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Tuesday, November 10, 2009 ( 7:59 PM ) posted by Setsuled I would so play this game; Ultra-Realistic Modern Warfare Game Features Awaiting Orders, Repairing Trucks One of the things I liked about Daggerfall*, the predecessor of Morrowind and Oblivion, was that it was actually feasible to be just a boring merchant, getting by buying and trading. Of course, I never actually wanted to play the game that way but it was nice somehow to know I could. And I've always been a proponent of having to handle basic needs like food or sleep in RPGs. It seems we're getting further and further from that. I watched Tim play the new BioWare game, Dragon Age: Origins last week. It seems to have blended a lot of the best qualities of Baldur's Gate and Knights of the Old Republic, with convenient party options, interesting spells, and dialogue that reacts to a lot of user customisations of character. But, once again, the dialogue is so awful it gave me douche chills. I heard poor Claudia Black, a talented actress, deliver the line, "Chaos is nature's fundamental nature." I can't speak to the overall plot, but Tim did mention that there's practically no explanation for the main villain's turn as traitor. Even worse is the intensely ugly wardrobe. The haphazard attempt to makes things look medieval at least limits their colour palette somewhat as it buys into the current idea that no-one liked using dyes in the Middle Ages, but that doesn't stop Dragon Age from including ordinary bikinis, dowdy sports bras, and unflattering, physics defying halter tops.  The men's clothes aren't any better, all the patterns and textures being too complicated or lacking in contrast so as to reduce everyone's outfits to variations of almost skin-tight jumpsuits, with big spiky pauldrons (shoulder pads) to indicate plate mail. For all that, though, I do remember Baldur's Gate and Knights of the Old Republic as having stories and characters that did engage me and make me care about them. I think the format is more responsible for that than anything else, which makes me think about what an amazing game could be made if they got some decent writers. Had trouble getting to sleep again last night, feeling like I was pregnant again. I wonder if it could be like Cronenberg's The Brood, and there are a bunch of demon children made of my repressed anger. If that's the case, apparently they hate Alka-Seltzer--I had a glass of that while watching another part of The Godfather and I very soon felt better. It may have been in part because of Michael Corleone--the guy's so cool, so collected, it's very reassuring. I was admiring Coppola's strategic use of light and colour, going from the beautiful amber and black images of Sicily suddenly to a bright yellow and red taxi outside the muted tones of the Corleone home. Really nice. Last nights tweets; Black liquorice should ever avail us. My stomach is confused by an apple. Digestion is watched by a backwards bust. There are always marble men to grapple. *Daggerfall can be downloaded for free now from the official Elder Scrolls website, here. # Monday, November 09, 2009 ( 7:41 PM ) posted by Setsuled I'm calling it now--this is the worst haircut in the history of the Buffyverse;  It's like Charisma Carpenter asked for, "Something that says 'I'm no younger than 58 and I love slot machines.'" This is even worse than Willow's mushroom hair and accompanying Mork wardrobe from Buffy's season 4. I suppose it fights stereotypes a bit, though--boy crazy Cordelia has what's normally considered lesbian hair while the actual lesbian was dressing like Gallagher for a while. What makes this a real tragedy is that Carpenter has the best rack of anyone on either show;  And Cordelia's supposed to be the fashion conscious one. I'd argue a haircut like that is almost as bad as accidentally getting a mirror reflecting David Boreanez in a shot. Otherwise, I enjoyed the season finale of Angel's third season a lot more than I did the first time. Connor's not annoying me nearly as much this time around. I love the ongoing exploration of the meaning of vengeance on both shows. I watched the final episode of Zan Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei to-day. It lacks a lot of the embellishments of the previous seasons' final episodes, possibly reflecting a lower budget, something which seems to be affecting anime across the board. The episode even sort of alludes to the phenomenon. The later portion of the episode also features a plot about Kiri Komori losing her security blanket--revealing that she has a "Linus Complex"--to a gush of wind, and the story ends up being about the effects of consumer spending in a bad economy. But I liked the first part of the episode even more, which dealt with people who are prone to noticing, and making a big deal over, typos and small errors while totally ignoring larger issues.    Not unlike noticing a bad haircut while ignoring the story about Cordelia and Angel failing to consummate their love because he's at the bottom of the ocean and she becomes a goddess of some kind, I suppose. In my defence, I did appreciate her breasts. I tried eating some pizza yesterday and it felt like I swallowed a basketball. Otherwise, I feel okay, though. I almost got eight hours of sleep last night. Twitter Sonnet #79 Bad paint looks normal on dented plastic. Grey continents in a sea of black glaze. Air is the baby in mankind's basket. Going now into a dull opaque phase. Wooden cups can last longer than glasses. Alka-Seltzer strengthens collection plates. Normal water's the rice of the masses. Cereal grains determine all men's fates. I've managed to be hungry on schedule. A moon photograph shows the right timing. Now I'm driving the Jean Genie's module. Through tired streets of souls mutely pining. Rainy season, Moon River overflows. Fake jewellery goes with garish old clothes. # Sunday, November 08, 2009 ( 6:59 PM ) posted by Setsuled Last night's tweets; Wooden cups can last longer than glasses. Alka-Seltzer strengthens collection plates. Normal water's the rice of the masses. Cereal grains determine all men's fates. I guess yesterday wasn't so bad. Tim finally got Oblivion running properly, and I watched part of a new copy of The Godfather I got last week. It's the new "Coppola Restoration"--I didn't finish watching it because the headache I'd gotten from all the sleep deprivation was preventing me from really enjoying it, especially since it's one of those movies that I've watched so many times I feel as though I've sucked it dry. In high school, it was one of those dependable things I could always put into the VCR and expect a nice time. But the picture on this new edition is hugely better than the previous DVD release. I noticed again how curiously high contrast a lot of the photography looks, especially in the wedding scene and the exteriors for Woltz' mansion. The sky's usually turned into a white void.  