snarp’s blog

Oil-based paint can just die now.

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

elongated_tito just made me watch Sin City. I know it’s kind of, like, done to complain about the movie’s treatment of women, but. Yeah, okay.

( Eleven-year-old girl that Bruce Willis has just rescued from bad guys tells him, ‘I’m still a virgin, thanks to you.’ )

And I just ended up taking the movie a lot more seriously than I meant to, and I think I’m stopping here and putting this under a cut.

I just finished Rocannon’s World, Ursula LeGuin’s first published novel. It’s definitely by LeGuin, so it’s good, but it’s also definitely early. It has a Huge Faceless Mystery Enemy Who Cannot Be Reasoned With And Must Be Destroyed. This isn’t something you associate with LeGuin, and she clearly wasn’t comfortable with it - they’re the reason for the Journey, but just barely have a name, are there only at the very beginning and very end, and then are only kinda-sorta there.

The protagonist defeats them with the help of a Mysterious Wise Man On A Mountain, because, being a basically sensical character, he cannot overcome a nonsensical problem on his own, and thus requires an equally nonsensical deus ex machina.

In between, he deals with smaller and more comprehensible crises which are recognizably human, animal, or weather. Those parts are LeGuin. Fortunately, she learned to drop the end-paper.

Random note: I’ll eat something generally thought inedible if Rosemary Kirstein hasn’t read this book, because (elliptical spoiler for both Rocannon and the Steerswoman series) her Demon Cities are Rocannon’s Angel Cities.

(This entry edited a few times over a few minutes after posting it, because my genius comes in spurts, like mustard.)

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Internet, are you sure Ahiru from Princess Tutu isn’t voiced by the same person as Mink from Dragon Half?

I went to the beach. And now I am at home. Dad and I got here at 9:00 tonight; Mom, thegeekgene, and elongated_tito will be back tomorrow. (I am writing like this because I am tired, and tired people do not use contractions.)

There was a Bad Problem while we were at the beach. Everyone else left last Wednesday, leaving the house and the pets in the care of some law students. On Friday, these people just left. They did not call my parents, or arrange for someone else to feed the animals in their absence. Fortunately, the animals are all still here and alive.

There were also other crimes, which I will document here for posterity:

* They left the lights on.

* They left dirty dishes in the sink.

* They left the computer on. (The computer was also very upset, as it overheats easily. There is something the matter with the mouse, which I will say is their fault even though it may not really be.)

* They also erased the Bookmarks menu, and may have installed some sort of spyware toolbar.

* They left the toilet seat up. And urine-sprinkled.

* They seem to have lost the mail and newspapers after taking them out of the box.

And, unrelated to the house, but most evil at all,

* They were working for a group that provides legal aid to the poor - hence, I think, my parents’ willingness to trust them with the house - but left without giving the group any warning.

There is much anger.

I also direct anger at the student group that was supposed to be finding me a place to stay in New Orleans next week, as I have still not heard back from them, and they are not answering email or phone calls - though they also did not cash my check, so I guess I ought to assume they just never got my application. (But I am still on their email mailing list! I am not sure how that happened. Maybe I signed up for it at that meeting I attended before applying? I cannot remember giving them my address then! Maybe I did?)

And I direct anger at myself, because apparently I did not submit my timesheet when I left campus last week, which probably confused my supervisors, to whom I had said I was not coming back for three weeks. Fortunately, I saw the email yelling at me for this at 11:00 PM, an hour before the final final final deadline, and submitted it.

At the beach, I read a lot of books, bought a few books, watched some of Princess Tutu on the laptop, and worked (some) on translating 11-nin iru! (some) - I was mostly only transcribing dialogue onto the laptop to make it easier to work with later, when I have access to better dictionaries. It is probably somehow funny that the manga I brought with me to use for practice starts out with so much techno-babble. I did not see the humor at the time, but now I have internet access again, and perhaps I may again someday feel that sensation of which I have heard, in another world, and which I think was termed “joy.”

I also bought some essential oil called “Illusion Angel.”

I think I just broke my stupid toe.

THE LIBRARY CATALOG IS DOWN TODAY AND I NEED TO RENEW/RETURN BOOKS BECAUSE I’M ABOUT TO LEAVE. SOMEONE CORRECT THE PROBLEM FOR ME.

There is a firefly out there that simply cannot accept its inability to get through the glass into my room. I think it can see the green LED on the monitor.

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

Oh, my god.

I might have driven Shitty Art Teacher away. She’s gone. She was tenured and her picture was on advertisements and she’s gone.

One semester after I sent in my horrible, nasty, mean, signed evaluation. A year after The Voice, who did the same thing, returned to haunt her.

Oh, my god.

The world probably doesn’t revolve around me, or even the anime club, but… seriously. I get the idea that people have only started getting really nasty about her the past couple years, and I know she’s really thin-skinned. Did I help break her?

I was just going, “I HAVE THE POWER” at first, but now I’m trying to figure out if I should feel guilty. I mean… tenure. She didn’t have to quit, she could have just stopped sucking, or something…

…

( And now, the happy post, written pre-the-first-stirrings-of-a-guilty-conscience: )

Edited to put a cut in, ’cause it was long.

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I was flipping through a comic that takes place in space, lying down with my head at a weird angle. I thought, uh oh, how am I going to tell which way I’m supposed to be reading? My head’s at a weird angle and it takes place in space! You don’t know which way’s up… in space!

