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Saturday, June 21st, 2008
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4:00 am - The Mark of Solomon books one and two, Elizabeth E. Wein
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(I wrote this post a few days ago and set it aside so I could proofread it [read: cut down on the allcaps]; I have since finished the books. I will probably do a spoilery post later.)
Tonight ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) genarti came over so I could show her the Terminator movies (1 and 2; I see no reason to acknowledge the existence of the 3rd), but instead I spent approximately four hours babbling to her about Elizabeth Wein's Arthurian/Aksumite books, and how they have the power to cure disease, bring about world peace, and lower the price of gas. Gen bore my evangelizing with grace, but I have to evangelize more. The Mark of Solomon: The Lion Hunter and The Empty Kingdom: READ THEM.
I stopped inhaling them in order to rhapsodize to you, o flist, so I don't know how The Empty Kingdom ends, but I don't even care. I will love it even if rabid angel fetuses descend from the sky and devour all the hunting dogs. Actually I will probably love it even more, so let's forget I just said that. (Note: I hope it doesn't spoil anyone if I say that it turned out that this did not in fact happen.)
The Winter Prince is the first book of the Arthurian/Aksumite cycle. It should be read first, both because it is excellent and because you have to read the books in order to appreciate the progression of characterization, consequences, and setting (Arthurian Britain to the Aksumite Empire is not a leap many series make). It is about the tensions between King Arthur (Artos)'s two sons, Medraut and Lleu, and to a lesser degree about his daughter, Goewin. It is vivid and unsettling and weird, and you don't need to have even a passing interest in Arthurian legend to enjoy it. (Test case: myself.) I loved it intensely when I was in high school, in part because it reminded me of a lot of the manga I was reading.
(And at one point while I was trying to show Gen the art in Godchild, I pulled a volume off the shelf, and we looked at the cover, and saw this. And then we both blinked. And looked again at the cover of The Winter Prince, which was this.)
( I grudgingly put the rest of this behind a cut in case some of you prefer to avoid spoiling even in the form of knowing what sequels are about. To be fair, it is not exactly predictable. )
People with knowledge: there are short stories, right? Where can I find them? I am willing to sell bookelfe's soul!
current mood: burbling with love
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| Sunday, June 1st, 2008
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6:23 pm - [return of sketches]
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4:52 am - [sketches]
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Sometimes people on my flist post scans of their drawings, and I think, "I should do that!" Then I remember that I don't draw. What I do is doodle during class, and then immediately scribble out everything I've doodled because I am so deeply offended by incorrect proportions, asymmetry, and anything created by me. I'm kind of addicted to destroying the fruits of my own creativity.
But sometimes tiny bits survive, and today I scanned some pages in, cropped them, and uploaded. They're separated by body part because I'm completely incapable of drawing whole people. Also I draw eyes all the time. I'm kind of creepy, now that I think about it.
You can probably kind of tell that I got most of my drawing instruction from a friend who was into manga at the time. I did take art class in high school, but the teacher hated me and that friend because we talked all the time and resented being told what to draw, and I never took the second year.
( This is why I do badly in school - Part I, image heavy; the scanner made everything huge )
current music: Imogen Heap, "Hide and Seek"
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| Monday, May 12th, 2008
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7:07 pm - it's not just for Jena anymore! (update)
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Hey, guys -- all of you who signed the Justice for Jason petition, thank you. The group gave it to the local DA today. (Details in the blog.) Hopefully it will be more effective than most internet petitions.
Seems like nothing much has changed otherwise, although there were some details I hadn't known about the attack given at the press conference (I think they're posted). One of the attackers has still not been charged with anything, and both of them are still running free. Jason Vassell is still under house arrest, electrically monitored, and unable to attend school, which means he's missed the end of this year's first semester and the entirety of the second semester, even assuming he doesn't get sentenced to the possible 30 years of jail. I am still unable to summon the sarcasm the handling of this case deserves.
/returns to homework
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| Saturday, May 10th, 2008
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8:44 pm - this is just to say
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I'm still neck-deep in final papers, but I feel the need to share my intense sorrow over The Sarah Connor Chronicles's failure to cast Francis Capra as Weevil a resistance fighter from the future. (SO FAR.) Deep, deep sorrow.
This post brought to you by (a) a friend demanding that we rewatch a few episodes of Veronica Mars not too long ago, and (b) my brain searching frantically for things to focus on that aren't schoolwork. My brain is unhelpful and does not love me.