The difference between the movie blood and the real blood of the real horse's head in Woltz' bed came off very strongly for me. A lot of people don't know that's a real horse head, so I bet audiences found the scene disturbing in a way they couldn't quite explain in the original theatrical run. "Villains", the episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer I watched last night, put a big smile on my face. Willow torturing Warren was so fun and satisfying--the show just completely fails to make any argument as to why Willow shouldn't kill him, so it ends up having some of the glee of a Tarantino or grindhouse revenge film. I also played a bit of World of Warcraft, playing some really annoying quest in Western Plaguelands that had me trying to find a specific book among a bunch of "musty tomes" that summoned a pair of difficult ghouls whenever I picked up the wrong one, who usually managed to kill me whenever my Retaliate ability was in its five minute cool down. They kept putting some kind of curse on me that reduced my strength and stamina by 100. My headache was pretty amazing last night. I had some Alka-Seltzers, but I might as well have just been drinking water for all the effect it had on me. It wasn't a migraine or anything, it was just constant and reduced my ability to engage with the world by about 100, I guess much like the ghouls. I really was getting mixed up last night--when my undead warrior sat down to eat some bananas or corpses to regain health, part of me really did think, "Maybe this'll help my headache." What did eventually help was going to bed. It was extraordinary--my headache instantly disappeared when my head hit the pillow. When I sat up, it came back, and went away again when I lay back down. It was like a light switch. But to-day's one of those lately rare days when I actually feel like myself, which is very good because I'm drawing the 300th page of Venia's Travels to-day. I made a commitment to myself to do this comic for around two years, and I do feel like it's around three fifths done. I'm excited. # Saturday, November 07, 2009 ( 6:52 PM ) posted by Setsuled Last night's tweets; Bad paint looks normal on dented plastic. Grey continents in a sea of black glaze. Air is the baby in mankind's basket. Going now into a dull opaque phase. Ugh. I slept badly yesterday because I tried eating some spaghetti with vodka sauce and I ended up feeling bloated as a days old corpse. I googled a bit and found a bunch of sites that told me, "You're in the first stages of pregnancy!" I was so tired, a part of me seriously started to contemplate that possibility. So I'd started my next chapter a day early so I'd have Friday and Saturday to unwind after my mind and spirit being in a pickle jar for about a week. I went to Tim's last night, and a few hours in, while I was trying to enjoy Oblivion through the haze of sleep deprivation, Tim's doorbell rang and I met outside a teenager who'd just backed his obnoxiously large truck into my car.  The little Chevrolet symbol's broken, too. The corroded paint job was already there--I've been putting off getting it repainted. I felt like I was barely present while we exchanged insurance information and he tried to convince me to let him fix my car himself at the local high school. I felt bad for him, I know insurance is expensive for teenagers and this was likely going to hurt. But I ended up calling my insurance when I woke up to-day. I still have a bad feeling I'm just going to be stuck with this somehow. This is the second time a car's hit mine when it was parked outside Tim's. Last time, the car wasn't drivable. At least I can still get around this time. Of course, I once again missed a full day's sleep, as I always have a hard time getting to sleep when I have to get up early, in this case to get photos of my car and make phone calls. I kept getting up to pee, I think, psyching myself into thinking the urinary tract infection was back. I propped up a bunch of pillows to try to sleep like Joseph Merrick because my stomach actually felt a bit better like that. It actually kind of worked for a while. But, please, Oden, Belldandy, Apollo, whoever's listening. Let me have to-night off. Please. # Friday, November 06, 2009 ( 7:39 PM ) posted by Setsuled  Twitter Sonnet #78 In life there are infinite sandwiches. Delivery schedule's always changing. New plan from a hen randomly hatches. While the provolone continues aging. You cannot touch the Baker's tomatoes. The bad vision has stark hue gradients. Madness expels the cheese from burritos. Zip codes are unwise droid ingredients. The warheads were in the cranberry juice. Smart goblets are heralded by trumpet. Olives seek the vaginas of Grey Geese. Electricity destroyed the carpet. Plagues make many Bokuzen Hidaris. Preserve your flesh between slices of cheese. But "goose" rhymes with "juice", not "geese"! Slant rhyme, motherfuckers. Pretty much. If you still have a problem, face me in combat. Last night I watched "Seeing Red", a sixth season episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that's a bit controversial. I actually saw it when it was first run, though I'd mostly stopped watching the show at that point. There were things I'd totally forgotten about, like Spike's attempted rape of Buffy, but I think I mainly forgot about that part because it didn't make any sense to me, and I had a tendency to omit such things from my viewing experience now and then. Logically, it still doesn't make sense that Spike could overpower Buffy for that long, or that so many people would come barging into Buffy's bathroom without knocking. This time, though, I tried to meet the writers halfway and see if I could at least appreciate what they were trying to do. From the Wikipedia entry; Writer Rebecca Rand Kirshner agrees that the viewer "could