But everyone was pointed in pretty much the same direction, so it was pretty easy. So I got sort of disappointed.

I started thinking about a magical theoretical space-comic that you could read upside-down or left-to-right or whatever because it’s in space, haha. This would, in real life, be a bad idea.

I just read The Left Hand of Darkness. I think I was thirteen the last time I read it, and I still don’t really have anything to say about it. Maybe about forty years has changed stuff enough that it’s just not as big a thing for me as it is for The Old People?

I don’t know. Pronouns are very heavy to me - it feels like cheating that LeGuin calls her hermaphrodites “he.” It’s the same reason I feel uncomfortable with seeing slash as feminist-to-the-bone, and why I refuse to entertain the idea that Torikaebaya Monogatari could have been written by a woman*. Maybe some people can read a character explicitly described as male as androgynous or female, but I just can’t, and I have trouble buying the writers could, either. “He” probably is the default pronoun in my head, but that doesn’t render it genderless in the absence of explicit football and power tools.

I have written a paragraph criticizing The Left Hand of Darkness in my LiveJournal. I am unconventional and brilliant! You will offer me an awesome job in Japan at once.

Okay, two things.

1) The edition I’m reading - the one with the crazy ice-heads on the cover - has a lot of typos. One of the place names is spelled three different ways.

2) On the back cover there’s a blurb from Michael Moorcock calling it “as profuse and original in invention as The Lord of the Rings.” Isn’t Moorcock supposed to hate Tolkien?

-

* Though of course Torikaebaya doesn’t have pronouns, and I was going on about that before, and, yeah. But Sensei told me he was pretty sure that at least some of the titles would have to have been read as completely gender-bound, so I’m going to pretend it’s the same thing and just totally ignore all attempts to call me on it.

Villainous types were using the kitchen at 6:30, so I decided to put my fish out to thaw and lie down while I waited for them to finish.

After a while, I noticed that it was kind of dark, and rolled over to look at the clock. It said 1:19 AM. I said, out loud, so as my inanimate objects would know, “I am some kind of genius.”

Whenever I do something stupid at work, I preface my explanation with, “Because I’m a genius.” (as in, “Because I’m a genius, I accidentally hit the print button just now,” or, “Because I’m a genius, I gave that girl bad directions.”) Today ILL Lord heard me saying this for the first time and laughed at me. I told her patiently, “I never do anything for non-genius reasons.” About forty-five seconds later, I ran into a piller.

Can you guess the last item on the shopping list?! Use your logical deduction and smartnessness skills to solve the puzzle!

shower gel
liquid hand soap
Lysol
cotton socks
sandals
???

…

…

“Antifungal foot spray.”

How am I the only one in this building to end up with a mold-covered bathroom? Why has this never happened at home?! I CLEAN STUFF CONSTANTLY THIS IS DUMB.

Sensei just discovered Tezuka’s Adolf (he says it’s my fault) and thinks it is the most cracktastic Japan-thing this whole week. He didn’t say “cracktastic,” though. We need to teach him the word, I think it encapsulates the essence of what he looks for in his Important Modern Japanese Literature. Sensei is a good teacher for this particular batch of Japanese majors, because he clearly went into the field for all the wrong reasons.

This woman must be stopped. Confiscate her crochet-hooks at once.

Some jerks keep checking out the library’s Chris Ware stuff recently. They are jerks because I always end up stopping and flipping through it when I’m scanning it back in, even though I know it always makes me all depressed for the next few hours. Ware’s brain has the trainwreck effect. (I just invented the word “brainwreck,” which is a very nice word.) So, darn people who check out Chris Ware stuff.

It looks like it’s going to rain, and that makes me happy.

Guess how long I’ve been awake.

No, guess.

…

TWO AND A HALF HOURS

Things my brain has invented today:

Valhalla onions

Hahaha, my library-fu is strong! I will make a movie about the culmination of epic quest to get Hagio Moto stuff off ILL. The most memorable scene will be the one where I accept the frailty of my countrymen in not having translations readily available, and just order the stuff in Japanese. I will be in a rock garden in the rain, and have a very pretty sword.

(Apparently our ILL person spent more time with my requests for the Viz versions of A, A’ and They Were Eleven than on anyone else’s requests the couple weeks. She wants me to think that, anyway.)

I read a bunch of Astro Boy in Pittsburgh last summer, where the library actually had manga that you could actually look at without needing to fight the bookmobile to the death out back. Since that’s not true here, and since Tezuka obsession seems to be something I go through around late summer every year (year-before-last it was Unico), I ordered the first five volumes off an Amazon seller the other day; they were really cheap, $5 each including shipping.

They came today, and I took the Pluto-arc volume to work with me. I quickly realized why they’d been so cheap - Astro Boy had been mutilated.

I don’t know what kind of a sick bastard stabs Astro Boy. Hasn’t he had a hard enough life already? Leave that kid alone.

Sleeping from 5:30 PM to 1:30 AM is a pretty good idea.

(It is very sad being nocturnal and having to work normal hours.)

Goddamnit! “The Celery Queen” sounds like “Ellery Queen!” And Ellery Queen’s a mystery writer! I can’t name my Wispy Clairvoyant Agoraphobe (TM) something that sounds like a mystery writer, it’s… it’s inappropriate.

- but I’ve been calling her that for like two years aaaagh how the hell am I supposed to remember another name now?! -

I must’ve seen the name on a bookshelf and let my brain latch onto it. I hate my brain.