snarp’s blog

This room is TOO HOT I will HURT someone.

Somehow, before I even started on my current (very slow) Dorothy Sayers thing, I ended up reading this spoilery post about Unnatural Death. Normally, my brain latches onto spoilers in a hentai-tentaclish manner and ruins my life *forever*, but I’ve been slowly working my way through the book for the past week without ever making the connection.

But I finished it an hour ago at work, all like, “I’ve read this bef - wait, is this the book that ends with *that* really *cool* scene? …*But why.*” So when I got back to the room, I googled a couple lines from the end to figure out where I’d read it before.

(and was kind of like, whoa, because I’d apparently been reading Ms. Monette’s LiveJournal way back months and months ago, before I read her book and I think before I even started my own LiveJournal, and I’d only just now added her to my flist, and yeah, that’s not the issue at hand here)

I guess I’m some sort of test case for her point - I read the ending, thought it was really neat, subsequently forgot *where* I’d read it, read the book, thought it was pretty neat most of the way, and *still* suspected naught until I finished it. This ending doesn’t belong to this book.

It makes me feel all smug when I have the same reaction to a book as smart people. Throughout it I’d been kind of going, Hm, Wimsey, weren’t you having a moral crisis a second ago, from whence springeth the *ultra-flippancy*? Hey, that was pretty dark, just now, but here Miss Climpson’s being goofy with punctuation marks again, and the contrast’s not anything like pointy enough to balance it out right. (And then I also went, Eh, I put up with Penguin Brothers, this is nothing. And then there was the ending and I went like, Oh this is *so just like* Penguin Brothers. Which is probably not a comparison that normal and well-adjusted people make.) The book was just off-balance in general; I think it is cranky.

Apropos of *everything*, I’ve got no idea how I’m supposed to go to sleep in here. I’ve got the window open and the fan on high, but the room is still suffocating. If the dorm were to catch fire, I would not be able to do that “touch the door to see if it’s warm” thing, because my door’s been warm for days. It is a wooden door, it doesn’t conduct heat well enough for that to be an okay thing. I know that violence isn’t the answer, but I may have to at least, you know, leave something malodorous and reddish in hue on phys plant’s doorstep.

(This text was originally posted on LiveJournal. It has been reformatted (awkwardly) for use on WordPress.)

I feel like it’s my patriotic duty to review The Hidden Stars by Madeline Howard/Top-Secretly Teresa Edgerton in such a way that you will want to go buy it. But every time I try to start, I end up with some variation on this sentence:

Goddamnit woman, if you hadn’t written Goblin Moon…!

So there’s a problem.

( ‘All giant serpents will be fitted with sports goggles to prevent eye injuries.’ )

When I was babbling at my mom trying to explain my annoyance with my recent purchase, it kind of inevitably occurred to me that this is Edgerton’s first novel since 9/11 (because I just assume that everyone is depressed by the same things as I am) - there are a lot of scenes of military guys looking at each other grimly, and by that I mean, a lot lot. In the book, the thing that’s finally going to kill everybody is ancient, indestructible monsters buried sleeping all over the world, which the bad guys have started to wake up. Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t help suspecting what those monsters are supposed to be.

I already said I didn’t think it was subtle.

I’m going to read the rest of the series, because, well… because that’s how it works. But I’m still going to bitch about it on the internet! You can make me buy icky books, Teresa Edgerton - but no force on earth can stop me from whining on LiveJournal.

-

(The names in this entry were edited 2006/06/13 because I noticed Edgerton was no longer being required to keep it private that she was Howard. She technically was when I first posted this (though she cheated mentioning it on her message board), so I kept her real name out, except for a nofollow link to TeresaEdgerton.com. I bothered to edit it because I’m procrastinating on stuff right now.)

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SINGLE IN TAYLOR! As, in *with its own bathroom*!

Ohhh, you were so proud of yourself with your *two*, JH… but I, too, have triumphed! Number nineteen will reign FOREVER!

It’s for a page called the “National Next of Kin Registry.”

…I don’t understand.

Look at this Wikipedia entry. Then look at its di?cu??ion page.

Haha, nerds.

Aaaaagh.

Miyazaki couldn’t plot his way out of a Super America with a *map*.

There was time travel and I don’t know why they went outside and then just *came back in* and Sophie’s hair and what about *Lettie* did she *die* and what the *hell* Suliman you are a *woman* and you don’t have *any* coherent motivation and *no one* does and Sophie doesn’t talk to hats or really do much of *anything* and TIME TRAVEL?

Maybe I should hit myself over the head until I forget the book, and try watching it again then?

Filenames in the “Magus Anmere: Cyborg Werewolf” folder:

eye
password
yourcreator!
Alignments
claws
cookies
goldenwings
pyramid
hair
tree
hunt
buses
murdermystery
outerspace
six
fairies

I’m tired and was having to open them to figure out what they were just now. If stuff can surpass its maker and go rogue, my filenames will shortly be rising up against me.

I think the tempo of songs stretches out in the time they spend sitting on CD’s and hard drives. In a thousand years, an advanced civilization will discover the last remaining open Apache server, and be unable to recognize its contents as music, its pace will have so slowed in the intervening centuries.