feel how [Spike's] very innards were twisted into this perversion of what he wanted," and she found that experiencing the scene from his perspective was additionally disturbing. And there are two motives I can appreciate--creating a rapist character the audience can identify with, and being intentionally disturbing. The first because I do believe it's inherently destructive to see people who do such things as inhuman, the second because I like being scared. I'm still coming down on the side of the scene not being appropriate, though. Not just because it doesn't make sense from a logistical standpoint, though that's significant because I think a viewer will latch onto the evident artificiality of a scene if they can instead of going with a concept that might be unpleasant. This isn't a moment for hoping the audience will just go with you on something. But, it also, as is often the case with Buffy's worst moments, relies on concepts that were too weakly established earlier on, mainly the differences the absence of a soul creates in a person. The main reason I think Spike comes across, especially early in his neutered phase, as especially sympathetic is that not having a soul generally seems just to mean he cares only about the characters we care about, while the other characters are burdened with showing a phoney compassion for poorly established minor characters. Suggesting at the end of the episode, apparently, that Spike's going off to find himself a soul because he's ashamed of himself for trying to rape Buffy makes us wonder if it is the absence of a soul that made him try to rape her. He obviously cared about her--taking care of her sister after she died is hardly the actions of someone interesting in just sex, and his desire to take her by force was evidently a confused effort born of frustration over the fact that she didn't appear to love him. So would the message here then be, "This is the behaviour of someone without a soul"? This would make it completely pointless to convey Spike's POV, which is of course the point of having soulless characters to begin with--people you can kill without feeling guilty about it. So it's too muddled to really be a useful statement. Also, it doesn't make sense in terms of the characters and the relationship they have--they had sex for the first time when they were in the middle of trying to kill each other. Buffy'd beaten Spike to a pulp a few episodes earlier. Their relationship was already established to be based on the two of them fulfilling selfish needs with violence being the only definitive way of saying "yes" or "no". Buffy certainly sounded like she didn't want Spike on her in the episode, and he looked like he knew on some level he was taking advantage of her, but knowing what the two are physically capable of makes the scene feel conspicuously like a pantomime--borrowing rules from another universe for a moment to shock and make a vague point. The other controversial moment in the episode, Warren coming in and shooting Buffy and Tara, has exactly the same problem. We've had an implicit understanding with the writers since season one that we'll just ignore the fact that the villains almost never exploit this very obvious weakness the Slayer has, that she can be killed by ordinary firearms. Introducing guns to kill off a character we care about, we automatically go through the shock stage of "How could this have happened?" And we're forced to conclude, "Gee, when Buffy lives surrounded by extremely powerful mortal enemies, it's kind of foolish of her to ever be outside of a bunker unless it's necessary." Of course, Buffy in a Bunker isn't as much fun as Buffy Facing Teen/Young Adult Problems While Fighting Monsters. Now, if Warren had shown up with a death ray and played out the scene exactly the same way, I think I'd actually dig it. The "nerd trio" is actually, in my opinion, collectively the best season villain since The Mayor/Faith duo. Precisely because they're a bit haphazard about their commitment to being villains--they largely lack the capacity for self-reflection, or examining a situation beyond their own superficial needs, so much so that Jonathon honestly didn't think hypnotising a woman to sleep with them was rape until she actually used the word, at which point he was mortified. After years of conspicuously campy villains, here we have a few guys who are too lost in the aesthetics of what they're doing to really understand what they're doing on a fundamental level. But I was sorry to see Tara go. Especially since Amber Benson and Alyson Hannigan had really gotten to enjoy making out, which is great to watch, even if they are both straight in real life. 
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Thursday, November 05, 2009 ( 8:53 PM ) posted by Setsuled  I feel like myself to-day for the first time in a week. I had a cup of coffee with breakfast, the first caffeine I'd had in three days. I feel like I almost kicked my caffeine addiction, but my head still had this weird triangular feeling, like there was a big empty compartment on the top with two lower compartments filled with condensed brains. I had a rice and bean burrito for lunch that seemed to help--on a diet of oatmeal, cous cous, and bread, I don't think I'd had much protein for days. Let's see, how can I relate to-day's entry to cats? Someone in Russia finally finished subtitling in English the high quality videos of the original, 1985 Dirty Pair television series, and I watched the twelfth episode to-day, about a government manufactured, super intelligent security mouse gone rogue. Kei and Yuri briefly enlist the aid of an army of cats, who prove to be no match. I also got some footage of Snow last night walking away from me. Nothing I can really post, though. He's just so anxious nowadays whenever he drops by, coming to the door for attention, then pacing indecisively before leaving. I've been reading more War and Peace. Rostov, the young soldier, has come home to Moscow to find Sonya, his childhood crush, waiting for him. Only now he doesn't have time for her because he's too busy socialising with older society, who accept him now that he's seen action. Poor Sonya, this after Rostov basically told her through his sister that he still liked her. She was very pretty, charming, and evidently deeply in love with him, but he was at that stage of youth when there seems so much to