nowadays I just want one that I can keep in any storage situation (position, temperature, time dormant, etc.) without affecting how easily it will start writing when I need to start using it again. A fun color is always a bonus, but a nice (darkish) black or blue ink is just fine too.

What are your preferences when it comes to writing implements?