Setsuled's Journal

( 3:38 PM ) posted by Setsuled

Twitter Sonnet #45

One can't gain favour with all centaur clans.
And there's just no pleasing the lycanthropes.
Endless snags plague all this chimera's plans.
Another party of masked misanthropes.
One cannot collect too many shellfish.
But some would impose a limit on gin.
Olives are a quite adequate garnish.
Vermouth's not something you have to put in.
Leaders may unite men against grey geese.
The eight reindeer were always on the roof.
Please tell Obama beer doesn't make peace.
You must drink something at least eighty proof.
They'll stone you when you try to get the phone.
All our operators are made of stone.

After writing about Comic-Con for days, there's naturally a backlog of spider pictures to post. In the garage a couple nights ago, I was about to turn off the light when I saw this fellow lying in wait;

That's the second brown recluse I've seen here this week, the first having been by the front door;

I guess word must really be getting around about me on spider forums.

I watched the new Haruhi Suzumiya and read the new Sirenia Digest this morning with breakfast. The latter contained first a nicely sexual sun/moon myth story that seemed somehow South American to me. And the Digest also contained an intriguing account by a fictional character of his encounter with a painter. It would seem to be another in Caitlin's "observer of an artist" motif. One might speculate there's something narcissistic about them, but they work perfectly fine. This one also features a somehow sinister narrator. And it connects with Caitlin's upcoming novel, The Red Tree.

I did not sleep too well last night. I got up to use the bathroom and Snow was hanging out outside, looking for attention. I can't say no to a cat. I woke up at 11am to-day--I have a feeling I'm going to be back to my nocturnal schedule pretty soon, whether I like it or not. I've finished the first couple pages of the next Venia's Travels at around 10pm the past couple nights, which feels insanely early, which has led to me tricking myself into thinking I can play World of Warcraft for an hour each night. No ill effects so far, though.

I finally got my car registration in the mail to-day, after paying for it more than a month ago, and after the previous registration expired around three weeks ago. Thank you, DMV. It's lucky I planned on taking the trolley to Comic-Con anyway. Now maybe I'll just go for a drive to-day . . .

( 7:11 PM ) posted by Setsuled

All the animals come out at Comic-Con. Pirates, droids, archaeologists. Sick. Venal. One day a real rain'll come and wash the scum off the streets.

Sunday

Normally not much happens on Sunday, and indeed I didn't visit a single panel that day. I wandered the floor, where I spotted Nabeshin;

Shortly afterwards, I came across Peter Mayhew looking very glum. He was alone in his booth, no one was talking to him. He managed a smile when I took his picture;

But, jeez, he's Chewbacca. I should have to fight through a mob to get a picture of him. What happened? I'd been listening to Howard Stern on my iPod on the trolley trip to and from the Con and he'd been talking about a guy he knew who'd been a big fish at his old radio station but was lately reduced to working at his old college station. What a crap shoot is the entertainment industry, and a sense of self worth makes up the stakes more than anyone wants to admit.

But I also ran into Jaime Hernandez, who didn't seem too glum at the lack of attention he was receiving;

I could've stopped and talked to him a while, but I couldn't think of anything to say.

Upstairs, the civil duelling from the day before had disintegrated into all out melee;

I smelled a lot more pot this year than at previous Comic-Cons. Maybe that explains the atmosphere in the anime hall, though the people there seemed more like they were experiencing a sugar high.

All four days, there'd been two bunny girls carrying around "Free Hugs" signs in the anime hall. The Free Hugs people have been getting to be a bigger presence every year. Having two girls dressed in Playboy style bunny outfits brought a sexual aspect to it I'm not sure all participants were comfortable with.

Then again, this line of free huggers;

Later turned into a pelvis thrust conga line which I failed to get footage of. I'm not sure how many of the girls in the anime hall are wearing sexy clothes because they like to titillate or have been conditioned to see the getups as more innocent. They generally seem like good hearted folk, in any case. I think they touched even the heart of this lurking, dedicated parent;

That about concludes all I have to say about Comic-Con 2009. This is the first time I've managed to get through all of it with only four posts--having a camera makes a big difference.

I hung out with Cryptess again that night and I drew a bunch of Wircelias in her new sketch book. In return, she drew her own version of Wircelia, which I rather liked;

My tweets from last night;

One cannot collect too many shellfish.
But some would impose a limit on gin.
Olives are a quite adequate garnish.
Vermouth's not something you have to put in.

( 6:57 PM ) posted by Setsuled

Saturday

I'm normally pretty anti-social at Comic-Con, but for some reason, this year, I kept wanting to talk to people and people kept wanting to talk to me. A couple kids approached me in the anime hallway on Saturday to ask me where the 11:45am Ben10 panel was. I brought out my schedule but, as it was already 11:30, I told them, "You're not going to get in. With any popular panel, you have get there at least one panel beforehand and sit through it."

"But it's not that popular," said one of them.

"Ben10?" I said, a little more sarcastically than I meant to.

"Yeah, I guess you're right," she said and sounded pleased. And I realised that I, as an anonymous adult, had just validated her love for Ben10. For once, my reflexive sarcasm actually accomplished something good.

Shortly after this, I took my first cosplay photos of the day, a couple Final Fantasy characters;

I saw a lot of Rikkus this year. Last year there had been a lot of Yunas, which I guess means next year is Paine.

I was sorry again to have missed the Alice in Wonderland panel when I saw these two;

I admired the Hatter's attitude.

I decided to get some lunch, then, and it was on the way back from eating that I saw Linda, the Fiddler. Back inside the convention centre, I ran into this lady with a marvellous costume;

The textures, the patterns--everything about it was well above average. I asked her if she was dressed as any particular character. "Fifteenth century Portuguese," was all she said.

"Cool," I said, "I've been more into thirteenth century myself lately. " She tipped me off about the duelling happening on the mezzanine;

A lot of Star Wars people were hanging out on the mezzanine for some reason, too, and I decided I had to get at least one picture of the many very impressive Boba Fetts roaming the con.

I didn't notice the really jealous looking Zam Wesall back there when I was taking the picture. "Lucas promised I'd be the next big thing in intergalactic bounty hunting, but people're still swooning over fucking Boba Fett. Why's he so special?"

I went to see Ray Bradbury's panel that night. It began with Bradbury's friend Arnold Kunert talking about several Bradbury related posters and t-shirts they had at their booth, and Bradbury complained about a tape he'd brought with him that was supposed to play before the panel started but there'd been a technical foul-up. It turned out to be footage of Bradbury being interviewed by Mike Wallace after the Apollo-11 moon landing, and Bradbury in the footage talked about how space exploration would mean the end of war as it would provide another expression of masculinity--he said boys loved war because it was fun, though it's generally not talked about, and he indicated that space travel would be something that united men with something to replace the fun of war. The interview, of course, was quite old and well before Margaret Thatcher and Ann Coulter came on the scene, though Bradbury didn't say whether he'd amended his opinion on the inherently masculine nature of war.

Here's Bradbury discussing kindergarten text books;

Here Bradbury discusses his inspiration for The Illustrated Man;

Here's Bradbury on burning the internet and being buried on Mars;

Finally, Bradbury takes that perennial question; what advice would he give to young writers?

As I was on my way out, I got a photo of Silk Spectre, who was in attendance;

There were many Silk Spectres and Rorschachs this year.

A human/Ewok hybrid. There's a scene I'm reluctant to imagine.

I went the autograph area next, where a lot of fairly big stars had drawn surprisingly small crowds. Here's a lonely Kevin Sorbo;

And then I came across Virginia Hey, known to me as Pa'u Zotoh Zhaan from Farscape, and getting a chance to talk to her more than made up for missing the Farscape Anniversary panel.

As I approached, she was talking to someone about makeup artists in Australia and how her extraordinary eye for symmetry had often led to her assisting her makeup artist on Farscape.

I asked if I could take her picture, and told her I was planning on posting it on my blog. I gave her one of my Venia's Travels cards, which features the gold title with one of the rose drawings from the main page in the background, and Hey seemed very pleased to see the rose, bringing out her iPhone to show me her rose wallpaper. We talked a bit about the variety of roses out there, and I recommended to her the anime series Revolutionary Girl Utena, which features a great deal of rose imagery.

Hey was displaying several of her pencil drawings, which seemed generally to be portraits of Farscape characters. It's nice to know she's truly passionate about the series, even now. And she seemed very keen on establishing real dialogue with the fans who approached her.

I went back to the anime hall to see if there was anything playing that interested me, but I didn't have much luck with anime showings this year. I did, however, run across Ranma Saotome;

And that about covers Saturday. More to-morrow . . .

Last night's tweets;

One can't gain favour with all centaur clans.
And there's just no pleasing the lycanthropes.
Endless snags plague all this chimera's plans.
Another party of masked misanthropes.

I've been playing World of Warcraft again the past couple nights after more than a week of absence. A wand I'd put on auction had sold for a hundred gold. Now I'm trying to kill centaurs from one clan to gain favour with their rivals, though I also have a quest to the kill the rival clan to gain favour with the one I'm killing. Not sure how it's going to work out. Anyway, it got me thinking about human animal hybrids last night. Probably ought to've mentioned the Ewok. Are Ewoks even really sentient? I say no.