do that there is no time for that sort of thing, and when a young man dreads being bound and prizes his freedom, which he needs for so many other things. I can kind of remember thinking that way when I was in high school. Now I think back with some regret about girls who were interested in me. Last night's caterpillar in my bathroom; Music is "Kinder, Heute abend da such ich mir was aus" by Marlene Dietrich. Last night's tweets; You cannot touch the Baker's tomatoes. The bad vision has stark hue gradients. Madness expels the cheese from burritos. Zip codes are unwise droid ingredients. # Wednesday, November 04, 2009 ( 7:37 PM ) posted by Setsuled It's weird how time seems to get away from me even faster now that the clocks tell me I have an extra hour. Maybe it's because I can't set one of the clocks in my room--the VCR clock can only be set by a remote control in which I have found what appear to be two exploded double A batteries. To-day I dreamt Laura Palmer and Aquaman were imprisoned on a converted cruise liner in the future. One night, they manage to escape by diving together into the ocean. Aquaman helps Laura Palmer breathe in the depths with glowing purple breath flowing from his mouth to hers. The two start to have a really nice time, and I dreamed slow moving, shadowy imagery of the two swimming nude thousands of leagues below the surface. Then some device strapped to Aquaman's chest prevented Palmer from breathing, and I woke up when the two were in a mad rush for the distant surface. I suppose the bends would've killed her first, but I think Aquaman's magic was still protecting her from that. With breakfast, I watched the online only, thirteenth episode of Bakemonogatari. After the big resolution with Senjogahara, it looks like they're concentrating on subplots, now a continuation of Hanekawa's problem with getting possessed by a cat demon. It seems to possess the very straight laced girl whenever she loses a grip, in this case it apparently might be due to some jealousy she feels for Araragi's relationship with Senjogahara. I don't know why, but somehow I find her to be one of the best looking cat girls I've seen in anime;  I was reminded a bit of the episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer I watched last night, "Entropy", which seemed to continue the season long theme of retribution nicely. I'm in trouble--I find I'm actually mostly enjoying the notorious sixth season. Last night's tweets In life there are infinite sandwiches. Delivery schedule's always changing. New plan from a hen randomly hatches. While the provolone continues aging. # Tuesday, November 03, 2009 ( 7:54 PM ) posted by Setsuled Twitter Sonnet #77 Nordic disguises dwarf Roman costumes. Somewhere there is a viral Robin Hood. The wasting wax blight idea was Brit Hume's. It was to know where candle elves stood. Hardened sugar shapes pummel the stomach. Bottle missiles wage war with sucking void. The berserker Pop Rocks tear through tonic. Organic train stations have been destroyed. The friendly vampire's tongue is hot pink. Energy finds him just moments from dawn. Heedless fun flows freely from the bad sink. In the morning, Errol Flynn's on the lawn. Radios broadcast from underground pools. A tall building houses much better schools. One of the things I like about the Middle Ages is that, no matter how bad someone was, there was no possibility of them destroying the world. Mass murder, rape, pillage, sure. But nothing really that could send the planet into an irreversible downward spiral that would cause pain to billions of people for generations. It sucks bigger toys got in the hands of the same petty warlords. Or maybe the worse thing is that less courageous assholes can wreak more havoc without having the guts to show their faces, as with the pustule of the pharmaceutical companies blocking the universal healthcare the country overwhelmingly wants. For days now, I've had the urge to watch the Errol Flynn Robin Hood, and I kind of avoided it because I always get indecisive when it comes to watching a movie I've already seen before. I talk myself out of my first instincts, asking myself, "Am I really in the mood?" I finally watched about half of Robin Hood last night before I had to eat dinner and, yes, it turned out, I was in the mood. I still love how the first group of scenes manages to throw in a lot of details in an interesting way. They're not totally historically accurate, though they're a lot more accurate than I think a lot of people would suspect. But in any case, it helps establish a world around Robin Hood--Saxons oppressed by Normans, headed by the cruel Prince John (Claude Rains), who in the middle of one of his movie villain speeches still cautions that they not hang every Saxon, lest there be no-one to tax or to till the land. You can sense how things function, and how John wresting the regency from Longchamp threw things out of wack. With lunch yesterday, I watched the first episode of Mad Men, which I found to be extraordinarily well written for a cable series, for the most part going just over the line of realism with its blatantly sexist and greedy characters to be a nicely funny commentary. One of the guys on the show, Vincent Kartheiser (whose name I always seem to pronounce as "Karthesiser") seemed incredibly familiar to me, but I didn't remember from where until he showed up as Conner on the episode of Angel I watched last night. He seems to have made niche for himself playing baby faced pricks. In spite of all I watched, and in spite of the caffeine deprivation, I actually got a lot done yesterday, finishing the next Venia's Travels script, doing rough drawings for the pages, and I pencilled and inked a page for the winner of Moira's auction. And speaking of whom--Happy birthday, Moira. And happy birthday, Trisa. It's also Kevin Murphy's birthday to-day. I'm dying to hear the new Rifftrax of Titanic. I'm going to have to see if I can borrow a copy of the movie from someone . . . # Monday, November 02, 2009 ( 8:53 PM ) posted by Setsuled  Last night I watched Inazuma, or Lightning, a 1952 Mikio Naruse film. The caffeine deprivation has made it hard to concentrate on anything, and the English subtitles were slipshod, but the little Japanese I understand, Naruse's skill at telling a story, and Hideko Takamine's beauty pulled me through. It's a deceptively "small" feeling movie, almost