But seriously, you guys. He would be so awesome!
current mood: wistful
current music: "but I'm bitter about how VM -- WEEVIL! HI WEEVIL!"
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| Friday, May 9th, 2008
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1:34 am - make way for ducklings
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Today I spent a while wandering around in the sun with a friend, and eventually we noticed that something behind us was making a strange -- almost honk-like -- noise. Which is when a mama duck stomped up, quacking fiercely, and drove us out of her way like a feathery waddling sheepdog. That was enough on its own to give me a cuteness hernia, but then we turned our heads, and lo! she was being followed by about a dozen tiny, tiny balls of fuzzy duckling. They were SO TINY! They had tiny duckling toes. They were made of fuzz and joy.
current mood: so precious!!!
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| Monday, April 28th, 2008
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3:19 am - when you use racist imagery ironically, don't you have to ... be ironic?
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So the project I'm presenting tomorrow is Edward Said-related. Said-based, even. Said presentation -- oh god, that was not an intentional pun -- requires visual accompaniment, so I hied myself to Google, in search of pictures of Mr. Said.
And found this. It's a favorable review of a book that allegedly debunks Said's Orientalism (the article's title: "How Edward Said took intellectuals for a ride"), with a few arguments that may be valid criticisms and some that make me wonder if the author of the article has ever been in the same room as a copy of Orientalism's cousin's best friend's former babysitter. Which, hey, the internet is full of book reviews written by people with no idea what they're talking about. But the kicker?
This is the image next to the article. The article arguing that Edward Said was totally wrong about Western study of the "Orient" being at all sketchy.
I really didn't expect "OH AMANDA MARCOTTE NO" to come in handy so quickly. And people say reading blogs is useless!
current mood: baffled
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| Thursday, April 17th, 2008
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4:43 pm
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So the official Heroes soundtrack has a couple of music videos in addition to mp3s. Which is not unusual! What is unusual: aesthetically, they're vids. They don't look like music videos, even official music videos associated with TVs shows or movies -- not just because they're 100% recycled footage, instead of recycled footage mixed with shots of the artists or something (which is what I'm used to), but just the way they're cut and edited and timed. Also, the one to "Man in the Long Black Coat" is clips of Sylar wearing a long black coat, and the one to "Weightless" is shots of characters flying (um, it also makes a worrisomely coherent Petrellicest vid), and the one to "Not Now But Soon" is a montage of S2 hugs and snuggles. They're not very good vids, but they're not awful for beginners, either.
Anyone have that quote with Kring and somebody else talking about how they've seen Petrellicest fanvids on Youtube? Because after that, and Kring's comments about how they wanted to experiment with internet mediums like the graphic novels, I'm really thinking there was some influence. (Here's an article from before the soundtrack came out with a little description of the videos.)
On a different note: today was the first day in my life that my studying has ever been interrupted by duck sex. As far as I know.
current mood: full of lulz!
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| Wednesday, April 9th, 2008
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10:11 pm - unrelatedly, this is my mostest favorite icon.
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Question: does your self-image/mind's eye change at all after you read or watch visual stories?
(For example: immediately after I read a lot of manga, the mental images that accompany facial expressions are drawn in black lines, and very much in manga shorthand.)
It's not purely a visual thing, but that's the easiest way for me to think of it; if you have examples that aren't visual, I'm curious about them too. I know that when I'm reading a lot of fiction written in third person, my internal narrative turns third person -- I tag little mental "she said"s after everything, without even noticing. (I used to think this particular quirk was just hard-wired into my brain, but when my TV, comic, and manga intake exceeds my literary fiction intake, it stops.)
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7:17 pm - saya mau makan otak pagi ini!!
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Today my Indonesian conversation partner and I ended up talking about the final exam format. Apparently it's going to be a 20 minute freestyle conversation, which perplexes us both, since most of the chapters I'm supposed to be covering are about going to the market, bargaining for a mat, and inviting guests to have some tea. Which will be difficult to work into a conversation with a professor in Arizona over webcam. "Would you like some ... web tea?" "No. Instead, we should go to the web market."
(Still less awkward than the Chinese textbook that mostly taught us how to discuss getting STDs, smuggling Playboy magazines onto airplanes, Monica Lewinsky, and the economic status of developing nations, I suppose.)