( 2:41 PM ) posted by Setsuled

Friday

That's a Mikuru Asahina and a Haruhi Suzumiya. I saw a lot of Haruhi Suzumiya cosplay, including a big group outside the convention centre inviting people to join the S.O.S. Brigade--but they were hired to be there and you can always tell the difference between the people who dress up because they love something and the promotional people. At least, for me, the latter lack something.

I'd planned on either seeing the Farscape Anniversary panel or the Coraline panel on Friday morning, but I got to the Con too late to see either. So I got in line for the Comic Book Legal Defence Fund's panels, and it was in this line that I met a very nice girl named Lisa, who lives in Portland, Oregon and whose father is a comic book artist, a member of Portland's Periscope Studio. We talked about Comic-Con, radio dramas, and promoting oneself on the internet. Apparently she's friends with artist Steve Lieber, because he stopped to talk to her as he was walking past us.

The first of the two CBLDF panels I saw was "Master Sessions: Expressionistic Atmosphere with Mike Mignola." Mignola told us he wasn't sure if his work was more impressionistic or expressionistic (I'd say expressionistic), but he did say that one of his biggest influences growing up was Frank Frazetta. Mignola drew Hellboy on an overhead projector for us while he talked, and as he made big, angular black shapes for shading and shadows with a marker, he told us how Frazetta would often spot black and that this was something that rubbed off on him. He said he had to develop confidence to lose a lot of the details from his pencils, which, he said, he drew "like colouring books".

He said he even now didn't feel entirely comfortable drawing feet, that his characters often seem to be floating when he doesn't root them to the scenery with foreground objects or effects obscuring their feet. But he stressed the importance of learning to draw even the things you don't want to draw, and he mentioned a Wolverine comic he illustrated that featured several close-up panels on Wolverine removing his boots. Mignola said he took a lot of polaroids of his own foot.

It's a really good thing I befriended Lisa in line because she gave me sketch book paper, loaned me a pen, and was aggressive in getting us seats close to the front for the next CBLDF panel, which was life drawing of Amanda Palmer.

Artists Camilla D'Errico, David Mack, and Terry Moore were on the panel, and their drawings of Palmer were on the projector, but as you can see I was among a group of people quite close enough to draw Palmer, too. Changing clothes right in front of us, Palmer even had Lisa tie her wrist warmers.

Lisa didn't have an extra pencil to lend me, so I just did gesture drawings;

Some doodles in the lower right hand corner from when we were waiting for Palmer to appear. Lisa asked me to draw the main character of my comic, but I somehow wasn't quite sure how to begin Venia with pen.

The panel artists talked about the importance of learning to draw real people for comics--even D'Errico, who described her style as manga and having little to do with realism. She mentioned how little her art teachers encouraged her, and it was to me another example of the general disdain towards the manga style in the western art community--I constantly hear about how manga styles are discouraged.

Well, after this panel, I was pretty much sated. It was only two o'clock, but I could've gone home perfectly satisfied with the day. Instead, I went downstairs and roamed the main floor a while, where I came upon some amazing movie props on display.

I can only imagine the security precautions around this thing.

How I long for the James Cameron of old.

This plush chest burster is not a prop that was used in Alien 3, I repeat, this is not an actual prop. Just so we're clear.

However, this really is the Bat Pod seen in The Dark Knight;

As a movie soundtrack fan, I couldn't help getting a kick out of this poster.

I asked this lady if I could take her picture, and she immediately afterwards demonstrated to me a flipbook that showed her taking all her clothes off. And it occurred to me this must be what heaven's like. This is her web site.

Porn had a bigger presence this year at the Con than I can remember. There was even a big Suicide Girls booth on hand with three scantily clad ladies who were given a lot of space by the masses of socially awkward boys walking past.

Looks like Don Corleone's tailor made him an offer he couldn't refuse.

As I was wandering, I ran into Gene Simmons with a big camera crew and press. I'm not particularly into Kiss (though I have nothing against Kiss), but I kind of felt like I couldn't not take footage;

Indy's ladies. I loved the idea.

That night I saw the live Rifftrax performance by Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett, and Kevin Murphy, which was hilarious as usual. They riffed a construction safety video from the late 1970s with music and narration my Waylon Jennings called "Shaking Hands with Danger". They also opened the floor to suggestions for a movie to riff, and the winner ended up being Dragon War, which sounds ideal, though the crowd had actually sounded more enthusiastic about The Super Mario Brothers movie. Which would have gotten my vote. I can still dream . . .

That about covers Friday. More to-morrow . . .

Twitter Sonnet #44

Many heroes are now on the trapeze.
Many places around town are a sith's.
Ate again at the amazing Pokez.
And my waiter sang along with The Smiths.
I shall forever honour Chewbacca.
Nabeshin is a rare and worthy man.
Gizmo by this time might well be caca.
There are hungry ghosts of goats in Japan.
No cure for sober like Wild Turkey.
Unions aren't destroying Subway Sandwich.
Don't give bourbon or mayo to Trumpy.
He's too powerful a tiny sasquatch.
Morning's been pressed into a new sector.
And focus is captive to night's spectre.

( 3:49 PM ) posted by Setsuled

Thursday

Okay, so I won't be accused of burying the lede, I'll talk about James Cameron's Avatar right off the bat. I saw the 24 minutes of footage presented by Cameron himself as well as cast members Sigorney Weaver, Zoe Saldana, and Stephen Lang, and I can't say I was impressed. Others have already written about how the cgi doesn't look as revolutionary as Cameron has led people to believe, and indeed it suffers from an eerie, overly clean quality that plagues so much cgi and was reminiscent of what made the Star Wars prequels often less visually interesting than the original trilogy. But the main problem is conscience.

Before presenting the footage, Cameron talked about how he wanted to provide a fun, action packed experience for the audience, but he couldn't do that without giving the movie a "conscience". I was reminded of a line from Ani DiFranco's "The Waiting Song"--"your basic average super star is singing about justice and peace and love and I am glaring at the radio, swearing saying, 'That's just what I was afraid of. '" If the conscience feels like something you're obligated to say, you're doing it wrong. Indeed, the movie feels quite preachy, Zoe Saldana playing the cg love interest native on an alien planet with a curiously Jamaican accent is naturally more in tune with protecting the environment and feeling guilty about killing animals in self-defence than the protagonist, a marine played by Sam Worthington. It's Pocahontas in space--Disney's Pocahontas. Only not as fun.

I suppose it's not fair to review the movie as a whole from only a fourth of it, and yet the scene where Worthington's marine character meets Saldana's native rather clearly presented the film's philosophy, as did Cameron's own comments on the film about its relevance to the current climate crisis. Cameron talked about how, although the Navi, Saldana's people, were aliens, they represented the spiritually superior side of humanity, while the humans represented a corrupted side.

It's instructive to compare, I think, Avatar with a movie that successfully explored the relationship between industrious man and nature--Princess Mononoke. In Mononoke, there was no bullshit guilt when San had to kill an animal to survive, nor was there an attempt to suggest that the anthropomorphic representatives of nature were morally superior to the humans. Both sides were trying to survive, first and foremost, and therefore it becomes a more useful dialogue about two sides addressing needs. Cameron struck me as an artist grown utterly out of touch with himself, and this project came off as an exercise in self-flagellation in response to his earlier work which he seemingly now sees as lacking this "conscience".

The fact that Avatar's visually uninteresting seems to reflect Cameron's own insubstantial grasp of the issues he's attempting to address--Pandora, the forest moon on which the movie takes place, is mostly a riot of green and blue that comes off as noise--again, Mononoke's colour palette did better to emphasise both the wild diversity of nature and the force of its expression. Pandora, meanwhile, seems like a supermarket with shelves lined entirely with plastic plants.

It might also be worth noting that this movie isn't going to make any money. Cameron has attempted to take his rated R space marines from Aliens and put them into what's essentially a modern, socially conscious Disney movie, inevitably alienated both audiences, something which ought to have been obvious to everyone. All the geek guys sitting around me during the presentation were constantly shifting about uncomfortably in their seats.

But I wasn't completely sure what my feelings were about Avatar until Terry Gilliam came out to talk about his upcoming film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, and I was reminded what a truly living artist was like.

Before he came out, a short retrospective on Gilliam's career was shown that was obviously put together by marketing to help establish the "Gilliam brand", as it were--it included the predictable "Lands beyond your imagination" title card, which has always looked more like something from a cheesy high school production to me ever since I saw Dave McKean's trailer for Mirrormask at a Comic-Con that had title cards that said something like, "A land not beyond your imagination, because we think you're pretty smart."

Anyway, then Gilliam walked out on stage and found chocolate;

Here, again, is the clip I posted last week;

Following this, Gilliam brought out Verne Troyer, the only Imaginarium cast member who appeared, and began taking questions.

I was surprised Johnny Depp didn't stay for the Imaginarium panel, since he was there for Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland panel, which I missed. Though I did see Depp drive by while I was in line for Hall H. He waved at people.

Finally, here's Gilliam talking about darkness in art and stealing ideas from dead painters;

I'd gotten up at 7am on Thursday in the hopes of catching all the Hall H panels, but by the time I got in line for Hall H, the line looked like this;

Of course, this was mainly due to hordes of Twilight fans who'd stayed the night. People were handing out this;

A Burger King/Twilight cross promotion and I have to say I couldn't think of a more perfect match.