like half a movie, but it's actually a very cunningly constructed film about the difference between affection given out of a sense of duty and circumstance and affection naturally given, independent of family or social prescriptions. Hideko Takamine plays Kiyoko, who has three half-siblings--their mother married four different men and had one child for each. When the husband of one of the half-siblings dies, the subtle net of obligation becomes apparent as family members ask for portions of the life insurance for their own ventures and the man's mistress shows up demanding money for the child he had with her. Kiyoko, meanwhile, is pursued by a baker with whom the family has a close relationship. At first, I wondered if I'd missed some important bit of dialogue when I saw Kiyoko would often become totally silent and beat a hasty retreat whenever the baker appeared, though the rest of the family were friendly to him. The scene that nicely brings out the dynamics of Kiyoko's relationship with the man and furthers the discussion on types of love features Kiyoko upstairs, listening to a record with her friend. The friend proudly tells Kiyoko how her mother had gone without eating at times for the sake of her music collection. Kiyoko asks her friend if she ever thought of marriage, and when the friend says yes, Kiyoko can't believe it, not able to believe someone who places such importance on their individual passions would be interested in such a confining arrangement. When the baker drops by in the middle of their discussion, Kiyoko has her friend lie to the man, telling him she's not home. When the friend asks Kiyoko who he is, Kiyoko jokingly replies, "My lover." The music from her friend's record reappears later in the film from the piano of a guy Kiyoko actually likes. Kiyoko describes the affection of her family as being like the affection given to a cat seen in the film, lacking the actual chemistry possible between two people. The film ends with Kiyoko happily buying a kimono for her mother, never actually presenting one form of love as "the winner".  And the movie had a really adorable cat. But speaking of affection without chemistry, I watched what may be the single most awkward episode of Angel last night, a third season episode called "Double or Nothing". I like Fred, and I like Gunn, but Fred and Gunn together, blegh. I know Amy Acker's adorable, but that doesn't mean she can't have self respect--I could have done very well without the scene of her wearing a glittery paper crown while she and Gunn first talk like a seven year old's idea of people in love before breaking up in a fight like two five year olds. The problem is that pretty much no time is spent on how or why these two got together, and loads of "You're cute," "No, you're cute!" style dialogue dominates their screen time together. They seem to be a couple more because they've been commanded to be than for any natural reason. I also read the first story in the new Sirenia Digest last night, and the second one to-day with breakfast. Both with Alice in Wonderland references, "THE DISSEVERED HEART" featuring a sort of Cheshire Cat character and "A REDRESS FOR ANDROMEDA" featuring "The Lobster Quadrille", which I knew Caitlin likes to quote often. The first story was a nice, dreamlike werewolf tale, something about innocence and predators. The second featured pumpkins and sea life imagery, a Lovecraftian ritual for sea monsters with Halloween bits. It was good. Gods, I need caffeine. To-day I watched the second episode of Nyan Koi, a new anime series about a guy who's cursed to understand what cats are saying and to eventually become a cat himself if he doesn't do 100 favours for 100 cats. It's by far the funniest new series I've seen in a long time, though the new episode of Natsu no Arashi was even funnier. Last night's tweets; Hardened sugar shapes pummel the stomach. Bottle missiles wage war with sucking void. The berserker Pop Rocks tear through tonic. Organic train stations have been destroyed. # Sunday, November 01, 2009 ( 7:44 PM ) posted by Setsuled Last night's tweets; Nordic disguises dwarf Roman costumes. Somewhere there is a viral Robin Hood. The wasting wax blight idea was Brit Hume's. It was to know where candle elves stood. A lot of last night and to-day has been spent doing some necessary reading for the next Venia's Travels chapter. I kind of wish I had years to really embed things in my memory, but in just about all my artistic pursuits, I can't escape the feeling that my time is limited in the grand scheme of things. Still only having one cup of coffee a day, and I probably wouldn't have that much except I need my mind to get anything done. I was noticing last night how decidedly surly I was without the caffeine. I don't know if I actually have time to go through the withdrawal. Still trying to keep to eating non-spicy things. I've been eating oatmeal for breakfast (no change there), cucumber sandwiches for lunch, and saltless potato leek soup with toast for dinner. I'm going to try incorporating cous cous, too. No-one I knew actually wanted to hand out candy to trick-or-treaters, except a six year old girl named Carly who was visiting at my parents' house last night. When the doorbell rang, my mother shushed everyone, but Carly couldn't get her mind around it, "Why can't we give them candy?" I told her I knew how she felt. But I managed to talk my mother and sister into watching Cat People last night. I was surprised when they didn't see Irina as the heroine of the movie, and I had to remind myself that this is probably the normal interpretation. Mostly what I get from it is smug Ollie and Dr. Judd, blundering about like everything in the world is there for their benefit, and Alice completely rolling over for them. What Irina sacrifices for them, I completely don't feel like they deserve it, and she comes off as practically a saint because of it. So far I've written just over half the next chapter of my comic. I don't know how I'm going to get through the rest without more caffeine. I might try some green tea, as some of the sites I've been looking at say it's actually beneficial for urinary tract infections. If only there were some way to shoot caffeine into my brain without it ending up in my guts. Happy birthday, Chris Walsh # Saturday, October 31, 2009 ( 5:03 PM ) posted by Setsuled Twitter Sonnet #76 Sure is a bad time