I Am Completely Serious

Oh, great. Now you have alcohol poisoning.

Continue reading “The Anita Blake Drinking Game”

I’m going to be teaching a little girl who looks exactly like a ko-omote Noh mask. She came in for a demo lesson today. I completely suspected her Mom of like, making modifications to her eyebrows for a second, but no, she totally does naturally look like that.

So I have been reading Anita Blake (at work!), and I just started Obsidian Butterfly, and in the middle of the obligatory scene where she’s on a plane and talks about how much she hates being on planes, Anita Blake just all of a sudden says,

“I was reading Sharon Shinn. She was an author that I trusted to hold my attention even hundreds of feet above the ground with a thin metal sheet between me and eternity.”

Sharon Shinn? What with the sparkly kinda-chaste beta-male romances? Laurell K. Hamilton likes Sharon Shinn? …I mean, do they know each other? What do they talk about? Their cunning plans to progressively suck slightly more every new book they put out?

Actually, now that I think about it, they’re pretty similar. It’s just that while Hamilton’s descent into self-indulgent crap led to freaky sex, Shinn’s led to saccharine domesticity. Same basic impulse. Okay, world makes sense now, I’m good.

…

The previous book, Blue Moon, had some plot in it, but the Badass-Detective-Work-to-Fondling-Bisexual-Werecreatures ratio has gotten on the wrong side of 1:1. Is this the point where I should be stopping? I note that I am only one book away from Narcissus in Chains, which I have heard is the Crazy Horrible Bad One.

(The quality of these books seems to be directly proportional to the amount of Officer Zerbrowski in them. I think his presence enforces some sort of exercise of self-control on Hamilton’s part. It’s hard to fit that particular character type into sexual fantasies.)

I totally take back the affectionate tone of my previous post about Miss Minnow. Today she got all snotty and decided she didn’t want to play Jenga with the other two. She went over and lounged boredly in one of the little toy chairs, saying in a disdainful tone, “You can play your game without me.” (Blue looked stricken.) No, I said. She said, “I’m not playing! It’s stupid! You’re stupid!” I pointed at the floor beside me. She kicked the wall and screamed. I picked her up and carried her over. She scratched up the back of my hand with her little fingernails.

Sweetheart, I appreciate that it’s hard to be convincingly moody and aloof when you’re, like, six. But you just drew blood from somebody who 1) is holding a bright blue whiteboard marker and 2) has a long and storied history of drawing Pikachu on inappropriate things.

The end result might not look as hardcore as you might expect, is basically what I’m saying.

-

(I didn’t draw on her, but I seriously wanted to for a second.)

Miss Minnow is in my first class on Wednesday. She’s six years old, and when she grows up she wants to be Nicolo Machiavelli. She’s very smart, very cute, and very manipulative. When Miss Minnow is in a bad mood, she wants everyone else to be in a bad mood, too. So she modifies the situation.

One of the other girls, Spaztastic, is Minnow’s age, but as suggested by the name, is hyperactive and not big on thinking things through. She also gets upset when she starts losing a game. The other girl, Blue, is younger than the other two and a little slower, but really, really wants to Be A Good Student. This means that for most of the class, she’s focusing all her limited attention on me - she doesn’t notice when Spaztastic is about to freak out. And she claps her hands and gets all happy when she gets something right or wins a game, which invariably infuriates Spaztastic.

So what Miss Minnow does when she’s angry is, she tries to fix the games so Blue is winning. Because she’s the only one of the girls with a functioning attention span (and I’m probably busy pulling Spaztastic down off the curtains), she doesn’t have much trouble doing it - we’ll be playing marbles, and she’ll wait until Blue’s looking at me and Spaztastic’s trying to sneak across the room to get her crayon box or something, and she slips some of her own marbles in with Blue’s.

And when Blue’s turn is over, Blue looks down at her marbles and says happily, “Blue is winning!”* And Spaztastic pouts ominously, glares at her, and throws something at the wall.