There was certainly a significant new element to the Comic-Con populace this year--I eventually did get into Hall H because when the Twilight panel ended there was an exodus from the room of women and girls with bad perms and ill fitting purple and pink clothes.

While I do hate Twilight, there was a backlash against the Twilight fans I couldn't quite get with--I saw on Sunday guys carrying around signs that read "Scream if Twilight ruined Comic-Con". I saw a video of Kevin Smith talking about it the other day that I thought provided some very useful perspective, saying basically that a lot of the things the guys at the Con were devoted to weren't really artistically superior to Twilight, and that Twilight brought girls to Con, which is something the guys really shouldn't complain about.

And it seems to me there was indeed an element of "no-girls allowed" to the guys bitching about the Twilight fans. There's really no other reason Twilight should be the target of more gripes than Naruto and other incredibly lame corners of the science fiction and fantasy world.

On the other hand, I met a nice girl named Jamie in line for Hall H who was drawing a picture of Bellatrix Lestrange from Harry Potter murdering Bella from Twilight in order to reclaim the name "Bella", since apparently this is what Bellatrix was often called for short. Jamie was actually dressed as Bellatrix as well, and I told her to "say something only Bellatrix would say" when I took this footage of her;

Ninety percent of the cosplayers I took pictures of at Comic-Con were girls. You may call me a pig, and I'll readily admit I am a pig, but even if I weren't, I still think I'd mostly have been photographing the girls because they simply had, by and large, the nicer costumes. Maybe the guys just couldn't work up the enthusiasm knowing that, inevitably, they'd still be guys at the end of it--never underestimate the self-loathing of the male geek, particularly male otaku.

The first cosplayer I got a picture of was this 5th Element character with cool hips;

This was on the main floor of the Con after I'd given up on seeing the Alice in Wonderland panel and decided to just wander the floor.

I'm not sure who these people were, but I liked them.

A mannequin cosplays as Asuka from Evangelion.

The Stark Industries booth.

Some really amazing Star Wars costumes--the textures were perfect, down to the oddly rough linen quality of Luke's cloak.

The portfolio review area, which I wisely avoided this year.

Cryptess and The Party Wagon. She'd been hanging out with Peter S. Beagle on Thursday.

I wanted to show her the wonderful Mexican restaurant, Pokez, where I most often eat during Comic-Con, but for once it was too busy that night.

I hadn't eaten lunch there, either, that day, instead choosing to eat at a Greek restaurant where I overheard a young man telling the cashier that Morgan Spurlock was currently casting "The Simpsons on Ice", though he cautioned that he really shouldn't be talking about it. He asked her if she was interested in auditioning, sounding totally serious, and she demured with complete sincerity. It was one of the most flagrant moments of unchecked bullshit I'd ever seen. Though I can kind of imagine Morgan Spurlock making a movie about duping people into auditioning for a Simpsons ice show--from what I've heard about his last film, he just might be that creatively bankrupt.

Well, that about covers Thursday. More to-morrow . . .

Last night's tweets;

I shall forever honour Chewbacca.
Nabeshin is a rare and worthy man.
Gizmo by this time might well be caca.
There are hungry ghosts of goats in Japan.

#

( 12:56 AM ) posted by Setsuled

Sunday went rather later than expected. I haven't even eaten dinner yet. I'm hoping I can retain something from this big schedule shift, though. Maybe I'll go to bed at 2am from now on.

Still a surprising lot of things on the last day of Comic-Con, which is usually pretty dead. I'll start writing about it properly in daylight. But for now, I must vegetate.

By the way, Linda, the violinist I posted video of Saturday, has a myspace.

Last night's tweets;

Many heroes are now on the trapeze.
Many places around town are a sith's.
Ate again at the amazing Pokez.
And my waiter sang along with The Smiths.

( 10:40 PM ) posted by Setsuled

I was dead tired at Comic-Con at 4pm to-day and was making an effort to leave early but cool things just kept happening. Every day at this Con, I've filled up my camera's four gigabyte memory card with pictures and photos, most of which I'm really pleased to have gotten. I have a lot to write about, and I'll probably start with the big "Con reports" to-morrow or Monday. But first, since she was one of the greatest things I saw at the Con, I want to share this video of a fiddler called Linda, who was playing on the street outside the convention centre and was kind enough to let me take this video;

Watching her, it seems like she must have been playing that thing in her sleep at age 2. I mean, when she picks up that dollar, she goes right back into that complicated bit like a lightswitch. The precise and rapid movements of her tiny fingers juxtaposed with the traffic and oblivious people walking by seemed absolutely unreal.

Twitter Sonnet #43

The strange dizzy crayfish has crossed my path.
Comic-Con moved me fast for no reason.
I haplessly escaped all schemes of math.
For all nihoncha there is a season.
Johnny Depp but lightly graced Comic-Con.
This year the Harley Quinns are out in force.
They line with Torgos and wizards the lawn.
To Hall H has never been a smooth course.
Amanda Palmer's good at being still.
But I've discovered she's not really dead.
Found Haruhi on a high window sill.
Looking for lunch, found Gene Simmons instead.
Met a Delvian who knows symmetry.
And saw a great sanguine Ray Bradbury.

And Happy Birthday, Cryptess.

( 11:19 PM ) posted by Setsuled

Who's the guy one least desires to see trying shuffle his way through the aisle, shoving against your knees?

It's cool, though. He takes care of the place while the master is away.

Last night's tweets;

Johnny Depp but lightly graced Comic-Con.
This year the Harley Quinns are out in force.
They line with Torgos and wizards the lawn.
To Hall H has never been a smooth course.

#

( 12:51 AM ) posted by Setsuled

I have a sunburn for the first time since I was a kid.

If you listen carefully, you can hear the Super Mario Brothers underwater level theme coming from the stadium behind the convention centre. Which proves yet again that, if I dream it, it'll eventually happen.

That's the venue where I saw Morrissey last year.

And now, Mr. Terry Gilliam, who's got two legs;

Twitter Sonnet #42

I have eaten too many Ritz crackers.
Need to find another unsalted snack.
Generic pasta sauces seek backers.
It's only celebrity sauce I'll back.
I think I timed to-day's burrito wrong.
By drowsy lunch I was nearly beaten.
My work'll be out of time before long.
And now tweet 666--hail Lord Satan!
Brains are not packing styrofoam.
Nor are they purple pixie stick powder.
Brains hold true under your hairy scalp dome.
Good brains, when dead, become hot clam chowder.
There must never be another Jar Jar.
Yet James Cameron has made Avatar.

( 9:08 PM ) posted by Setsuled

On my way back from Comic-Con, a kid on his bike stopped and told me, "There's a scorpion on the trail. Around the bridge. Be careful."

"Thanks," I said, and walked on, but saw instead this;

A crayfish crossing the dry, dusty path to get from one part of the river to the other. I've seen them do this before, and it mystifies me every time.

I met with Cryptess downtown to-day--I haven't seen her in around five years, I think it's been, when I drove up to Seattle to bring her to Comic-Con. This year she took the train from Anaheim, and I helped her find her motel in Chula Vista. Or, well, I went with her in case my help was required.

My Comic-Con registration was processed remarkably fast--and a huge line formed after I finished. It was quite amazing. Now I'm going to try to get to sleep early enough to get into Hall H to-morrow. Updates here may be infrequent and/or brief during the Con, which ends Sunday, as I'll be spending all day there every day. I like to get my money's worth, what can I say.

Last night's tweets;

Brains are not packing styrofoam.
Nor are they purple pixie stick powder.
Brains hold true under your hairy scalp dome.
Good brains, when dead, become hot clam chowder.

#

( 10:15 AM ) posted by Setsuled

AT 1AM ON WEDNESDAY, JULY 22, SETSULED ATTEMPTED TO FALL ASLEEP IN A BID TO COMMENCE SOMETHING APPROACHING EIGHT HOURS OF NOCTURNAL SLUMBER.

WHAT FOLLOWED IS SUBJECT TO REVIEW BY VARIOUS INTERNAL AGENCIES, THE DETAILS OF SETSULED'S ENDEAVOUR DEEMED TOO FANTASTICAL BY FRONTAL LOBE ADMINISTRATIVE BUREAUS.

JAGGED CLUMPS OF HOURS, THREE BY THREE, A BATTERY ACID STACCATO GARNISHED WITH DESPERATE CONJURATIONS OF SHEEP WHO SOMEHOW BORE STEEL WOOL, SUNLIGHT GLINTING OFF THEIR CROME FACES ACTING AS A METRONOME SPIKE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. SUPER MARIO BROTHERS UNDERWATER LEVEL THEME BUT WITH SUPER MARIO LAND SUBMERSIBLE, THE WHOLE EPISODE SQUISHED INTO THE UPPER LEFT HAND CORNER OF CONSCIOUSNESS TO MAKE ROOM FOR IMAGES PRODUCED FROM HALF REMEMBERED CONVERSATIONS REGARDING ROBIN QUIVERS' BRA AND STAMPEDEING OSTRICHES.

THE AFTERNOON OF JULY 22 WOULD SEE SETSULED AT COMIC-CON PREVIEW NIGHT.

AS OF 8AM, THE STATUS OF SETSULED'S RESTEDNESS REMAINED UNKNOWN . . .

