I Am Completely Serious

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.)

Continue reading “GOSH FRANK MILLER”

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

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.

Continue reading “Scary Monks = an okay band name”

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.

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.)

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.

Jesus, and there are even idiots flying planes with advertizing banners trailing behind over the field now. (That cannot possibly be fucking cost-effective.) Ohio is seriously trying to convince me that it’s the beach.

MY CAMERA CANNOT BE DEAD.

AAAAAAGH!