Conversation partner used to ask the questions in the exam, so he told me about one year where the guy doing the grading was elderly and hard of hearing, so he kept saying, "Speak up!" until CP and the student were both shouting right in each other's faces. I was in tears of mirth at the idea of extreme high-volume totally fake market bargaining.
(Imagine a Scrubs-style cutaway to the world of my imagination here. The subtitles read:)
Me: THIS MORNING I WOULD LIKE TO GO TO THE MARKET.
Exam-giver: OH I SEE. CAN I COME TOO?
Me: OKAY. I WOULD LIKE TO BUY THE BLUE MAT!!!
But anyway -- freestyle conversation! It looks like those ficlets will come in even more handy than I'd thought. I could, in theory, converse with the exam-giver about eating brains.
Me: THIS MORNING I WOULD LIKE TO EAT BRAINS.
Exam-giver: OH I SEE. DO YOU LIKE TO EAT BRAINS?
Me: YES!!! SO DOES MY BLUE WIFE.
In other exciting news, it looks like next semester I'll finish every requirement except total number of credits. Which means I could theoretically do a semester abroad, or earn some extra credits over the summer to make life easier, or ... build a pony made out of 300-level English classes. I don't know. But I'm happy! I thought I was behind, and instead I'm doing fine. I could even do a thesis*! If I was STUPID.
I've been helping a friend edit hers, and now I have a raging case of thesis envy. I know! I know. But they're so pretty.
* I would explain this American use of "thesis," but I'm not actually sure what the definition is. Er. This is another reason not to do one, isn't it.
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| Tuesday, April 1st, 2008
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11:13 pm - this is not a meme.
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If you wish to help me review my Indonesian lessons so far: give me two characters we're both familiar with, and I will write you a very tiny ficlet about those two characters conversing, wherein their dialogue (but not the narration) will be written in painfully bad Indonesian. It will probably also be OOC because I have only learned a limited number of conversational tactics and none of those are anything like "omae o korosu" which is at least useful in many situations.
This will probably be most entertaining if you're the sort of person who finds French language textbooks the height of hilarity.
(I still plan to finish the last meme! And post actual, er, posts again! Just, those will not impact my grades at all, so they're not at the front of the queue at the moment, and when did I start saying "queue"? I am perplexed.)
ETA: You're all very weird people. I'm just sayin'.
ETA II: I am adding a whole disclaimer just to warn people of the badness of my Indonesian skills.
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| Monday, March 17th, 2008
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6:34 pm - memery
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It's not so much that I'm busier at home during spring break than I am at school, it's just that I'm less bored. At least, I think. Anyway, there are a few posts I want to write up (and betas I want to finish and send, and comments I want to reply to), but in the meanwhile, I think I can swing a meme, gacked from liviapenn.
I have made a secret list of 15 characters. Ask me questions like "how are 2 and 9 secretly similar" or "what if 3, 6, and 12 went on a road trip" or things like that and I'll answer.
ETA: Also, don't look at the comments, because then you'll know who's who. Since you can't, for reference: so far 6 and 9 have been asked about a lot, but the other numbers are mostly unasked about.
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| Saturday, March 8th, 2008
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7:43 pm - kurang mengerti.
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Last night I fell asleep crazy early, and drifted immediately into a dream in which I was eating soup in the dining hall. "What's in your soup?" someone asked me. I started listing the ingredients, which included rice -- except then somebody else we were with interrupted to say, "That's not rice. That's mongoose nipples."
MONGOOSE NIPPLES.
This person went on to inform me that dried mongoose nipples are a valuable source of protein, at which point a loud truck went past my window, and I woke up giggling helplessly at my own subconscious. Mongoose nipples! What would Freud say?
It was especially weird because usually my dreams fall into one of two categories: (1) dreams in which somebody dies, occasionally me, or (2) dreams in which I reset my alarm clock/get up and take a shower/walk in puddles and get my feet wet, and end up deeply confused when I wake up and remember doing those things. I don't usually dream about eating dried mongoose nipples in my soup. I could stand to never do it again.
*
There've been a lot of annoying reactions to issue #12 of the Buffy comics. (If you're on my flist, I'm not talking about you. If you're not, it's still statistically unlikely that I'm talking about you.) Right now I'm most irritated with the people complaining about the pronunciation of Satsu's name, given in one of the articles about the comic. No, they shouldn't have spelled it Sah Tsu. There's a system in place for transliterating Japanese to English, its conventions exist for reasons, and it shouldn't be mangled to better cater to people who have no familiarity with Japanese.