( 11:08 PM ) posted by Setsuled

Yes, I did decide to update Venia's Travels to-night so I won't have to worry about it during Comic-Con. Unfortunately, the new chapter features a lot of beautiful naked women. Try not to take it personally.

#

( 9:25 PM ) posted by Setsuled

Last night's tweets;

I think I timed to-day's burrito wrong.
By drowsy lunch I was nearly beaten.
My work'll be out of time before long.
And now tweet 666--hail Lord Satan!

To-day barely even feels real--my alarm woke me up at noon, when I was in the middle of a deep sleep. Hopefully to-morrow will be easier. I've been working on my comic all day, and I'll probably upload chapter 30 to-night or to-morrow morning. Maybe.

So tired. What else can I say? It's all tired, all the time for Setsuled at this moment.

Listened to Howard Stern while inking and colouring the past couple days. Sunday I listened to the round table critics commentary on Seven Samurai again. What a great movie. The third critic, whose name I can't remember, focused on how the film is about blurring of the lines in social strata, who Kikuchiyo is the perfect example as a "a circle who wants to become a triangle", referencing the standard Heihachi makes. I love Kikuchiyo.

The new commentary is so much better than the Michael Jeck commentary from the first Criterion release of the film, but the Jeck commentary isn't really a terrible commentary. Here's a nice clip from it;

Forcing thoughts into concrete form is almost painful right now. I'd feel happier to let them float as contented wisps.

( 9:42 PM ) posted by Setsuled

There's a video online of Yutaka Yamamoto now apologising for the "Endless Eight" Haruhi Suzumiya story arc. Yamamoto used to work for Kyoto animation, the studio that produces The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, but left before the new season began. I find this video fascinating for several reasons--for one thing, judging by comments on the video that are in both Japanese and English, I think this is illustrative of the fact that Japanese and English speaking fans are drawing closer together.

Now, it should be noted that Yamamoto was never in charge of Haruhi Suzumiya--that was Tatsuya Ishihara in the first season. But, as lousy as it was of the guy video taping to upload the video in spite of Yamamoto's specific request for people not to share what he was saying on the internet, Yamamoto really had no business apologising. Whatever he might think of what's happening, a lot of people put a lot of hard work into these new episodes and people who might otherwise go along for the ride and try to be open to the experience can very likely be shut down by a statement like this from someone seen as in charge. Doing something like "Endless Eight" is bold, and people are frightened of boldness, and otaku are typically terrified of boldness. Audiences are delicate, sensitive, whiney little creampuffs and if the artist doesn't exude confidence, the audience isn't usually going to supply it. It's not even that they're not bold people in their daily lives, it's just that they expect art to expect very little from them.

And let me just reiterate, too, how much I love "Endless Eight" and how much more I love it with each instalment--the feeling it gives of motionlessness, the desperate need to figure out some way to change this lack of motion without having a clear idea of what the root problem is--the end of each instalment where Kyon stands up as Haruhi walks out of the restaurant and he racks his brain, trying to think of some clue in something that Haruhi has said--that he can't find it, even after having gone through the same cycle over 50,000 times according to Nagato, the alien character. It's a wonderful story that transmutes the concept of feelings that can't be addressed because of a fundamental inability to directly communicate.

The fact that Tim tells me that posters on anime forums are losing their minds over it only makes me love it more, I have to say. Tim says they're accusing Kyoto Animation of "trolling", which is yet another example of the word's apparent new misappropriation to mean anything someone doesn't like. A troll used to mean someone who went to a forum with the explicit intention of causing discord. Haruhi Suzumiya does it just by existing, and as I've been called a troll for the same reason, I have to say Kyoto Animation definitely has my sympathies.

My tweets from last night;

I have eaten too many Ritz crackers.
Need to find another unsalted snack.
Generic pasta sauces seek backers.
It's only celebrity sauce I'll back.

Picked up some more unsalted peanuts to-day as well as some citrus blossom honey--that stuff's great, it tastes sort of like marmalade. Mixed with hot chai tea it tastes a bit like mead.

( 10:07 PM ) posted by Setsuled

All is well in Angel's little fake city.

I'm up to the eleventh episode of Angel, and it's still basically superior to Buffy, mostly, I think, because it holds together better. It has a more consistent set of rules--there's no unspoken prohibition against the use of guns, is the main thing. And you get more of an impression of the general hell a world of killer demons would create.

The introduction of Wesley and the departure of Doyle creates a better dynamic for the lead characters, too, though I do like Doyle. Joss Whedon, in Doyle's Wikipedia entry, is quoted as saying, "He was a very popular character, but the mesh was very difficult in ways that made it hard to write. Glenn had a kind of intensity that was kind of like David [Boreanaz's], and David already has that." But, of course, the clear problem I think most people could see from those nine episodes was that Glenn Quinn had the intensity Boreanaz didn't have and never had. Both Buffy and Angel were notoriously plagued by bland leads, and it's never more apparent than in the Angel episode where Buffy guest stars and the episode hangs on a chemistry between the two actors that has less life than a desk's romance with gum. But it's easier to forget when Glenn Quinn's not around. It's a shame Quinn died without ever getting the lead role he seemed built for.

The Buffy/Angel dialogue algorithm is starting to leave me a bit cold. I think it goes "neutral statement, dumb joke, fisticuffs, dumb joke, serious statement, bigger serious statement, bigger serious statement, really dumb joke, fisticuffs, serious statement, dumb joke, serious statement, end credits." I don't really mind it so much except it kind of exhausts me after a little bit. I suppose Comic-Con will be a nice break from watching the show, since I don't see how I'll have time.

Twitter Sonnet #41

No trash can is ever truly empty.
Tall spiders supervise waste disposal.
They have me take outside bags from my tea.
Cat pace cars monitor the proposal.
Feline suits withhold sleep in a briefcase.
Someone's got to negotiate with them.
My lack of REM is infecting the base.
Let Keith David or Wilford Brimley in.
Cops won't find the alien on the streets.
It's found in the heart of Saturday night.
It's safe on set to love in city tweets.
With David Tomlinson we fly a kite.
The safest moé's Jessica Rabbit.
But The Shadow knows your darker habit.

I listened to David Bowie's Diamond Dogs walking back from Tim's last night. It's a good idea to get in touch with David Bowie now and then. I ended up listening to The Bell Jar audiobook while colouring--I got to the part where Esther and Betsy are seeing a movie, right before they get sick, and Esther talks about how it became clear that the nice girl in the movie was going to end up with the nice guy and the sexy girl wasn't going to end up with anybody. I always thought this was funny, and kind of a comment on American society's disapproval for women who enjoyed sex. Of course, it also mirrors Esther's relationship with Buddy, who she begins to hate after she finds out he's by no means a virgin, even though he'd made her feel as though she were the "sexy" one in their relationship.

Last night, though, I got to thinking about what the filmmakers' intentions were with the movie Esther was watching. Is the idea to condemn girls for being sexy, or to comfort girls who don't believe they could ever be sexy? I suppose it all depends on perspective. Though even if the latter were the case, the suggestion would still be that women should be punished for a certain amount of sexual expressiveness. Of course, the real point of the movie may have been the importance of regulating nuclear power, for all I know. I don't know what movie she was watching, and people will often see the story they need, want, or are compelled to see in what they're watching.

( 6:57 PM ) posted by Setsuled

What do you suppose Alfred Hitchcock would make of this?

Those guys look like they're praying. Maybe every day they have to kneel and pray facing the wiener.

I ended up not walking to Tim's yesterday because I couldn't get him on the phone--I'm walking there to-day. So I ended up just working on my comic yesterday--I've got four pages finished and I've already pencilled one to-day. I'll ink it when I get back from Tim's, so I'm not doing so bad. It's a shame I don't have Howard Stern to listen to while I ink and colour though, and no new DVD commentaries. I'll probably end up listening to The Bell Jar again. I do have a lot of Lenny Bruce to listen to, too.

I signed on to World of Warcraft very briefly last night looking for Tim. I found an item I'd put up for auction on Monday had sold for 150 gold. It was some kind of leather cuirass much weaker than what I'm wearing but Tim told me it was very valuable because it was the sort people used for "twinking", a concept Tim explained to me but which I still completely don't comprehend. It had something to do with "level brackets". Anyway, that's a hell of a lot of gold for something I have no use for. If this were Warcraft II, I could build some farms now. Maybe even a watchtower.

It's too bad I can't make money like that from my old shirts in real life.

My tweets from last night;

Feline suits withhold sleep in a briefcase.
Someone's got to negotiate with them.
My lack of REM is infecting the base.
Let Keith David or Wilford Brimley in.

Little reference to John Carpenter's The Thing for the ultra hip out there.

The spider in my bathroom last night;

( 7:16 PM ) posted by Setsuled

Last night's tweets;

No trash can is ever truly empty.
Tall spiders supervise waste disposal.
They have me take outside bags from my tea.
Cat pace cars monitor the proposal.

Even less sleep to-day than yesterday. Lots of noises around the house starting at the crack of dawn, which would be about an hour after I fell asleep. So I drew half a page, but I think I'll save the rest for to-morrow, maybe walk to Tim's to-night, then try to get to sleep early.

