I Am Completely Serious

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Sodexho has generously given me a light pink plastic tumbler that turns darker pink when it gets cold, in an obvious and completely inappropriate reference to nipples. I wonder if they’re going to email me telling me to deposit it in a box someplace on campus, because I am not on the meal plan anymore and am not therefore entitled to a plastic tumbler.

Printed on it in very small type is a schedule of what I assume someone considers to be the school’s “feminist events” for the next three months. The schedule gives dates but no times, and is badly spaced and punctuated.

I mean, this isn’t a disposable cup or anything. It must have been expensive to get these things custom-made. Isn’t it kind of weird to give out a reusable item with your February-March-April 2007 schedule on it? Am I supposed to treasure it forever as a memento of “Love Your Body Day” (which is apparently on Valentines Day)? Is there going to be a whole series of collectible 2007 color-change cups?

Oh, wait, the year’s not on there.

Actually, the schedule itself is even more bizarre than its presence on a cup. Here it is (formatting, punctuation, etc. all theirs):

( commentary, or, This Plastic Tumbler Is A Story About Rape )

Edited deep in the night because my own formatting was somewhat sketchy.

Continue reading “I Like My Women Like I Like My Coffee”

O I am ill, laid low by such a foul imbalance of the humors as to make me dirty up all my new hankies in one day, and re-read books.

But then I watched the last few episodes of Ouran and my nose wasn’t stopped up anymore. It’s a miracle! A piracy miracle!

I’m still all dizzy, though. I hate being dizzy. I don’t even get to get intoxicated or go into a berserker rage first. It’s totally unfair.

For some reason being sick always makes it a little easier to concentrate in class. And also apparently makes me write in real short paragraphs.

…Kyouya. Sigh. (cut for spoilers) Continue reading “Must! ‘Tis somewhat hard when Tamaki must go!”

I resolve to mutter darkly under my breath.

We went to New York and basically I just got a bunch of manga. I had a Barnes and Noble gift card, but the Barnes and Nobleses repeatedly thwarted me – they didn’t have the new Saiyuki or Battle Angel, any of the volumes I wanted of Fruits Basket, Monster, XXXholic, or Emma, or any at all of Ouran and Scott Pilgrim. I’m very disappointed in you, New York City. Very, very disappointed. I ended up going to a Borders and I think it was actually in New Jersey and it was sad. (thegeekgene gave me the Scott Pilgrim, though, so that was okay.)

I got Mom to read some of Emma and Ouran, though neither of us is sure how much Ouran she understood. After a couple volumes, she told me that she couldn’t tell the characters apart, and I asked her who she was having trouble with – she showed me a page with a long-haired blond girl who only showed up once, and asked if that was Haruhi. I told her that she was probably beyond my help. (She did think Renge was funny, though.)

If I am ever a crazy old lady, I think I will not keep cats, because they put odors into effect that cannot be stopped by conventional weapons (soap, BPAL, screaming).

thegeekgene: Dad bought a minivan, you know.

Me: What – no, he didn’t.

elongated_tito: He did. It’s red.

Me: Mommmm!

Mom: I know -

Me: Weren’t we, as of, like, less than twenty-four hours ago, buying a used Corolla and renting a minivan for a couple days?!

Mom: I don’t – I don’t want to talk about – I am irrational about this! I don’t want to talk about it!

It has been pointed out that my memory of the time thegeekgene fell down and cracked her head open when she was two (and I was six or seven) is at least half made-up. I have two specific memories of this incident. In the first, she trips in front of the fireplace and bangs her head on it, and there’s red stuff on her and people yelling and the like.

In the second, she is being strapped to a round table, with heavy blue bags over her arms and legs to keep her still. The light in the room is an eerie cool blue, and as I watch the table begins to spin, slowly gathering speed. She opens her mouth to scream – and two heavy blue doors slam closed in front of me, truncating the sound with a sickening clang. The hallway is quiet, and lit a bright, searing white.

Mom says that first part totally didn’t happen. thegeekgene‘s blood is, of course, yellow, and coagulates instantly upon contact with oxygen, ossifying into powder in under one-point-three seconds.

…

Apparently I wasn’t actually at the hospital with them, since obviously they didn’t need any extra screaming children there. When I heard someone saying later that she’d been X-rayed, and they’d had to hold her down with something like sandbags, I must have just constructed the rest in my head. I assume I took the scene from a TV show or something.

But for years, I seriously believed that this had happened. It’s probably lucky I never needed an X-ray myself until I was a teenager.

The noises thegeekgene‘s new puppy makes at night sound like a person talking.

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1) Went to Barenaked Ladies concert with Mom, Dad, and thegeekgene. This is exactly the third concert I’ve been to in my life, if you count Sesame Street on Ice.

I will never again attend a concert without earplugs. I still hear roaring.