When she’s in a good mood, she doesn’t want to have to hear me yell at Spaztastic and harsh her buzz, so she fixes the game in the other direction - she makes sure Blue never gets more than one point ahead of Spaztastic. This requires some more delicacy, because unlike Blue, Spaztastic can and does count her points - obsessively, even. She will eventually notice that they’ve been moving around, even if she never actually catches Miss Minnow at it. She can’t figure out whether to blame Miss Minnow or me (it doesn’t occur to her to blame Blue), but either one is clearly insupportable.

So what Miss Minnow does is, she keeps winning herself (she never has any trouble with this), but then visibly gives her own points to Blue, who will happily accept them because Miss Minnow is her hero and she likes getting “presents” from her. This allows Spaztastic to consider the definition of “winning” the game as something more fluid, so she eventually stops keeping such careful count of her points, allowing Miss Minnow to start slipping them in.

For Miss Minnow’s bad moods, I switch to games where no one wins, but for the good ones I’ve just been letting her manage things. Hey, she’s developed a strategy for quieting Spaztastic down for five minutes. I have no complaints.

Miss Minnow heard me speaking Japanese to her Mom at one point, and really wants to get me to do it during class, or at least to prove that I understand words more complicated than “English,” “Japanese,” and “homework.” I’m not supposed to do that, but if I’m distracted and a kid talks at me in Japanese, I sometimes forget.

So last week, while I was grading homework, Spaztastic tugged on my arm and gleefully showed me how she’d covered her entire coloring sheet with pink. I said, “Heeee.” (Approximate translation: “You iz weird, honey.”)

Miss Minnow said, “Teacher just spoke Japanese! She said “heeee!”"

I said, “No, no! That’s English. It’s, uh… it’s Canadian English. I said “Eh.” Canada English.”

Blue said, “Canada!”

I pointed it out on the map. “Here. Near America, on top of America.”

Miss Minnow explained helpfully to the other two, “Canada is a very cold place. Winter there is really cold.”

I said in English, “Excuse me? You live in Niigata. Winter’s cold here.” I said this without expecting them to understand it, but apparently the word “Niigata” rendered the comment comprehensible to Miss Minnow - she smirked at me, and I realized I had just totally proven I could understand their conversation.

I hope Miss Minnow uses her powers for good.

-

* Little Japanese girls seriously do refer to themselves in the third person a lot, it turns out. I’d vaguely thought the extent of the phenomenon was fictionalized by anime for purposes of cuteness, but no.

I started Disgaea last night, and then all of a sudden it was four AM.

One must hope that Candida the Elf’s guildmates will organize a whip-around for the $25 name-change fee.

I just realized that iTunes* went crazy at some point in the past year, and I have two or three copies of about half of my music collection - all in the same folder as the originals, but with different filenames and metadata. The apparently random nature of which files were copied and how many copies I ended up with makes it less than convenient for me to go through and clean the folder up manually.

Is there a program that can search through and identify the duplicate files, even accounting for the differing metadata, and allow me to bulk-delete them? I’ve tried MediaMonkey and Duplicate Music Files Finder, and they both seem to choke on the different-metadata problem.

* I assume this to be iTunes’ fault because it is the only media player/organizer that I have ever used on this computer.

Having discovered that the cell phone works fine as an MP3 player, I started up my perennial Get The iTunes DRM Off My New Pornographers Albums Project again. I tried three pieces of DRM-cracking software, none of which worked. It is a triumph for Apple’s software engineers!

Except that I just torrented everything instead.

I have made the Mr. Saturn theme from Earthbound my ringtone. But I am deeply disappointed to discover that the new phone has no place to hook my little dangly-charm of Killua from Hunter x Hunter that I got from a vending machine.

I am so much cooler than you.

(Why would Nokia split my cell phone’s manual into 25 separate PDFs and make me download them each individually?)

Ken’ichi did his homework.

-

Today Mee asked me how much I weighed. I taught her how to say “shut up.”

(Ken’ichi, age 8, walks past me as he is leaving his other class.)

ME: Hey! Ken’ichi! Did you actually do your homework this week?

KEN’ICHI: (smirks silently)

ME: Mr. Ken’ichi Whinyface III! Homework! Did you do it this time!?

KEN’ICHI: (in Japanese) I don’t speak Ennngliiiish!

