I Am Completely Serious

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

This semester, I’m in two classes in which I’m the only girl. One’s a history class, which has six students, and the other’s a computer science class, which has five. Both have male professors. I’ve had other classes where I was either the only girl or seriously outnumbered, and while that obviously sometimes gets awkward, it’s generally not so ba

( I abandon all disclaimers THE COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT CAN’T DEAL WITH WOMEN. )

Continue reading “HEY HOW IS YOUR COMPUTARRRR”

This part of the book is written in language so Ancient, so Forbidden, so Unspeakable, and so Evil that you can’t make heads or tails of it.

Luckily, you’ve got your trusty English to Ancient Forbidden Unspeakable Evil dictionary, and you’re able to translate a little bit at a time.

You learn how to manipulate pure evil, and adapt it to your own particular method of spellcasting. Neat!

You gain a skill: Fearful Fettucini

You put the dictionary back on the shelf, for the next guy.

-

Using the skills taught to you by the Asian Vandalism Master of ??????????? Fu, Steve, you expertly dress ‘s with the flowing white sheets of your ancestors. This reminds you of a haiku:

Burning cherry tree
Ev’ry blossom is aflame
Uh, here come the cops.

-KoL

I just saw the three Wunder-Deer again. They were standing out in the parking lot in front of one of the dorms, eating something on the ground. Mama Deer and Baby Major starting moving away when they spotted me – but they didn’t stop eating, so that they were kind of dragging their heads along the ground licking at it as they stumbled – they weren’t looking where they were going, this was very stumbly movement – into the bushes.

Baby Minor didn’t move until I clapped my hands really loud at it – then it stopped eating and looked at me. After a couple seconds of that, it looked around, appeared to realize it had lost its family, and darted into the yard after them. As I opened the door to my dorm, I saw a puzzled little deer head peek back up out of the bushes.

It probably ought to be adorable, except I just know I’m gonna see one of these guys’ bloodstains on the road sometime soon. I wonder if they even know about the whole “winter” thing? Where did they come from?

Incidentally, I was coming home 3:30 AM on a weekday morning because I had been coding, and had needed access to a Linux machine.

(Addendum: I’m never looking at an FMA community again. Are there people who don’t understand the “spoiler” concept? Gahhh! They’re just cheerfully going into posts by people who have only read up to volume 9, and having nice little conversations about major plot points in volume 11. Does drinking alcohol make you forget stuff that happens when you’re sober? Maybe I should drink alcohol… no, I’ve got work tomorrow… I’ll hit myself in the head! That’ll do it! Where’s a two-by-four, housekeeping left a random two-by-four in my room last year…)

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

( Cut for major spoilers. )

Also, in nitpicky news, it looks like they forgot how they were romanizing some of the names, and left some formatting errors in there again. There’s a really obvious wrong-word-balloon thing right at the beginning. I didn’t notice any others right off, but one of the squinty guy’s longer conversations was really awkward, so maybe there was some switching in there that was tricky enough I didn’t notice it.

A good thing is that the characters have pretty distinctive voices, so you can usually tell when something’s gone fishy with the formatting. If there’s mis-attributed dialog in, say, Vampire Game, you just can’t tell – the sneaky Princess, egomaniacal Prince, much-put-upon royal bodyguard, and haughty vampire king all sound like fourteen-year-old South Park fans.

…not that I don’t appreciate the lines about lube and dirty limericks the translators stuck in there (I’m sure this makes me a terrible person and a failed Serious Manga Reader), but it’s kind of jarring when an extremely stodgy character suddenly says something really snippy. Shock potty humor works best when it is a shock. It shouldn’t be coming from all directions at once, especially if you’re trying to fit a semi-serious shounen-ai story in there, too. Ishtar and Yujinn making buttsecks jokes, sure; Vord and Duzell, some of the time, fine; but not Darres. And I’m sure he was using distal-style most of the time in the original, but you couldn’t tell it here.

Unless I’m midjudging this and they completely scrapped the original plot. I don’t think they did – they’d have dumped more of the politics – but I’d say it’s possible that Ishtar was originally dumber, and Duzell’s angst more obnoxious. Which thought saddens me.

…I wish more people read this manga. It’s good! I mean, the art’s awful and the plot’s infuriating – but – well, it’s good anyway! It has a better cross-dressing- heroine- surrounded- by- guys- who- are- prettier- than- she- is- yet- whose- egos- she- constantly- deflates than Ouran Host Club! It has a haughty immortal vampire king who looks exactly like said heroine (due to magic… things…) and whom she immediately wraps around her little finger and starts sending to deal with her unwanted suitors! And he looks all ominous and serious all the time while thinking stuff like, “Damn that princess, tricking me into seducing her pretty, evil, incest-fetishizing uncle! He’s not even my type!” (Though this may be bullshit translation.) It has no idea how suspense works! It has no idea what shoulders look like! It has two palace guards whose original dialog was apparently so pointless that the translators could replace 90% of it with dirty jokes that don’t fit their facial expressions! It has horses that don’t work!