for me to be sick. I hope a lighter meal is all I need. A Zelda fairy now'd be fantastic. Why can't problems ever be solved with mead? Calculators oftentimes will not help. Much is done with Satan's power of sloth. Water's more easy going with some kelp. A cop can sing or bust crime but not both. Loud chairs misunderstand their true function. Chuckling ghost imps dance to cause chronic pains. To winter air, dead trees apply suction. Blood is the cranberry juice in your veins. No man alone is a big yellow bird. Green garbage monsters should not be disturbed. Another video game Friday at Tim's. While he was playing Oblivion, I went through a bunch of old Nintendo and Super Nintendo ROMs I had on an old disk. It seems at one time Nintendo games were made from everything and I played a curiously goofy Jaws game that involved moving a little white diver about a small square of water, avoiding octopi gliding horizontally across the screen and collecting sea shells. The shells looked exactly like the shells in the Disney's Little Mermaid game, and I wondered how many little bits of graphics and programming were often reused. The Bible Adventures game certainly seemed to have borrowed a lot from Super Mario Brothers 2 (or Doki Doki Panic), and I was briefly involved in the cartoon madness of Jochebed taking Moses to the river--controlling the woman speeding from one end of the screen to the other, lifting her baby like a prop as well as evil spiders and periodically throwing them. "Wow," I said to Tim. "Everyone's going to be Christian after playing this game." The Wikipedia entry has screenshots, as well as this fascinating bit of trivia; Bible Adventures is one of a very few games produced without a license from Nintendo. In order to bypass the NES's 10NES chip, which was intended to prevent unauthorized games, Wisdom Tree used technology licensed from Tengen which used a voltage zap to bypass the security mechanism. Because the technology used in the cartridge was technically copyright infringement, the Bible Adventures cartridge was not sold through traditional video game retailers, and is thus a scarce collectors' item today. What are the laws of man to 8 bit God? Well, thank heaven Wisdom Tree had the courage to go rogue and put repetitive, derivative God into the devilish grey boxes. I played some WoW last night, then watched Blood: The Last Vampire, a rather short anime feature film by Production I.G., the same studio that makes Kimi ni Todoke. It's also very beautiful, though I think their works, like Kimi ni Todoke, the animated sequence in Kill Bill, and xxxHolic, that have less overt use of cgi, actually look far superior to Blood and Ghost in the Shell. There's a stiffness about the fusion of the two styles. But Blood's story is certainly better than average, nicely avoiding any time wasted on exposition and just showing through images and dialogue Saya's character and her relationship to the monsters, her strange sympathy with them coinciding with her commitment to killing them coming off as far more poetic this way than just another rehash of the common half demon versus real demons story. Though, as there are apparently a manga and anime series that follow the film, I'm sure a lot is eventually made more explicitly clear. I see the film's concept is the result of a sort of contest among students of Oshii Mamoru, according to Wikipedia, and "The submissions of Kenji Kamiyama and Junichi Fujisaki became the basis for the upcoming film: a girl in a sailor suit wielding a samurai sword." Which seems pretty amazing to me as that describes about 80% of action anime. It's nice to see director Hiroyuki Kitakubo was given artistic license to take it somewhere interesting. Well, I think I'm slowly weaning myself off caffeine. I managed to get by on just one cup of coffee yesterday and I'm going to see if I can do the same to-day. # Friday, October 30, 2009 ( 6:27 PM ) posted by Setsuled Last night's tweets; Calculators oftentimes will not help. Much is done with Satan's power of sloth. Water's more easy going with some kelp. A cop can sing or bust crime but not both. Having a cup of coffee right now after going almost 48 hours without caffeine. I hope I'm well enough after two days of solid sleep blocks to drink the stuff that'll make me feel like myself again. So far so good. I think I'll keep drinking cranberry juice in any case. It turns out I rather like it. So I did upload the new Venia's Travels at around 5am. No-one's more surprised than me that I finished it last night, but without caffeine, noticing any light or sound surprises me. Even now, I'm having trouble forming thoughts or emotions. I guess I could be a Matrix battery still. Or a senator. Oh, hey, there's an opinion. Coffee bringing me back online by slow degrees. Pretty much nothing to say about yesterday. I worked on my comic and listened to Howard Stern for about ten hours. Thank the gods for the Stern show. It's hard to imagine anything feeling like an emergency while listening to it. I also watched an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with dinner. The night before, when I was feeling really shitty, I'd watched "Sleep Tight", an episode of Angel with which I felt a peculiar sympathetic panic as Wesley worried about Angel killing his baby. It's as though, as I sensed things going wrong with my body and anxieties about my lack of health insurance and otherwise inability to handle something truly serious, I projected those anxieties onto Angel's behaviour, and I actually got a little scared when he threw his spiked blood against the wall, shouting about his kid. I was so happy when he was back to himself by the end. You know, I'm feeling so sorry I said David Boreanaz was bland. He actually has a kind of Harrison Ford quality. I'm not sure what I'll do to-night. I guess I'll go over to Tim's. Maybe play some World of Warcraft. Go to the Western Plaguelands and kill things. It's nice being able to go back to the undead area, which I think is my favourite region in World of Warcraft. The colours are sort of Invader Zim-ish. Almost done with my coffee. I can feel my brains opening slowly to life like flower petals or a vagina. Sweet, sweet, brain vagina. I swear it's the vagina part that turns me on the most. But, oh, brains . . . # ( 5:17 AM ) posted by Setsuled The new Venia's Travels is online. It's named after a Jesus and