ME: Homework! You know the word homework! I said it to you like thirty times last week!

KEN’ICHI: (hides behind a partition, still smirking)

ME: Dude, I can still see you! Homework! Yes, no, maybe?

KEN’ICHI: No!

ME: Why!? Why don’t you ever do your homework!? You have to copy one sentence, it’s not hard! Go home and do your homework, right now!

KEN’ICHI: I don’t know!

ME: Homework! Homework! Homework!

KEN’ICHI: (runs outside and smirks at me through the window)

ME: Homework! (Ken’ichi’s mom comes up beside me, looking confused. I point at him.) Homework!

KEN’ICHI’S MOM: (in Japanese) Oh! Yes! Ken’ichi, you have to do your homework!

(Ken’ichi’s Mom is clearly not actually going to make Ken’ichi do his homework.)

ME: Ken’ichi, I will hang you out the window by your toes if you don’t do your homework this time.

(Ken’ichi apparently apprehends the deeper meaning of my words, and backs away from the window to hide.)

-

(I have been instructed to communicate with my students and their parents in exactly this manner. Like, one-word sentences and yelling. I’ve got faxes on official company letterhead telling me to all yell a bunch of one-word sentences. It’s gotten to be kind of automatic.)

Ed Book is a nature photographer whose photo blog I’ve been reading for like… six years? I know I found it before I left home for college. Generally he’ll post pictures of hawks or foggy lakes or snow on mountains or suchlike, and talk about nice people and their dogs he met while out working. He’s in his sixties and has a large, impressive beard. His usericons are all picture of himself looking like he’s about to, you know, cut down a tree or sail a shrimp boat or deliver presents to all the children of the world. He ends every post with the word “peace.”

Sometime in the last couple weeks he appears to have discovered Rickrolling. I was a little startled.

(He only does it under friends-lock, so you will have to friend him if you don’t want to take my word for it. He just now made a gleeful post about doing it to some telemarketers.)

“First up, bad news: the Glyph of Windfury Weapon now does not add the additional attack power. You can panic now. This is bad enough that I’ll be devoting all of next week’s column to it.”

Reading WoW blogs gives me perspective. Whatever my problems may be, at least they’re not as bad as that glyph thing.

I also finished the seventh Anita Blake book today instead of doing class prep, and I am not proud. (I think she may have healed a wereleopard with the power of sex.)

that will totally make you want to read it.

Once upon a time, the Vampire King Duzell got a bit grumpy and decided to kill all the humans. He came close, but was finally defeated by King Phelios, who destroyed him with a spell called La Gamme, which takes the life of both the target and the one who cast it. In his dying breath, Duzell curses both of them to be reborn again in one hundred years, to repeat their battle.

Phelios is destined to be reborn into the body of one of his descendents - but Duzell forgets to specify what he’s going to end up. The broody vampire king finds himself trapped in the body of a newborn kitten, and the pet of Phelios’s descendant, the irresponsible and manipulative Princess Ishtar.

Ishtar holds Phelios in contempt for 1) being the sort of person who would throw his life away, and 2) marrying his cousin, something that afterwards became a royal tradition. Ishtar does not like her cousins. Sometimes they try to poison her. Though disconcerted, the scheming vampire king sees certain obvious possibilities in his situation. Duzell, eventually regaining enough of his power to transform his cat body into that of a human (with great restraint, the mangaka refrains from giving him fluffy ears), reveals himself to Ishtar.

And Ishtar, to Duzell’s bewilderment, joyfully takes over the entire project, sweeping him off on a tour of the country to meet all her cousins and kill whichever of them he wants. “And hey! Maybe I should give this world domination thing a shot, too!” It quickly becomes clear that Duzell is no longer the one in control of this intrigue. Ishtar particularly enamoured of his ability to shapeshift into a (male) body that looks just like her - she can make him deal with her suitors!

Duzell, whose social skills are stunted from centuries of talking only with his brainwashed servants, is no match for Ishtar. It’s particularly great when he starts falling for the suitors.