It’s great, I promise!

Continue reading “Fullmetal Alchemist 9 and random Vampire Game fretfulness”

Martha Wells is posting her book The Element of Fire on her LiveJournal, and that means you must read it, your only excuse for not having previously done so being its Impossible-To-Find status. (link via kate_nepveu)

Aie!

“Oh my god this show is so terrible – ohhhh, god, no, that kid’s got blue hair, he’s going to be a protagonist! We’ve got like fucking seventeen protagonists already, I can’t -”

Good work, Spark!

“OH GOD IT’S TRUE his name’s Spark oh please someone kill him! Before he matures!”

He reminds me of someone, Parn. He reminds me of you… when you were a boy!

“OHHHH GODDDDDD I’m going outside.”

“Okay, so it is after midnight, so it is now Talk Like a Spider Day. So we will all just be like, “…,” okay?”

“Yarr. Yarr be all I know how to say, me droogy – damn, see, I’m completely crap at this.”

I named my program “randread” because if you read it wrong it looks like “van dread.”

Sleep deprivation

(this post originally written around 6:00 AM yesterday)

Shorter-Than-Me-san and I were in the kitchen cooking stuff a few minutes ago. She was making something complicated involving a rice cooker and leeks and water chestnuts, and I was making macaroni from a box. Deciding that my bubbling macaroni looked sadly monochromatic compared to her thing, I chopped up half an onion and put it in there, then still dissatisfied with its hue, went to get some green stuff.

Her: “Is that spinach?”

Me, dropping a handful in the water: “Yeah, do you need any?”

Her: “No, no – I heard that spinach was bad. My brother was watching TV and saw that people have died from eating spinach.”

Me: “…can you watch my noodles for a minute while I go on the internet?”

Her: “Sure, okay…”

So apparently there’s E. coli in the spinach. My lack of a television or radio meant I’d missed this. Fine. Damnit. I got up to go throw away my poor macaroni and onion, but then a brilliant thought struck me – shouldn’t boiling kill E. coli? I sat down again and inquired of Google, and Google said yes.

Feeling extremely smug, I returned to my spinach, which had now been boiling for several minutes – my problem, in perfect congruence with my rich-girl expectations, had taken care of itself. I reassured Shorter-Than-Me-san of my immortality, but tossed the rest of the deadly green so as not to creep her out.

Now I’m wondering if I’ll get a refund if I take my receipt down to the store – I only bought the stuff within the past two days, I’ve probably still got it somewhere. That spinach was the expensive organic stuff, I want my $5 back.

Yeah. So extremely minor brushes with death are funny.

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

Cardcaptor Sakura probably fosters really unhealthy attitudes about honesty. There are all these scenes, particularly in the last couple volumes, of which the moral is basically, It’s okay to deceive your loved ones if you feel like it’s for their own good. Particularly if the loved one is Sakura. She will totally thank you for it – tears in her eyes, screentone with bubbles and flowers, the works.

( Facetiousness continues, but with slight spoilers. )

But it is so cute that I don’t actually care. I guess Sakura is the only completely heterosexual protagonist? I don’t even know if you can count Clow, he has this thing about keeping extremely pretty men around. Well, maybe Kero’s straight. It’s not addressed.

Ohhh, wait. Miss Mizuki. Okay, so two.

My brain hurts from library. There were four people on my shift for some reason, and all of them but me were new.

Continue reading “‘Lie to me, Clow.’”

Last week, I decided to mirror copies of my LiveJournal posts over onto my website for paranoia reasons. I think I’m pretty much done now. I don’t know if I’m going to bother making the mirror keep up with the LiveJournal perfectly unless I can find a way to do it automatically.

Anyway. Notes on exporting stuff from LiveJournal to WordPress:

* Make sure the WordPress content directories have their permissions set up all nice before you start. It might not work right anyway, though.

* Set the correct time zone in WordPress before you start. WordPress and LiveJournal don’t communicate well about this – all your imported posts will end up with the wrong time stamp if you’re not in the time zone WordPress thinks you are.

* * And apparently Daylight Savings doesn’t sync up right no matter what you do. What the hell.

* It’s the XML export option, not the default CSV one.

* LiveJournal-specific code – lj-cuts and user- and community-names – won’t go through right. It just gets erased. (Not the stuff under lj-cut tags, just the tags themselves.) For user- and community-names, I just uploaded the little graphics to my server and manually put in fake tags. This will be over-labor-intensive for people who write more than I do.