Status of review of The Hidden Stars - still too sad

Status of Green Lion re-read - half-way through third book; convinced world needs Ceilyn/Tryffin slash

Snow lies heavy on the ground; my element yet reigns, and for this little more time I may continue with my plans…

(I have no plans.)

He’s been my advisor for, I guess, three years now, but I only just a minute ago noticed that Sensei’s middle name is “Stone.”

If you do not know the gentleman in question, and therefore don’t understand how funny that is, I guess all I’ve got for you right now is a link to Gunnerkrigg Court.

I’ve been trying to write a review of that book I was all excited about, and I guess I’ve got all but the sum-up, but I think it’s literally made me *too sad* to finish. I’ll see if I can manage it tomorrow.

I made some fairly uncreative icons in celebration of this UN-sanctioned event.

(The last one is intentionally extremely irritating, yes.)

The art is from a deep reflection of Hakkai’s in volume five. It has long amused me.

(Edited 7:25 PM Tuesday to fix Sanzo’s ear.)

“- they’re depressing mountains,” Hero said uncertainly.

Nera had been waiting for him to say something, and this clearly disappointed her. She corrected, “No. They are oppressive mountains. They are coming this way.”

“…sometimes mountains do that just, naturally. Because - there are these plates underground that kind of ram together and -”

“These mountains appear one by one. A dense, wet fog appears in a place where a new mountain is being formed, and something huge and black falls into the fog with a clang like a great bell. Sounds of chisels echo from within - and they echo even when they shouldn’t. Those who enter the fog are lifted up and dropped at random places far away with headaches that linger for up to a year. The fog and the sculptors remain for two months, until one morning the fog lifts, leaving a new mountain already covered with lichen, sparse bushes, and goats, and signed somewhere around the base by its designer. Most of the recent ones are by someone named Chethura; I am told he has admirers in the cities -”

“All right, all right, yeah. Tectonic plates don’t really, have goats.”

Girl out in the lounge, exasperatedly: - guess he raised *himself* or was raised by *monkeys* or *wolves* or -

*at this point I shut the door*

I just spent three and a half hours pulling books. I think I’m gonna die. At one point this baby was crying at me because a buzzard was trying to haul it away and I was all like, “Unnnh baby just wait like five seconds I’ve ALMOST found the right government document here,” but they were both gone when I looked up.

I am eating a bag of rolls and half a candy bar rather than going to dinner.

She informs me that,

1) She was actually writing a book report on Snake Oil Wars, and

2) The music was a mix CD given to her by her boyfriend for Valentine’s Day.

So you’re going down, Martian scum.

ladyringolane is having a grande mal emo-zure in there. She woke me up a while ago playing something about girlfriends and the color brown, and just now it was “Iris” (which she claims is the world’s emo-est song) and then something really loud with a hoarse guy yelling stuff*.

Yet even over this, I could hear her pounding on her keyboard, having been spurred on to a pivotal emotional point in her latest story about gay cowboys in Nazi Germany who own restaurants in the rain.**

Go, ladyringolane, go! Ganbatte, imouto! Fight! Show the rest of Fanfiction.net who’s boss.

And turn down the volume at some point before I go back to bed, please, I’m still looking over my shoulder thinking a girlfriend is breaking into the house to steal all our brown.

-

* It wasn’t Conor Oberst; unbeknownst to many, Oberst suffered a tragic marching band accident in his youth that permanently shattered his yellin’ bone. With access to today’s cutting-edge technologies, he might have recovered - but physical therapy was not as advanced a discipline in early-80’s Whingeiana as it is today, and the treatment he received basically just consisted of being slapped for forty-five minutes each day. It was later determined that this has no real medical value.

** This sentence may not accurately describe my sister’s oeuvre; it may, rather, stem from a hallucination induced by being woken up all of a sudden.

When I take over the world it will mostly just involve headphones.

Posing jauntily up a member of the Polyphonic Spree’s robe. *That Saint.*

The book has one of the world’s most intensely awkward first paragraphs:

“The big car had been sliding through the night like a great black slug with wide, flaming eyes that seared the road and carved a blazing tunnel of light through the darkness under the overarching trees; and then they eyes were suddenly blinded, and the smooth pace of the slug grew slower and slower until it groped itself to a shadowy standstill under the hedge.”

You know, one of those kinds of slugs. The ones with the big burny-eyes, that make tunnels. They are common in Florida.

I like how first the slug is “sliding,” but then it has a “smooth pace,” and then he kind of belatedly remembers what it was he was making this silly metaphor about to begin with, and has it “grope itself to a stop” in a more authentically sluglike fashion. Extended metaphors, what’re you gonna do. Mutter. Metaphors…

I guess this is just what happens when you have to crank books out really fast.

I am at home with my *cats*.

Having put a picture of my cat on my Livejournal, I will now sink back into the foul girly-nerd stew which birthed me. That being, in this case, reading a Lymond book.

And yet all of a sudden I am the happiest girl in the whole wide world and need to get to a bookstore immediately.