New Haruhi Suzumiya this morning--still in the time loop plot. Of course, the interesting thing is looking for the differences in each episode, one of the biggest being the different animation studios employed for each episode--it's an illuminating look at how different studios work, and I have a suspicion each studio was instructed not to look at the others' work;

It adds to the eeriness of the story arc, the feeling that everything's the same but not quite. This latest one focused more on Koizumi for some reason--not giving him any more lines of dialogue, or even fundamentally changing his reactions to things. He just has more animation, his clothes stand out a bit more. It's an interesting exploration of camera created POV, too-Haruhi Suzumiya's a shounen series, so there's always going to be a lot of shots focusing on attractive female bodies, but, I think it was the second episode in the cycle ramped that it up slightly. Another episode played around with high contrast lighting a bit more. This newest one goes from an overt dread in the previous episode to seemingly making the characters comfortable with this dread. It's strong and disturbing deja vu for the characters, but they seem to have somehow become comfortable with it.

And, of course, each time one looks for clues as to how Kyon is supposed to finally break the cycle. There's some suggestion that he needs to express affection for Haruhi, maybe ask her on a date. But my prediction is that Kyon simply needs to do his summer homework--every episode ends with Kyon figuring he'll just avoid the schoolwork since he's stuck in a time loop anyway. I'm kind of hoping I'm wrong with this prediction. But I love the whole atmosphere of inertia, anyway.

And it's produced the only anime fan vids I can remember liking;

( 9:18 PM ) posted by Setsuled

Der Sonnet des Nibelungen

The big box is the one that won't open.
Good cheese is quite impossible to slice.
Don't submit any requests to Oden.
Your boxes and cheeses aren't worth his price.
Don't pair up Thor with Florence Nightingale.
Yoghurt's all the mana anyone needs.
Valkyries suck at delivering mail.
Every one her mark she always exceeds.
Fenrir's massacring morning papers.
Still just Michael Jackson news anyway.
My energy at three sharply tapers.
Though if Freya wanted me I'd make way.
Good ash trees are too rare around this town.
Signal from Yggdrasil often goes down.

I don't think I got enough sleep last night. It's the kind of thing I can't tell until I start drawing. Moving sluggishly to-day--I'll stop moving and it takes me five minutes to realise I stopped moving. Must . . . press . . . on . . . too much . . . to do . . .

Let's see how many of you can figure out what's going on in this video;

That's the opening from Maria Holic, a series I'm enjoying even more on the second viewing. Somehow, the Japanese company that produced the series has managed to crack down on some above the board U.S. fan distribution of it, including a curious set of videos on YouTube that I can't view--a message displays telling me that the videos aren't viewable in my country due to copyright. I hope this means these bozos are actually planning on distributing Maria Holic in the U.S., but I suspect it's far too cool for U.S. anime distributors, who always seem to be finding new ways to be out of touch with the anime fan base here. Though what, exactly, the point is of having unsubbed YouTube clips viewable in Japan but not in the U.S. is completely beyond me.

Last night I watched "Hush", one of the legendary Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes. I still think it was pretty good, and it was nice to have Tara introduced finally. It's weird how much she seems like a female Kirk Cobain early on. It'll be really nice for Willow to have something to do besides being nauseating. It's weird--and I remember feeling the same way when I watched the show through the first time--Willow could not deliver a bad line for me in the first three seasons. Somehow, everything she said was cool. But in the fourth season, it was like she became too conscious (or rather the writers became too conscious) of her cuteness and it spoiled. She began saying things like "poop head", things that are beneath even Warwick Davis' Willow (get it? 'cause he's a dwarf? Not many things are literally beneath him? It's gold, I tell you). I am glad she didn't sleep with A-Rod, like Willow Palin.

Anyway, I'm hoping now that I've matured into a marginally more benevolent person, I'll be able to dig some of the ultra syrupy Willow/Tara scenes. After all, I actually truly love this;

( 10:06 PM ) posted by Setsuled

Last night's tweets;

Don't pair up Thor with Florence Nightingale.
Yoghurt's all the mana anyone needs.
Valkyries suck at delivering mail.
Every one her mark she always exceeds.

I think the story in this next sonnet is shaping up to be "Norse Mythological Figures Assimilating Into Modern Culture". And valkyries really aren't great at delivering mail--they're too busy with their melodic, full-throated laughter and killing.

Here are actually two spiders, one from last night and one from the night before, in one epic film;

That's two blockbuster tracks off the Ranma 1/2 soundtrack, going out to all you early 90s anime fans out there.

On Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, I watched the 1981 BBC adaptation of The Winter's Tale with breakfast. I'd never read the play. I enjoyed it, though I can see why it's not counted amongst Shakespeare's greatest. It's intriguingly schizophrenic, and I wondered if it was one of the plays where Shakespeare might have actually been only one of a group of playwrights. The first half of the play feels like a variation on Oedipus Rex, with a few roles shuffled about and exaggerated, with the focus placed on the stubborn and paranoid king of Sicilia. He's sort of a King Lear character. Though he retains his throne, he exhibits Lear's jealousy early on, but it's his friends and family who become exiles, rather than the king himself.

There's a psychological credibility to the king's inability to believe his wife's innocence and to quickly and harshly condemn those who would act as her advocates--the strength of his love for her provoking an equally boundless and senseless passion in retaliation to the slightest possible threat to their relationship. Actually, the impression I had was that the king had himself begun to loose interest in his wife, couldn't believe that he would, so he blamed his wife and his brother. The affectionate conversations at the beginning of the play do seem oddly forced and over the top, and at the end of the play the idea of time's toll on affection is directly referred to by the King and another character.

Or, it may be an even more fascinating a statement on the contradictions that make human behaviour so inscrutable--it's possible Leontes loved his wife too much and not enough.

The second half of the play unexpectedly veers into romance and comedy, with Leontes' daughter, Perdita, having been, Oedipus-like, abandoned as a baby by the king's order, becoming sixteen years later the subject of the play. I actually enjoyed this portion a great deal more, though there's less to say about it--much of the dialogue is given to a robber named Autolycus and a slow witted shepherd, and their story is told alongside a tale of hidden identities involving Perdita and her love for the disguised prince of Bohemia, whose father, King Polixenes, is also disguised. A lot of familiar elements here for Shakespeare, the point this time apparently being the juxtaposition of family, romance, deception, and the truth of fundamental motivations revealed when no-one has to worry about the identities they're attached to.

I fully expected the end of the play to be tragic, with the King of Sicilia having an incestuous affair with his daughter (ala Oedipus) and lots of people dying--which is apparently what happened in the source material Shakespeare drew from. Instead, there's an extremely odd happy ending. I'm not sure the tragic ending would have really added anything, so maybe this is one instance where it's okay to let the audience feel good. What the hell, we deserve it.

It was a good production--Jeremy Kemp was fine as the King of Sicilia, though my favourites were Rikki Fulton as Autolycus and Robert Stephens as Polixenes, who had a sort of Oscar Wilde quality that added an unobtrusive flavour to a character who's otherwise there almost solely to serve the plot. But this was my favourite exchange in the play;

PERDITA

[To POLIXENES] Sir, welcome:
It is my father's will I should take on me
The hostess-ship o' the day.

To CAMILLO
You're welcome, sir.
Give me those flowers there, Dorcas. Reverend sirs,
For you there's rosemary and rue; these keep
Seeming and savour all the winter long:
Grace and remembrance be to you both,
And welcome to our shearing!

POLIXENES

Shepherdess,
A fair one are you--well you fit our ages
With flowers of winter.

PERDITA

Sir, the year growing ancient,
Not yet on summer's death, nor on the birth
Of trembling winter, the fairest
flowers o' the season
Are our carnations and streak'd gillyvors,
Which some call nature's bastards: of that kind
Our rustic garden's barren; and I care not
To get slips of them.

POLIXENES

Wherefore, gentle maiden,
Do you neglect them?

PERDITA

For I have heard it said
There is an art which in their piedness shares
With great creating nature.

POLIXENES

Say there be;
Yet nature is made better by no mean
But nature makes that mean: so, over that art
Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race: this is an art
Which does mend nature, change it rather, but
The art itself is nature.

PERDITA

So it is.

POLIXENES

Then make your garden rich in gillyvors,
And do not call them bastards.

( 10:20 PM ) posted by Setsuled

Last night's tweets;

The big box is the one that won't open.
Good cheese is quite impossible to slice.
Don't submit any requests to Oden.
Your boxes and cheeses aren't worth his price.

My last tweet was retweeted by AllTheCheeses, which apparently republishes every tweet that includes the word "cheeses" (plural). It is with solemn reverence I accept this honour.

Before anyone gets too excited, I was only talking about those little Babybell cheeses that come in the red wax. They are good.

I finally had a chance to go to the movies yesterday--I went with my sister to see Bruno, which I enjoyed, though not as much as I thought I was going to. Maybe it's just that it was impossible for it to live up to the expectations it generated--Bruno's interview with the terrorist leader wasn't nearly as interesting as I'd hoped, though it was fascinating in itself to see this guy talking to Bruno. I guess it should come as no surprise that a terrorist would come off as an exceptionally focused man.