There’s no WordPress equivalent to an LJ-cut; I eventually ended up manually setting up fake cuts that led back to the LiveJournal. This won’t work for people who write more than I do, or are planning to erase the LiveJournal. (I also made invisible posts containing all the cut text, to keep all my data nice and safe.)

* Apropos of the invisible double-posts – you can *have* two posts for exactly the same time, but only one will show up at a time on a list-page that should show both. My solution was to set the double-posts’ times one second back.

* Tags (“categories”) won’t transfer over, either.

* The “Uncategorized” category doesn’t disappear automatically once you’ve, you know, categorized a post – you have to actually remove it. And WordPress has no mass-edit options.

* In WordPress, “publish” means “make visible to all” – if you’ve set a post to “private,” hitting “publish” will undo it. Hit “save” instead.

* When viewing the blog while logged in as an administrator, there’s nothing to differentiate private posts from public ones. There doesn’t seem to be a way to view only the private posts, either. This is annoying.

* If you’re changing the permalink style and WordPress says, “You should update your .htaccess now” at the very top of the page, scroll down to the very bottom. There’s a box down there that explains what it wants.

* It’s kind of messed-up how the LiveJournal spellchecker doesn’t recognize “LiveJournal,” “LJ,” “blog,” “permalink,” and “href.”

[nerd]

So apparently Final Fantasy XII just bots itself?!

…

The way I play turn-based RPG’s? This is excellent.

Hahahaha, somewhere someone with a Y chromosome just felt a great disturbance in the force. And also completely bled all over himself from the ears.

[/nerd]

WTF Internet Moment: The Keep by Jennifer Egan, reviewed by Donna Bowman on the Onion AV Club

Jennifer Egan should adopt a nom de plume – “J. Egan” would do quite well. An unfortunate side effect of the popularity of chick lit and poetic, memoir-ish “women’s novels” is that a woman’s name on the cover creates a certain expectation about what’s inside.

…yessss. This unfortunate preconception is common in many demographics, for example the yeti, orcs, Snorks, amphibious robots from the original Johnny Quest, and that bell that hides the Easter eggs in France. Which is to say that that it is a problem mainly among imaginary pretend people.

Isn’t The Tale of Genji generally considered the first novel? What with it being by a woman, and things. I think the reviewer is under the impression that women writing books is somehow a new thing, started mayyyybe in the early 90′s or so. Whole thing couldn’t have pre-dated Oprah, anyway.

And Egan subverts that expectation as thoroughly as any woman writing today. Her previous novels pigeonhole themselves in typical women’s-fiction categories by their synopses (model finds self, teenage girl finds self) and cover photos (youthful female faces).

First sentence: “Egan subverts stereotypes about women’s writing being navel-gazing crap!”

Second sentence: “(And by the way, I apparently believe that women’s writing is navel-gazing crap.)”

Her muscular, lively prose achieves a haunting effect closer to Chuck Palahniuk than Marilynne Robinson – not the tenuous, lacy phrases of fragile introspection, but the stark honesty of action arrested in stop-motion.

OH MY GOD THAT IS SO CRAZY, THAT IT IS CRAZY. I don’t know who Marilynne Robinson is. Is she the archetypal woman writer now? I was not informed. I was tolerably happy with Jane Austen’s performance, did her term expire? And why the hell wasn’t J. K. Rowling’s name on the ballot?! Step up and do your duty to the community, woman!*

Also, stop-motion is for Christmas specials.

That’s my harmful preconception.

(Skip skip skip – awkwardly-worded and confusing synopsis – aaand here -)

And the immersion in these high-stakes psychological tightrope acts gives The Keep a page-turning horror.

Immersion in… high-stakes… tight-rope acts.

Oh my god that’s the best bad metaphor ever.

Just as well that the publishers didn’t slap a girl’s face on the cover; if they could take the “Jennifer” off, too, Egan might get the kind of masculine (or at least gender-neutral) reading her outstanding novel deserves.

…holy shit.

I feel like I should read the book just to apologize to Egan for having been reviewed by this person. I guess Bowman must have read it, but her mind was clearly on something else. Is the stuff on the AV Club usually this bad?

* And is Palahniuk really the archetypal male writer? It seems like a lot of women read his books.

Today it’s been pretty cold and overcast, though it’s never rained for more than a few minutes at a time, and that always just as I was getting back to the dorm; and I never went to the dining hall, and when I walked through town there wasn’t much traffic, and walking around campus there weren’t many people; and the house is quiet, and I’ve got brownies and tea; and basically every single day could be like this and I’d be happy.

(Though my domain’s DNS servers could be working. That would actually be good.)

Last night I made brownies. The ventilation in the kitchen isn’t very good, so the door’s propped open all the time, meaning that you could smell my brownies all over the bottom floor of the house.

I was just coming down the stairs after a trip to the store, and smelled brownies again. I’ve enabled someone.