Mary Chain song. I finished it more out of numb momentum than tenacity. # Thursday, October 29, 2009 ( 7:51 PM ) posted by Setsuled Last night's tweets; Sure is a bad time for me to be sick. I hope a lighter meal is all I need. A Zelda fairy now'd be fantastic. Why can't problems ever be solved with mead? The new Venia's Travels chapter is likely to be up a day or two later than usual. The reason I haven't been sleeping the past few days is that I've been getting up to pee every five minutes. I've also been hungry and unable to eat at the same time. After talking with my family a bit, and doing some googling, we're working under the theory that I've got a urinary tract infection, so I've been taking some antibiotics. To-day was the first sleep I've really had in days. Obviously, this is a bad time for this. I know a lot of people read the comic on Saturdays and Mondays, so it won't really matter, but to those hoping to read it to-night or Friday morning, it probably won't be up. I have five pages totally finished, plus another two mostly coloured and one I still haven't started. I can't have caffeine, but I'm going to try work on this thing to-night. We'll see how it goes. Drinking cranberry juice with breakfast. Tastes totally different than I thought it would . . . Happy birthday, Natalie. # Wednesday, October 28, 2009 ( 9:43 PM ) posted by Setsuled  Twitter Sonnet #75 Can't believe I'm this hungry already. I ate lunch about an hour ago. Thin cucumbers can make plates unsteady. There's no real food inside the Nintendo. Forbidden spaghetti is black wires. Baby ghosts will try eating anything. Beware of tiny mayo vampires. Digital spell casters do like to sing. Neutral dead gnats are floating in white wine. Their tiny Robin Hood went for the rum. Spirit laws are canaries in a mine. Drunk driving without alcohol's no fun. Cram silent signals in a fat file. Another sleepless day for the pile. My mother suggested leaving out a small cup of chardonnay for the fruit flies or gnats or whatever they are and it seems to have worked like a charm. Though I guess I need to put some fresh bowls of it in the kitchen because a lot of them just seem to be swarming instead of drowning. This exercise has made white wine, incredibly, seem even more disgusting to me. I already thought it tasted like liquefied taffy. I'm in day two of getting only fitful, three hour stints of slumber. It seems to've messed up my appetite, among other things. I ate lunch yesterday at around 11pm, even though I wasn't at all hungry. I had only a bowl of saltless pea soup, but I could barely cram it down. I usually eat lunch in the kitchen, but the insects were so bad I took the soup into my room and watched the third episode of Kimi ni Todoke while I ate. Sleep deprived turned out to be the best way to watch the show, as some of my higher functions were disabled and I was able to get invested in the story. It's still beautifully designed and animated, too. I have to wonder if my dislike for the show is due to psychological imperfections on my part. What bugs me is the naive, innocent hearted protagonist. Why should this bug me so much? Some people are naive and innocent, and those aren't crimes. Sawako's naiveté is over the top, as she persists in only marvelling about how she's finally making friends and just thinking about how great the male lead is without becoming aware of the fact that she's attracted to him. But cartoons are often about exaggeration. She's kind of like a humanoid lolcat. Lolcats and cats don't bother me. In fact, I can appreciate the easy affection animals give because I tend to put a lot of people off without even trying. And yet, on occasions when I've encountered anything like that unconditional love from people, I tend to find it irritating. I find the idea of someone liking me without understanding me to be disturbing. Though I guess there are people who like that emotional distance, and I'm reminded of David Letterman's recent scandalous affairs with much younger women, and discussions on The Howard Stern Show about how this fits in with the sort of anti-social Letterman they know. It's kind of how I generally perceive relationships between older men and young women, though--two people unable to really connect with others take social roles and the power dynamics inherent in those roles as a surrogate for actual chemistry to satisfy sexual desire and the need for companionship. It kind of puts me in the mind of the Xander/Anya relationship on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which always seems to me a reflexively Lucy and Ricky Ricardo set-up--Anya's persistent naiveté is tolerated by Xander because she's just such a gosh darn adorable little lady. I've remarked before on how ironic it is that a woman who was once a demon committed to causing men to suffer (even though she never seems to express any opinions about men) ends up becoming a misogynist fantasy, almost a lesson book to young misogynist men on How to Handle Those Hysterical Broads. But she's not just a fantasy for men, and Sawako, in Kimi ni Todoke, isn't meant for men at all--it's a shojo series, which means it's meant for adolescent girls. Part of what annoys me about Sawako, and other characters like her, is that I feel like there are girls watching who wish to emulate this unaffected innocence, and there are few things more irritating than affected unaffected innocence. I'm reminded of something Rosie O'Donnell said on Monday's Howard Stern Show about how she had to learn the difficult lesson that, while Barbara Walters was a feminist icon, she's not a feminist. This became clear, O'Donnell said, when she went to a party Walters had thrown for Michael Bloomberg and all the guests had been forced to sing parts of a dopey, affectionate song Walters had written for Bloomberg. The impression I got from O'Donnell's story was that Walters is someone who's gotten through her career mainly by maintaining a certain false innocence, or keeping herself partially brain dead in the interest of implicitly worshipping men or adhering to their sense of entitlement. And yet, a part of me still wonders if I might hate innocence too much. After all, some people worship others simply because they're that impressed. And if someone likes someone a lot, past the point of being rational, certainly they might come off as being a bit dopey. It's frustrating, because