Ron Paul, on the other hand, seemed spacey as usual, which maybe actually speaks well for him. What struck me most about that segment was how oblivious Paul seemed, and how he began calling Bruno a "queer" when most people would have figured filming was still going on (as Roger Ebert pointed out in his review). And for the first time I actually started to seriously think maybe Ron Paul is dumb enough to have not known about the racist newsletters he published for around fifteen years. The way he lets his trend-slave people lead him around now is maybe the way he let radical right wingers lead him around in the past.

It's nice to see audiences comfortable with the amount of sexuality portrayed onscreen in this movie. Bruno's interviews with Christian counsellors committed to turning gay men straight turns out to be less fascinating for explorations of their ingrained homophobia as it is for an exploration of their misogyny--the second guy goes on and on about how women talk too much, never get to the point, and seem silly--as though to say, "Yes, I get it, women are horrible." All the undersized lederhosen and exercise bike dildos in the world could not make Bruno seem more deeply disturbed these guys.

Later in the evening, I reached level 30 in World of Warcraft. Yatta. My sister apparently got a job at the Anaheim BlizzCon next month--she's going to run a shuffleboard game. She hasn't found out if she gets to dress up yet.

( 5:21 PM ) posted by Setsuled

Twitter Sonnet #39

No-one knows a cure for delinquency.
No-one in Second Life speaks English now.
Schwarzenegger's on E.T.'s frequency.
Deanna Troi was a real tranquil frau.
The day's already lain its plans for you.
Calmly and quietly without complaint.
So quit trying to decide what to do.
The house is built, all you decide is paint.
Quests well begun is mostly levelled up.
There's no business like big bean burritos.
It's second to tequila in your cup.
Mark the merry massacred mosquitoes.
A transvestite and a mislaid letter
Might make Oedipus Rex even better.

Last night Tim ran my World of Warcraft undead warrior through some really tough place in the southern Barrens and I got a nice new axe called "Corpsemaker". I also found some cornbread--"I hope it's not that lousy Nostromo cornbread," I told Tim. I almost said, "They didn't have cornbread in the Middle Ages!" but then I found a blunderbuss.

I miss the blunderbuss in American McGee's Alice. I wish I could get my copy of that game working again . . . I've been meaning to re-read the Alice books again in preparation for the Tim Burton movie. Well, it's a flimsy excuse, really--I love those books, and the movie looks like it's going to resemble them as much as Ghostbusters resembles Hamlet.

Which reminds me, it looks like there's going to be a discussion panel at Comic-Con called "Was Bram Stoker the Joss Whedon of His Day?" I can answer that one for you right now;

No. No he wasn't.

He was the Bram Stoker of his day. Sure they had a thing or two in common--vampires, yes, though perhaps more saliently they put spins on older gothic conventions. But if you're judging an artist by his resemblance to what's come before, one could as easily say Oscar Wilde was the Whedon of his day, Shakespeare was the Whedon of his day, and Roger Cormen was the Whedon of his day. There are no original story ideas, really, and such similarities really only serve to illustrate patterns of audience reaction to art. Or, I suspect, in this case the similarities are discussed to impart some value to one or the other for people desperate for justification in honouring one while most think more highly of the other.

You know what, nevermind, people really are cattle, it's necessary. And I mean that in the nicest possible way. Alfred Hitchcock said actors were cattle, and he had a high regard for several of them.

( 8:05 PM ) posted by Setsuled

A picture of the moon I took as I was walking home from Tim's house on Friday.

Last night's tweets;

The day's already lain its plans for you.
Calmly and quietly without complaint.
So quit trying to decide what to do.
The house is built, all you decide is paint.

The Comic-Con's programming schedule's now its web site, and it looks like I'll be spending practically all day in Hall H on the 23rd, the first official day of the Con. I'd camp a spot in the room just for Terry Gilliam, but I'm certainly interested in seeing Tim Burton discuss Alice in Wonderland--though, in terms of articulate directors, Gilliam and Burton are kind of at opposite ends of the spectrum, Gilliam being extraordinarily articulate, while Burton usually seems like he wishes someone would cut his tongue out to remove the pressure. I'd certainly like to see what James Cameron has to show, too. Looks like I'll have to sit through the Twilight panel, though. Maybe there'll be some teenage girls I can seduce with body glitter and blank stares.

It's interesting that practically all of the really big panels are on Thursday. Anyone hoping to get in to Hall H is going to need to get there early, too early really to pick up a pass first, which means everyone must get their passes on Wednesday, preview night, which you can only do if you bought the full, four day pass. So if you have to work on Wednesday, or you only bought a pass for Thursday, you're out of luck. On the one hand, I can see the rationale as it would encourage people to buy the four day pass, but the schedule's only just been released and the organisers must have known passes would be sold out long before this. Meanwhile, practically nothing's going on on Saturday--well, nothing "big". I'll certainly want to see Ray Bradbury that day. It's with some pleasure I see that, after years of headliner treatment, Zack Snyder and his Watchmen pastiche have been relegated to sharing a panel with Mark Hamill and Kevin Conroy upstairs on Saturday night in Room6BCF. I like Hamill and Conroy, but nonetheless--HAHAHAHAHA! YOU SUCK, SNYDER, YOU SUCK AND EVERYONE KNOWS NOW.

Otherwise, let's see . . . I'll want to see the live Rifftrax performance, I'll probably want to check out Joss Whedon and Eliza Dushku's Dollhouse panel (hopefully the fact that I'm one of five people who like the show will be reflected in crowd size), and I'm going to have a hard time choosing between seeing Henry Selick and Neil Gaiman on the Coraline panel or seeing Brian Henson, Rockne O'Bannon, Ben Browder, and Claudia Black on the Farscape anniversary panel. I'll probably definitely see Amanda Palmer's CBLDF live figure drawing something-or-other--it's nice knowing I'll be able to catch at least one AFP performance (of sorts) since I can't drive across town to see her and Gaiman perform at The Casbah. I've been to The Casbah, and it's a cosy little venue, making it all the more irritating that the show's happening during Comic-Con.

All in all, it's looking like a pretty good Comic-Con. Even Sunday looks worthwhile, with the American Dad panel. Maybe this is just an indicator of American Dad's tiny following. Patrick Stewart's the shit on that show, folks.

I feel like these past few days are probably the last where I won't be really busy as I work to get ahead on my comic before the Con, which has oddly been a lot of pressure. I ended up doing practically nothing yesterday, starting a bunch of things without finishing any. I finally gave up and started writing the script for chapter 30. I felt a lot better afterwards, and ended up watching Planet Terror and drinking tequila. It's such a shame Robert Rodriguez lost out on directing The Princess of Mars. Maybe he wouldn't have kept the nudity, either, but he'd probably be more likely to keep it than Andrew Stanton. As much as I do love WALL-E, the guy's just not the right fit for this material. But then again, we don't really live in a world that would accept an all nude, Sci-Fi blockbuster, do we? Which is all kinds of sad.

Here's some footage of Tim's cat, Charlie, I took on Friday night;

The music is Robert Schumann's "Traumerei" with lyrics supplied by Kafuka Fuura of Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei. I forgot to mention what a fantastic day Friday was for anime--both a new Haruhi Suzumiya and the season premiere of Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei had finally been subtitled. I was very happy to see the new stuff maintains the fantastic quality of the previous seasons.

( 6:02 PM ) posted by Setsuled

Last night's tweets;

No-one knows a cure for delinquency.
No-one in Second Life speaks English now.
Schwarzenegger's on E.T.'s frequency.
Deanna Troi was a real tranquil frau.

I watched Kenji Mizoguchi's 1936 film, Osaka Elegy last night. Like his Sisters of the Gion, another of his films from the era, this one demonstrates how women are pinioned by a network of society's subtle mechanisms in 1930s Japan. It's a melodramatic tale of a young woman who's gradually forced into being a sort of high class prostitute as the pressure of her father's debts leds her to become the mistress of two wealthy men.

The movie stars a young Isuzu Yamada, who somewhat resembles a young Joan Crawford, and, combined with the film's plot, I couldn't help thinking of Crawford's string of "shopgirl" movies in the 1930s, which typically featured Crawford as a poor, working class woman who faces the dilemma of exchanging her virtue for a more comfortable lifestyle. But the steps shown in Osaka Elegy down the path of social disgrace are considerably more credible, despite cumulatively amounting to a melodrama. Because each step is believable, the brutal conclusion works like the end of a good film noir--Yamada's character is no femme fatale, she's more like the poor schmuck noir lead who tried to do the right thing but just had one too many turns of bad luck with her riskier decisions.

Yamada would later become a Kurosawa regular, her most memorable performance perhaps being the Lady Macbeth character is Throne of Blood, Kurosawa's adaptation of Macbeth. But Osaka Elegy also features a far more prominent Kurosawa regular, Takashi Shimura, in a tiny role as a police detective. Maybe it's the weight of the later movies preceding him for me, but even in such a brief role, I couldn't help noticing what a presence he already was onscreen. He doesn't even get a single close-up, but he managed to communicate so much from a distance.

I walked to Tim's yesterday and I think I'm still a bit tired from it. The DMV's lagged on sending me my car registration, so I'm walking everywhere. One of the reasons I went to the zoo on Thursday was that was my last day with a motor vehicle. Here're a few more clips from that trip;

The music's "Madiana" by Josephine Baker.