In case it is not clear, I really, really love the Ishtar-Duzell dynamic. Particularly the Ishtar half. She is possibly my favorite shoujo heroine ever. She’s smart and self-absorbed and lazy and lies a lot, and her occasional acts of heroism are perfectly in character, because the shallowness and meanness are how she protects herself from people who want to use her. She understands her own motivations perfectly. And she has actual relationships with female characters! They get whole plot arcs, even! (One of those plot arcs is extremely tedious, but let’s set that thought aside for the moment.) Duzell, by comparison, is extremely straightforward, and not much good at self-analysis - he wants to find Phelios and kill him, and he wants Ishtar to stop embarrassing him, and he has no idea how to accomplish either of these things.

The manga is not perfect. For one thing, it has some of the worst art in the universe. People have weird shoulders, I don’t even want to talk about it. There’s the problem of Darres, Ishtar’s bodyguard. It’s consistent with her character that she fall for someone like him, but his characterization is inconsistent, and it’s hard to get a handle on him. There are things he does at the end of the series that just don’t work.

Also, JUDAL either hadn’t thought the plot out very far in advance, or couldn’t bring herself to go through with some of what she’d planned - the pacing is bad, plot threads are dropped and never picked up, and character arcs are either too short or too long. You can literally feel her switching gears when she gets too attached to canon-fodder-type characters to kill them off. I can see where she’s coming from, but her reluctance to let the main characters get hurt seriously damages the ending.

And this isn’t exactly a problem with the manga itself, but there are major issues with the Tokyopop adapation. As in, worse than usual. Worse than with Kare Kano. Recent English manga translations often err on the side of fidelity, and the dialog ends up suffering from a tone-deaf literalness that damages its impact. (”Do you think he is the kind of person who would let his body be possessed for no reason?!” “No, I don’t.”)

With Vampire Game, Tokyopop made the opposite mistake. The adaptation’s tone is very crude, lots of potty-humor and smart-assery even when it’s wrong for the scene and the character. While it’s fine for Ishtar to make filthy jokes (and this is part of why I love her so), it usually isn’t for Duzell, and definitely not for Darres. It haven’t read the Japanese version, so I can’t be sure where and how severely liberties were taken, but if Darres wasn’t speaking very careful formal-style in every single scene in the original, I will eat some item that is generally applied topically, such as for instance shoes.

(Seriously, Tokyopop, if you guys are thinking about re-releasing this series for Twilight-related reasons - because it is so the anti-Twilight - I would be happy to write you a less South Park-ed up adaptation. I’ll leave the Vaseline line in there if you’re really attached to it. Just let me wash Darres’ mouth out with soap.)

…uh, in conclusion, read the manga, and write me fanfic where Ishtar embarrasses Duzell, but be prepared for a vague sense of dissatisfaction?

I think I’m not very good at making people read stuff.

While walking home extremely tired at 9:30 PM in a foot of snow, listening to Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start The Fire on my iPod, I was briefly under the impression that the song was a fictional one, taken from some made-up world. I wished momentarily that I lived on the magical sort of world wherein there really was a space monkey mafia. I think I was visualizing it as sort of a steampunk kind of thing, with brass coal-powered rockets and stuff, and the monkeys wore pin-stripe suits and smoked bubble cigars.

My delusion continued until I realized that if Billy Joel was fictional, I could not possibly have his song on my iPod.

It feels like some sort of minuscule adulthood rite of passage, buying a kitchen appliance for myself.

Also, standing in the grocery store’s massive liquor section* and doing math in my head, I chose to buy one of the big things of Baileys instead of a little one, calculating that it would be about 70 yen cheaper per ounce. I think this is also some sort of rite of passage, but it might not be an “adulthood” one per se. A dissolute, girly adulthood rite of passage. I then came home and drank spiked hot chocolate and leveled my orcish hunter to 45.

(Apparently the Ice Stone has melted, you guys.)

* It’s a spirits aisle, a beer aisle, a wine aisle, and a bunch of wine displays spilling out into the housewares section. It sprawls.

“Fishing is a secondary profession which allows players to fish various objects, primarily fish, from surfaces of water (or lava).”

My new cell phone has two cameras. One on the back for normal pictures, one on the front for video-phone.

I live in the future. (It’s wasteful.)