My Summer Vacation: May 2026

Saturday, May 16, 2026

Chinese TV Series Rabbit Hole

Last October, when I was returning from the Hawaiian Council annual meeting in Washington state, I was sitting on the plane near a woman who was watching a show on her tablet. It turned out to be the Chinese TV series, The Imperial Coroner; & even though I could not hear any dialogue it piqued my interest. I like crime & mystery type stories & the historical & cultural aspects also interest me. So when I got home, I Googled it. And thus started my journey down the rabbit hole.

I think I like watching these type of things because of trying to figure out who the culprit is & whether the clues that they find or give are really based on science. (I do that with ones in English, too.) And in the historical genre ones, because of the swordplay & horses. This one had a little bit of everything plus a blossoming romance.

Screenshot from Rakuten Viki.

Since then I have also branched out in to watching some wuxia swordplay & some xianxia fantasy-oriented series. Most of the things I have been watching are from mainland China so they are in Mandarin with English & Cantonese subtitles. I have watched a handful of Korean shows & a couple each from Hong Kong, Shanghai, & Taiwan. Nearly all of them are on Rakuten Viki. Here's what pops up when I click on the link on my desktop.

Maiden Holmes is the only one out of those above that I have watched.

Since starting the journey down that rabbit hole, I have also made a document to help me keep track of what I saw & whether I liked it & would watch it again. There are 4 categories on the list: Watch Again OK, Once Is Enough, Nope, & Viki Pass - Watch When Free. The Watch Again category is self-explanatory; but I have hyperlinked the actual 1st episode to the ones I really enjoyed (which is about 90% of them) to make rewatching easier. The Once Is Enough category is shows I enjoyed the 1st time around but don't have an overwhelming urge to see it again. However, if you come for a visit & want to see it, I will sit there & watch it with you. The Nope category, if you want to watch those, I will let you watch it on your own; they were so painful I could not even get through 2 or so episodes. For all of the ones I have watched, in the document I list the description of the series as indicated by the hosting site, the genres it covers, the main actors, when I watched it, & my very short description of it that is more meaningful to me. Like "phoenix sold as chicken" or "detective with anger management issues". These short phrases probably won't help you remember the series but they trigger a lot of memories for me; my brain seems to be wired a little differently.

Well, gotta go! Need to watch the next episode of Love of Nirvana. [shameless cat vs Marquis]

It rained really hard for about 15 minutes at around 7:45 this evening. It was coming down so hard the rain was visible on all the security cameras. Usually it can only be seen on the North & East cameras because water is directed down in those areas. Rain coming down by the West & South cameras flows away from where the cameras are pointing; but the wind was blowing the large raindrops in all directions so they could be seen going by horizontally. The rain in the Front Yard camera just comes down through the leaves of the puakenikeni.