( 6:20 PM ) posted by Setsuled

The music in that one is "Light of Green" by Nakagawa Koutarou from the Code Geass soundtrack. I was finally able to get to the zoo yesterday because I'd somehow finished the last two pages of the new Venia's Travels on Wednesday night, and the zoo finally has decent hours for people like me during the summer.

I got a lot more pictures and video than I'm posting now--I may post more to-morrow.

These hyenas really seemed to want to go somewhere and do something. The music's Bernard Herrmann from the Psycho soundtrack.

This was already late in the day--the zoo was closing at 9pm and I'd gotten there at around 6pm, but the time really flew by.

Camels.

A kind of tree kangaroo. He'd been sulking with his back turned until the moment I took the photo.

The zoo's doing something called "Elephant Odyssey" right now, but this topiary elephant is the only elephant I managed to see. I did see a hippo, though;

The kids were particularly annoying here--they clearly didn't care at all about the hippopotamus, and were just bored out of their annoying little skulls. The music's one of the variations on Yukino Miyazawa's theme by Shiro Sagisu from the His and Her Circumstances soundtrack.

Slumbering gila monster. The glare on the glass in the reptile house made it just about impossible to get good pictures.

These snakes had plans, I could tell;

The music's "Grey Clouds" by Franz Liszt, which I got off the Eyes Wide Shut soundtrack.

This might as well be video--this turtle did not move a muscle.

View of Balboa Park from inside the zoo.

A pig of some kind.

Twitter Sonnet #38

All centaurs are more human than satyrs.
Neither of them ought to be sawed in half.
In dreams dwell the advocates for waiters.
Who are real humans in the final math.
Italian album takes twenty seeds.
Now deluged by sundry contributions.
Every earnest, hidden muppet has needs.
But they skip the bukkake ablutions.
There's no rain holds a candle to whiskey.
But the Roo cannot to-night be consoled.
Camera weary at dusk is the monkey.
But no-one in this house has yet been sold.
The convenient vehicle is too tall.
Teacup totem ladders too quickly fall.

( 10:34 PM ) posted by Setsuled

The new Venia's Travels is online. I'm pitching this one as Alfred Hitchcock meets Alice in Wonderland. It may distress foot fetishists.

I went to the zoo to-day and took a lot of pictures and video, most of which I will probably post to-morrow, but I wanted to post this peacock right now. It was wandering around in the middle of the road and didn't mind me walking right up--it was so much like my hippogriff dream.

The music's Bernard Herrmann from the Vertigo soundtrack. I doubt I'll be keeping any of the native sound on these videos as you mostly just hear people screaming--children, mainly, but an alarming number of adults.

There's an intriguing new website promoting Caitlin R. Kiernan's next book, in case you're wondering.

#

( 3:16 PM ) posted by Setsuled

Two pretty wild dreams to-day--the first, I dreamt I was taking part in some kind of celebrity charity foot race where the runners had to carry the large egg (about the size of a watermelon) of an endangered bird to the finish line--there was only one egg, and only the person carrying the egg could officially be the winner. I'd just read Roger Ebert's review for Bruno before going to bed, so maybe that explains why there were two Sacha Baron Cohen's in the race--a good one and an evil one. There was also Bill Corbett and Ian Holm in his Bilbo Baggins costume. For some reason, the egg was already broken at the top and clay like, yellow yolk protruded from the fissure and was bigger than it, as though it had spilled out, foamed, and then froze. There were also markings in black felt pen all over the egg, none of which I could decipher, except one of them appeared to be a crude eye. No-one seemed to mind the egg's less than fresh state.

I remember winning the race, despite the machinations of the evil Sacha Baron Cohen, but some kind of technicality I'm not clear on prevented me from accepting official victory. I actually woke up laughing when a stop motion animation triumphantly announced, with a grey clay building from which emerged a flag like at the end of a Super Mario Brothers level, "And the winner is . . . Undisclosed Enterprise!"

I don't remember much else about that dream except a scene with Jason Mewes at a supermarket that seemed like a deleted scene from Mallrats.

In my second dream, I woke up to discover that I'd become an attractive young black woman. I even had a new set of clothes--a rather nice, stylised red velvet three piece suit and fedora. None of my friends or family believed I was me, and seemed angered by my attempts to convince them. So I was wandering the neighbourhood alone at night when I saw something moving quickly about the street that might have been a dog, but it was much too fast. When it got closer, I saw it was a bird--it had a curved, eagle-like beak, wings, and four legs, like a big dog or cat. It kind of skittered about on, I guess, talons, poking about the gutter, trying to find something. I brought out my camera and got some really great footage, though at first it seemed I wouldn't as it immediately leapt into the sky when I pressed record, turning into a tiny dot of light before circling back down to the ground to give me a fabulous close-up. Somehow I knew it was okay to pet it, and I scratched under the feathers of its neck, wary of the very dangerous looking beak.

"It's a hippogriff," said one of the neighbours, standing a few feet away.

Later in the dream, I eventually managed to convince my sister I was who I said I was, but no-one else would believe me. I remember wearing armour and encountering an evil king at one point, too.

Last night's tweets;

Italian album takes twenty seeds.
Now deluged by sundry contributions.
Every earnest, hidden muppet has needs.
But they skip the bukkake ablutions.

I was downloading a collection of songs by Italian singer Mina when, remembering a self described "bukkake queen" and her Italian boyfriend who were on Howard Stern a couple weeks ago, I couldn't help imagining the concept of torrent seeding as bukkake. I was downloading Mina because I had a sudden impulse to have the Goodfellas soundtrack, only I discovered on the CD's Amazon listing that the official soundtrack only has 12 tracks, which right off the bat seems wrong, considering there was music constantly throughout the movie, and there were several notable omissions, like the Sex Pistols' "My Way" and all the Rolling Stones' songs. The absence of the Stones' songs didn't surprised me, since I know their greedy former manager is notorious for charging obscene amounts of money to license early Rolling Stones, and this, I suspect, is why The Rolling Stones aren't as prominent in the culture's mind as they used to be.

Anyway, a commenter on Amazon posted this useful tracklisting of songs actually used in Goodfellas, which led to some sonic adventures for me last night;

1. TONY BENNETT - "Rags To Riches"
2. THE MOONGLOWS - "Sincerely"
3. THE CLEFTONES - "Can't We Be Sweethearts"
4. GIUSEPPE DI STEFANO - "Firenze Sogna"
5. OTIS WILLIAMS AND THE CHARMS - "Hearts of Stone"
6. THE CADILLACS - "Speedo"
7. GIUSEPPE DI STEFANO -"Parlami d'Amore Mariu"
8. THE MARVELLETTES - "Playboy"
9. BILLY WARD AND HIS DOMINOS - "Stardust"
10. JOHNNY MATHIS - "It's Not For Me To Say"
11. MINA - "This World We Love In (Il Cielo In Una Stanza)"
12. BETTY CURTIS -- "I Will Follow Him (Chariot)"
13. THE CRYSTALS -- "Then He Kissed Me"
14. THE HARPTONES -- "Life Is But A Dream"
15. THE CHANTELS -- "Look Into My Eyes"
16. THE SHANGRI-LAS -- "Leader of the Pack"
17. BOBBY VINTON -- "Roses Are Red"
18. cast -- "Toot, Toot, Tootsie Goodby"
19. cast -- "Happy Birthday To You"
20. DEAN MARTIN -- "Ain't That A Kick In The Head"
21. JERRY VALE -- "Pretend You Don't See Her"
22. THE CRYSTALS -- "He's Sure the Boy I Love"
23. THE SHANGRI-LAS -- "Remember (Walkin' In The Sand)"
24. DONAVAN -- "Atlantis"
25. ARETHA FRANKLIN -- "Baby I Love You"
26. BOBBY DARIN -- "Beyond the Sea"
27. JACK JONES -- "Wives and Lovers"
28. TONY BENNETT -- "The Boulevard of Broken Dreams"
29. THE ROLLING STONES -- "Monkey Man"
30. THE ROLLING STONES -- "Gimme Shelter"
31. THE RONETTES -- "Frosty The Snow Man"
32. DARLENE LOVE -- "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)"
33. cast -- "Danny Boy"
34. CREAM -- "Sunshine Of Your Love"
35. THE DRIFTERS -- "Bells of St. Marys"
36. DEREK AND THE DOMINOS -- "Layla"
37. VITO AND THE SALUTATIONS -- "Unchained Melody"
38. HARRY NILSSON -- "Jump Into The Fire"
39. GEORGE HARRISON -- "What Is Life"
40. THE ROLLING STONES -- "Memo From Turner"
41. MUDDY WATERS -- "Mannish Boy"
42. THE WHO -- "The Magic Bus"
43. SID VICIOUS -- "My Way"

A couple of these I still haven't been able to find, most significantly any Giuseppe di Stefano. But I did manage to find a number of flac versions of tracks, which I suspect are of much higher quality than the 1990 soundtrack. But the Mina stuff turned out to be lousy remixes from 2004. Why do people do that shit?

( 9:20 PM ) posted by Setsuled

Last night's tweets;

All centaurs are more human than satyrs.
Neither of them ought to be sawed in half.
In dreams dwell the advocates for waiters.
Who are real humans in the final math.

I'm feeling peculiarly benevolent, so to-day I shall explain the tweets to you, supplicant reader.