*
One of the nice things about being absolutely terrible at Indonesian is that it's giving me some perspective on my skills at other languages. At this point English is the only language I'm fluent in, and also the only language I can carry on a conversation in (if it's not a conversation about buying your mother, cheese, or absolute destiny apocalypse). But there's still something to be said for being able to read basic French, being able to understand when someone in the kitchen is talking about someone else's enormous 屁股, and knowing, looking at a sentence of written Japanese, where words begin and end, and which are nouns, and which are verbs.
Er, that's the bright side. You guys, learning languages is hard! My conversation partner is very nice and doesn't laugh at me when I can't pronounce gs or anything properly, but it's still very embarrassing. I'm starting to think that the main benefit of language classes, especially for beginners, is having other people around to sound idiotic with you.
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| Friday, March 7th, 2008
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1:25 am - 29 SCC icons
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Batch of icons, mostly from the last few episodes. Feel free to bend, staple, or mutilate. Credit is nice, but not necessary.
( Possibly spoilery )
current mood: tired
current music: "The Man Comes Around," obvi.
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| Wednesday, March 5th, 2008
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10:00 pm - this is short because I should be asleep
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| Thursday, February 28th, 2008
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5:37 pm - and justice for all.
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Late at night on February 3rd, a student at my college was stalked, harassed, threatened, and called racial slurs by two men (not students, and unconnected with the college) lurking outside his window. Which they then smashed. The student -- Jason -- called the police, but before they arrived, the two men busted into the dorm and attacked Jason, breaking his nose. He defended himself, and the men were stabbed (no one's said whether the men brought the knife in with them or whether it came from somewhere else); all three of them had to be transported to a hospital afterward. When the police arrived, they restrained and handcuffed Jason, who is of Jamaican descent, before finding out that he was the one who had called them for help.
Jason has no previous criminal record -- instead he's got a record of social service and volunteer work. He's been arrested on multiple charges, including two counts of assault with intent to murder. At first he was the only one charged; since then, one of his attackers has been charged with hate crimes and disorderly conduct, and the other still has not been charged at all. Both are white.
There's a blog up called Justice for Jason. It has more information on the incident, on the legal fallout, and on how to help Jason's family with the legal costs of his defense, which could be as much as $15,000.
Window repair: probably a couple hundred at most.
Legal defense: possibly as much $15,000.
Bearing the legal brunt of your own racist victimization: priceless.
ETA: Feel free to copy any part of this post if you want to help spread the word. (Which would be very appreciated.)
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| Wednesday, February 27th, 2008
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4:00 pm - list of completely irrelevant factoids about myself.
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- I have two-tiered hair. The outer layer of my hair is medium brown, and very straight. Underneath, closer to my neck, my hair is much darker and coarser, and is very tightly waved. It's not a gradation; it's two distinct layers. The difference was more drastic when I was younger (and actually spent a lot of time in the sun), and the hair on top was lighter, and sometimes my friends would notice it while braiding my hair. I've never heard of anyone else having hair like this.
- Sometimes when I'm listening to music, I'll start hearing the song as though it's slowing down and dropping in pitch (or the opposite). I assume it's because I start hearing the baseline louder than the drums or something like that, but it's incredibly weird, like I'm hallucinating an audio warp tunnel. It happens more often with songs I've vidded.
( More about my totally fascinating self. I wrote this on a slow day. )
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| Sunday, February 24th, 2008
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2:21 pm - vid rec (BtVS/AtS)
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| Friday, February 22nd, 2008
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6:25 pm - Dark Angel
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It feels like it's been a while since I actually had much time for the internet. (There've been a lot of posts lately I've meant to comment on and not had the time or energy for, so if you get notifications for old posts, that's why.) I was going to be productive this afternoon, but then I tripped and fell on Dark Angel. ( Mostly excited burbling. Spoilers through 1x18 )
Now I'm going to go finish the disc, and I think I'm going to ask for no spoilers this time. Somehow I got all invested in what happens! Maybe it's Stockholm Syndrome.
current mood: gleeful
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| Saturday, February 16th, 2008
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2:50 pm - Dark Angel 1x7, "Blah Blah Woof Woof" -- oh my god, is that seriously the episode title?
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