Mom says it wasn’t really that loud.

1a) There was a Yelling Shithead (TM) behind us. He was a middle-aged man who was balding and had chosen to grow his hair long to in some way disguise this. He screamed constantly and derided the intelligence of his companions (“‘Mediocre’ – oh, do you know what ‘mediocre’ means?”), whose responses we could not hear. (Or, actually, I’m not totally sure those poor people were actually with him.)

He yelled “Nutshelllll!” at regular intervals throughout the concert. I was pleased that they never played it.

2) Dad owns a t-shirt with the election results printed on it.

3) Okay, I’m going to have to make my family buy a new monitor. This one is going to kill their eyes. I guess it’s been kind of blurry for a while, but it was actually painful for me to read through my friends list just now. Urrrgh.

4) Joseph Beth in Lexington was having a huge manga sale. $2 a volume. I mean, the stuff that this applied to was 90% crap or random high-numbered volumes of series no one wants to buy all of – to give you an idea, I think about a fifth of the selection was comprised of volume 4 of Shaolin Sisters: Reborn and volume 18 of Samurai Deeper Kyo. But I still found eight things I wanted enough to buy, and I didn’t even realize there was a second tableful downstairs until after I’d checked out. ( The haul. )

5) Mom and thegeekgene are watching the Sci-Fi channel.

Mom: “It’s – what are they doing now? Why are they running through a field?”

6) This seriously is hurting my eyes, I’m going go cook something in the properly-equipped kitchen I have access to.

Continue reading “At home.”

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Apparently, Yukito Kishiro is taking some time off the main Last Order plotline to start a series called GUNNM Gaiden/write some side stories? Or something? You’re not helpful today, internet.

I’d actually be kind of okay with that. I feel like Last Order is moving really slow. Over the first seven volumes of the original GUNNM, we had like six plot arcs spanning about fifteen years. That was one of the things I liked so much about it. It was a fighting manga with no filler! No monsters-of-the-day! A new, absurdly melodramatic plotline that completely breaks Alita’s heart almost every volume! This was awesome.

But at seven volumes of Last Order, we’ve only covered a few months of time – the past three volumes have just been a couple of days. And they haven’t really been eventful days, by Kishiro’s usual standards. An eventful day for Alita used to be:

( cut for massive spoilers for first series, minor spoilers for Last Order )

Continue reading “(I am never, ever going to get to sleep.)”

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1) WAHAHAHA election

2) I got nervous the other day (see: election) and spent something like a third of my paycheck on manga. ( It came today. )

3) Sensei’s giving a talk in a couple hours. Apparently he’s talking about Miyazaki somewhat. I hope he doesn’t switch directly from crazy porn to Miyazaki. I hope he doesn’t say something that makes me start giggling and he gets grumpy at me and takes it out on my research draft.

4) ELECTION

I’m feeling kind of weird and hyper and everything’s-awesome. I hope I don’t hit the bad side of it and die this evening, because I really need to get started on my computer science project.

Continue reading “WA”

At home. Politics is infuriating and sleazy and I will do the revolution just so as not to subject people to stuff like what happened today. My revolution will be the first to use a video game for its core text, that being Kingdom of Loathing, which teaches that you fight sleaze with ice and spookiness – but watch out, ‘cuz it does double damage on fire and stinkiness!

I will have there be some kind of jerk blood-test that they administer before they allow you to run for office, or maybe one of those questionnaires that’s supposed to identify sociopaths. It will save the non-loathsome candidates money, and the public a lot of unattractive advertising.

I went to take a nap immediately after thegeekgene and I got home, morosely convinced that she would wake me up in under an hour so I could deal with a crisis involving sleaze having followed us home and being on the porch with a fake special knife from a seventies movie from out of the Edge Co. catalog.

Mom woke me up an hour ago and fed me some very good pork, though, so I feel better now.

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I just finished reading RG Veda. Response:

holy crap what was that

…

( spoiler-cut )

Yes.

Continue reading “RG Veda”

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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”

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( 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!

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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.’”

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I guess the internet’s been having Big Creepy Bugs Week or something? There seem to be more people than usual having horrible bug encounters on my friends list, and there was a thing on one of the _wank comms about people wanting bug pictures kept under lj-cuts.

In middle school I would always carry a thing of dental floss in my bag, which I would use to make little leashes for the preying mantises I beat out of the bushes at recess. That sentence should be giving you a pretty accurate picture of my social life at the time.

But it also means that I can totally look at those centipede pictures on FW and then go right back to my crunchy sandwich.

Today, however, I looked at Boing Boing. And there was the fucking hummingbird hawkmoth.