I think back to times when girls have seemed overly demonstrative of affection with me in light of how well I thought they understood me and I feel sort of ashamed about how put off I'd reflexively felt by it. Maybe they were just doing what they thought they were supposed to, maybe they really liked an aspect of me I didn't understand. I hate the idea of disliking someone just because they like me and or disliking someone because I don't necessarily agree that they ought to like me. But I guess I can at least say I was never truly mean to someone for it, though I bet I might have seemed cold. In any case, when it comes to fiction for girls, Revolutionary Girl Utena's definitely more my speed. I watched the 12th episode again this afternoon with breakfast, and found myself loving the big feminist subtext. This actually makes me feel very happy to think of it making an impression on young women--Utena, the girl finding her true self by taking on the powers normally given to men, the powerful male character whose destructive sense of entitlement is shown without casting him as a two-dimensional villain, and even the non-feminist Himemiya isn't shown to be mentally deficient, just having been indoctrinated into a system that keeps her down more than she realises. Utena fights for her and herself regardless of any expressed desire on Himemiya's part for more freedom, and yet Utena isn't a tyrant. This show doesn't annoy me one bit. # Tuesday, October 27, 2009 ( 4:24 PM ) posted by Setsuled Last night's tweets; Forbidden spaghetti is black wires. Baby ghosts will try eating anything. Beware of tiny mayo vampires. Digital spell casters do like to sing. Just woke up a few minutes ago. Well, I was only sort of sleeping. My sister called me and interrupted several hours of attempting to sleep. At least I knew the person calling. For days now, I've been woken at various times in the day by people trying to reach someone named "Cretin". Apparently people have been trying to reach the guy who used to have my number for some time. I also got a call from a guy looking for "Lisa". He sounded reflexively suspicious and angry when he heard a male voice. After drawing and inking two pages yesterday, I'm irritated to think I might fall behind to-day. You know what? I'm not going to let it happen. Maybe I'll sleep a bit, though. # Monday, October 26, 2009 ( 9:12 PM ) posted by Setsuled Last night's tweets; Can't believe I'm this hungry already. I ate lunch about an hour ago. Thin cucumbers can make plates unsteady. There's no real food inside the Nintendo. I've already pencilled two pages to-day. Here at Setsuled Ltd., we call that penciltastic! Or maybe pencilgasm. Well, no, that sounds like it carries a lot of meaning irrelevant to the subject. Now, after lunch, there'll be much inking and colouring. I probably didn't work as late last night as I could've. I stopped at around 3am because I was extremely and inexplicably hungry. I had some angel hair noodles in vodka sauce with chopped garlic while watching Angel, and then made the rather bad decision to play some World of Warcraft for a little while. I didn't stop until around 5:40 am, after I'd for some reason decided to ride all the way from the Arathi Highlands to Ironforge with my undead warrior, flagging myself for PVP several times on the way there, though no-one noticed. I'm starting to feel like I might want to try playing for a while on a PVP server. Some bad bananas from a week ago seem to have left a team of gnats in the house. Where are my spider friends now? You guys need to step up. Maybe I need to stop carrying you outside . . . Looks like someone uploaded Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress to YouTube a week ago in good quality. George Lucas got the plot for Star Wars from this movie. If you're looking for something to do, watching this movie's not a bad idea; # Sunday, October 25, 2009 ( 9:24 PM ) posted by Setsuled Twitter Sonnet #74 I can't tell you there's a wrong thing to eat. But nations fit only the guts of Rome. Chinese Pac-Man's nuts trying to compete. And me, I can't get beyond Thunderdome. No amount of dead Ents will yield a gem. Cheap Chinese food bleeds soy sauce everywhere. One hole in hell has a real bad modem. Cam stonings are a tomato's nightmare. Shadows tangle roots in black and white woods. Spirits slip in through strange executions. Thick cards deliver the sensory goods. Blank screens block final programme transmissions. Morrissey and a hillside desolate. Good nature please leave this man with us yet. Those last two lines are a reference to the beginning of The Smiths' "This Charming Man"; Punctured bicycle on a hillside desolate will Nature make a man of me yet? Odd way to end a sonnet that began with a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 reference, I guess, but I was really hit harder than I'd have expected by the news that Morrissey was unwell and that it was part of something that had been going on for some time. I think if there's any one thing that I can point to to explain the fact that I've survived the last five years it would be Morrissey or maybe Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei. Sounds like he's out of the hospital now, at least. Jonathan Ross apparently sent him flowers and cupcakes, though I have to wonder if cupcakes were the best idea for someone in poor health. I have a lot to do to-day, partly because I slacked off so much Friday and Saturday. Well, I've kind of set aside Friday as my "day off" in my schedule, but I really ought to've gotten more done yesterday. I've just felt really sluggish for reasons I can't explain. Last night I watched Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood again, his adaptation of Macbeth. Isuzu Yamada creates a particularly gruesome Lady Macbeth with her blackened teeth, which were fashionable for affluent women in Japan at the time;  It's a movie filled with great images, though. This time I was also particularly digging the endless, tangled branches and roots of Spider's Web Forest at the beginning; 
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( 6:42 AM ) posted by Setsuled Morrissey collapsed onstage last night after performing "This Charming Man" and was taken to the hospital. I'm having a crazy fanboy moment here--I really want him to be okay. # |
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