I seriously don’t think you should click on that link. ( You probably shouldn’t read the rest of this, either. )

Oh my god that thing is awful. It took me a second to realize it wasn’t a hummingbird. That’s what’s so bad about it. Hummingbirds are nice, and big moths are okay, but a really big moth that looks like a hummingbird, with a thick body and a bunch of ineffectual little tapered legs with no feet – that is Lovecraft. And its eyes aren’t where it looks like they are, and its front half is shaped like a vibrator, and it would be the worst thing ever to have come flying at your neck because it’s so much more fragile than a bird and its little proboscis-thing would break off and it would be hurt so it wouldn’t stop flying around and shit.

And I’m not going to be able to fix this by fucking looking at kitten pictures, either, because I’m going to suddenly became convinced that one of them is actually a freaky bug that only looks kind of like a kitten, and its eyes are actually infrared bits or sticky traps for smaller bugs. Please, someone tell me that a mad biologist bioengineered that thing, so I can go kill him for it.

Before, the only Boing Boing person I had conceived a personal hatred for was Cory Doctorow, because he shares my basic politics, but fills them full of a kind of viscerally unpleasant self-absorption and paranoia. But now I hate Frauenfelder, too, for the much sounder reason that he thought the creepyfuck bug was pretty and just slammed the picture up on the main page with no warning. I want to slap him really hard.

I had a nightmare a few years ago about a computer virus getting printed out, and getting up off the paper as a really big, really thin, translucent bug with a lot of wings that it didn’t actually use to fly – because it was a program, it was immune to air, so you couldn’t wave a magazine at it to blow it away from you, so it just kept coming. This moth is actually worse than my made-up dream monster. I would still hate the moth if you told me that every last one of them had died last night because of air pollution.

-

Also, here is a webcomic.

(edited a couple times to correct the date and put a cut in)

Continue reading “AAAAAAAGH”

We’ve got a pile of terriers on the screened-in porch right now. One of thegeekgene‘s friends asked us to come get them out of the road near her house, because we have apparently taken over the local animal shelter. There are three puppies and two adults, apparently a little terrier family.

I have named one of the puppies Emperor Vomitorius, for reasons that are very good. Poor little Emperor Vomitorius got very carsick.

We kept them long enough to dip them for fleas, but they’re going to the shelter tomorrow, so if anyone wants a vomiting terrier who is in charge of Rome, speak up now.

Dad bought a laptop to take lawyering with him today. He took me with him to help, because He Knows Nothing. From what the office’s computer guy was saying when this idea first came up, Dad basically just needed something with a wireless connection, so I pointed Dad to the cheapest thing there. He said okay, and we asked the guy to go get one.

The guy came back and said they were out of stock, at which point I suggested we go to a different store, to find something in the same price range.

Upon being placed in a shopping situation, Dad’s brain begins a countdown. None but Dad knows when the countdown will end, and even he knows not where… but when he reaches zero, an item must be purchased. Dad did not want to take the two-minute trip to the other store. He wanted to buy a laptop now. He wanted the one that said “satellite” on the box.

Loud, Cheerful Upper-Class Businessman (Dad): Oh, I like this one here, honey!

Waspish, Ungrateful Daughter With Nasal Voice (Me): You want – do you like it because it says it’s “satellite?”

Dad: Yeah…

Me: Do you know what it means that it says “satellite” on the box?

Dad: No.

Me: There’s no – I can’t even find the specs for this, there’s no little card -

Dad: Yeah, I’m getting this one here, please. This one here, please!

Grasping, Villainous Best Buy Employee: All right, I’ll get it out for you, if you’ll just sign -

Me: No! Stop signing things – I’m calling Mom! Don’t sign anything! Dad -

At this point, The Plot Thickens, for the computer that Dad had pointed out to the salesman was not in fact, the “satellite” computer. Dad, presented with the information that he had just asked for a completely random computer, said again, “Yeah, this one here’s fine.”

This laptop turned out to be basically the same laptop that I had suggested to him before, but with a slightly beefed-up processor and hard drive, and more RAM – it was about $200 more than the other. The guy asked us whether we wanted a service plan. I’d had to send in my laptop to be worked on twice, and since Dad is not precisely reverent of his electronics, it seemed likely that he was going to need it, too. He said he didn’t want it. While we were going up to pay, Dad muttered darkly that he wasn’t going to pay $250 for a service plan!

I have basically been ranting the whole day.

I decided I’d might as well figure out how YouTube worked. I uploaded this video of Dad’s huge Saint Bernard grooming thegeekgene‘s cat. The dog does this often, and to every amenable cat she encounters, but she and this cat in particular share a special bond; the white cat is the only one I’ve yet seen groom the dog back. Or stand on her back and give her a massage.

You can hear That Show With Undertakers in the background, and the video goes on about twenty seconds after the dog stops grooming, because I’ve tried three video editors and still not convinced any of them to both cut and save the file properly.

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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”

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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”