The tweets reference Lenny Bruce's prediction that waiters shall be the final oppressed minority, Howard Stern's live shows when he had been fired from NBC and he practiced a gruesome variant of the "saw a lady in half" magic trick, and the first tweet refers to the fact that World of Warcraft classifies centaurs as humanoids but not satyrs. What this means is that Lelia, my undead warrior, can feed on the flesh of centaurs but not satyrs, which was inconvenient because it was satyrs I was battling in Ashenvale last night.

I actually got caught up with my comic last night, finishing the sixth page of the next chapter at around 12:30am, unexpectedly finding myself with an hour and a half of free time. It was extremely disconcerting--I played World of Warcraft while drinking gin, but felt a little ill at ease, keenly feeling like I shouldn't have gotten done all I'd gotten done. Maybe that's why I've been so productive to-day so far--I've already pencilled and inked the last two pages of Chapter 29. I've only a lot of colouring to do now.

Last night I also played with my level four human rogue a bit (this is her);

Nothing remarkable yet, but I'm proud of the name I snagged for her--Galatea. Though I suppose it would've made more sense for my undead character to be Galatea. Oh, well.

Happy birthday, Laura Cooper.

( 9:51 PM ) posted by Setsuled

Twitter Sonnet #37

Thirteen minutes are similar to ten.
Fireworks never end when you expect.
The new shogun prefers women to men.
All peaceful plans to sack Edo are wrecked.
Tomato sauce has taken the whole plate.
A cat might make a mess of a lizard.
For some spoils mercs will forever wait.
Lazy monks attend them in a blizzard.
There's barely time now for Technicolour.
The angry black cat sleeps in seclusion.
Matters of gross human height are solar.
Brought to a not jolly green conclusion.
The checkout is not your home or your bank.
The world's big with better places to think.

Finally catching up on a lot of things to-day I've been behind on lately, most importantly colouring. It's still going to be rough getting ahead for Comic-Con, though.

With breakfast to-day, I watched the final episode of Natsu no Arashi, which was one of the most gloriously self indulgent works of art I've ever seen. Filled with completely inexplicable and unabashed fanservice. Every few moments, all the characters abruptly changed into different, skimpy costumes for no reason at all, and the dialogue was composed entirely of riffs from two previous time travel comedy episodes, the best bit being a discussion of whether or not a carton of milk would still be expired if taken back in time to before its expiration date and swapped with its past, unexpired version and brought back to the future. The characters present different possible solutions to the paradox while wearing increasingly smaller and stranger clothes.

I think the last conclusion was that the milk existed but only Schrodinger's cat could drink it. Or something.

The time travel comedy was one of the best aspects of the series, which switched between comedy and a drama where a boy and the ghost of a high school girl travel back to the 1940s to rescue people from bombing raids. Interestingly, the show demonstrates repeatedly that the past cannot be changed, and that everything the characters do in the past had already happened, all the people they save had already been saved and remembered being saved by them. In one case, a man informs the characters that they saved him before they go back and save him. I found this a fascinating deviation from standard time travel story telling, though I suppose it might have dissolved tension for a lot of people.

The comedy episodes supported the idea of inalterable history as well, with Hajime, the 13 year-old main character, convincing Sayoko, the ghost girl, to go back in time for his petty schemes, the fruits of which it inevitably turns out he's already experienced. And then there's a great sex comedy subplot about Hajime's co-worker, Jun, who's a girl posing as a boy, though eventually it's only Hajime who is fooled and some nice comedy is produced by the absurd lengths to which Hajime's stupidity goes to prevent him from realising Jun's true sex, even to the point where the two switch bodies and Hajime is so caught up in distress over the absence of testicles on Jun's body that he evidently fails to notice the vagina.

The drama aspects of the show were good, and kind of jived well with all the Japanese movies from the era I've been watching lately, but, if there is another season, I hope it concentrates more on the comedy. Maybe I ought to get the manga . . .

( 10:02 PM ) posted by Setsuled

My tweets from last night;

Tomato sauce has taken the whole plate.
A cat might make a mess of a lizard.
For some spoils mercs will forever wait.
Lazy monks attend them in a blizzard.

While colouring yesterday, I listened to critic Donald Richie's commentary for the Criterion DVD of The Lower Depths. Most of his analysis centred on the idea of the necessity of illusions for survival, particularly among the poor, which I also felt was the film's chief concern in my analysis. Though Richie, who knew Kurosawa personally, also remarked on Kurosawa's feelings about the subjectivity of criticism;

Of course, my going on like this, about the aesthetics of the Kurosawa film is something with which the director himself could not have disagreed more. He didn't like this kind of talk, like I'm talking now, and in fact when he heard anybody talking like I am now he would either leave the room or stop listening. He simply was not interested in this. If you asked Kurosawa, you know, the meaning of what he was doing he simply had no answer for this. If you asked him how he had done a certain scene, he might be interested enough to answer. His interest in his pictures and indeed life itself was never in, you know, why a thing happens, this was not what interested him. He was very interested in how it occurs. How it could be put together, how indeed it could be reassembled . . . but he simply wasn't interested in any past aesthetic, categorical talk, he disliked the kind of generalisations that I am lavishing on this particular recording. What he liked was the detail, the single detail which showed all, and which rendered all generalisations redundant . . .

He'd say, "Look, I'm making a film. If I could've said this in words, I wouldn't have needed to make a picture of it, right?" And of course, he's quite right. He's implying that the kingdom of words and the kingdom of images are separated by this great gulf and no bridge is ever going to go over it. And, indeed, what we say about a thing and what the thing itself consists of are two entirely different things, which never agree. I mean, post-modernist structuralism says exactly the same thing, and it is quite true--the words create an image by themselves. As you are listening, I am creating an image of those images that you are looking at, but the images you are looking at are the real thing. I'm the illusion, or the delusion, here. The images themselves carry everything we know and we do not need to question what they mean . . .

Which is a fitting enough discussion with a film about people needing their own personal illusory worlds to survive.

Richie digressed quite a bit in this commentary, which is by no means a bad thing, as it sounds as though he has quite a lot of stories, having known several of Japan's greatest directors since the 1940s. I was surprised to hear him say he'd actually suggested to Kurosawa that he cast Toshiro Mifune in Ran. The decades long rift between the director and the man who'd starred in 16 of his films had seemed so profound to me I couldn't imagine someone bringing it up so casually. Kurosawa's reply, apparently, was that he wouldn't work with anyone who'd make something like Shogun, which was an American television series Mifune worked on in the 1970s. But, Richie said, Mifune had been forced to take the role after participation in his last film with Kurosawa had made him unavailable for years after he'd been used to doing two movies a year. He never curbed his extravagant spending, so he was forced to take the first big paycheck that came his way after Red Beard.

But one of the most interesting things Richie had to say about The Lower Depths, to me, was a remark on the casual cruelty of the characters

Of course, illusion is also delusion . . . illusions are against the whole idea of reality, that's why they're called illusions. And so they are delusions in that they separate us from reality, but they also make reality something which we can live with. All these people . . . hope that they are somebody else . . . Both these people are motivated by hate, self hate, usually, or, in the case of the thief, doubts about self. We will shortly see a man who calls himself an ex-samurai and who may well be one. But the important thing is this is the shell, this is the character he has drawn. We see a prostitute later on, and she lives on the illusion, the delusion, that she has had a very great love in her life and that this love is somehow going to go and come back in some way and is going to make her life having been worthwhile.

. . . Here comes the samurai. And you'll notice the way in which the other characters refuse to believe he was a samurai and make fun of his ambitions just as they are extremely cruel to the prostitute. Cruelty in this picture turns out to be a natural function, sort of like eating, or going to the toilet . . . And so, the idea of an evil, something which is larger than ourselves, is not addressed in this picture at all, nor do I believe Kurosawa entertains any such idea. Cruelty is something which is absolutely inbred in us and is based upon our concept of who we want to be and who we think the other person is. In this case, all of these people who are making fun of this man who says that he is a samurai are boosting their own idea of who they are by doing this . . . They have discovered an "other" against whom they can project themselves and hence realise who they are. At least they aren't samurai, at least they don't lie . . . If you look at it closely, everybody turns against everybody else, in that they refuse to accept the illusions which the others feel are necessary to live. Mifune, who has problems of his own, is like a child, he's so delighted, to be able to affirm himself against what he would see as the pretensions of somebody with whom he has to live.

( 9:37 PM ) posted by Setsuled

Well, looks like a prequel to Anne of Green Gables has come to Japanese television. It doesn't look quite as bad as 90% of the mass production anime out there with featureless buildings and cookie cutter character designs, but there's still the notable lack of attention to details of period architecture and dress--I expect that from most anime series, but what surprises me is the lack of enthusiasm for flora and fauna--the forests and mountains in the backgrounds of even some of the cheapest looking anime out there tend to be beautiful. This looks like late 1980s American plastic trees and shrubs along with eerily still forest animals--I mean, it's the theme song, this is where the animation's supposed to go all out. I can only imagine the show itself--it must be like a slide show.

On the other end of the anime spectrum, the new season of Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei premiered yesterday. I hope someone fansubs it soon. Until then, there is the opening and ending on YouTube--the opening's not much to look at, and I wonder if it's temporary, like the plain openings for the first few episodes of the first two seasons. But I do kind of like the ending;

I did watch an Akiyuki Shinbo show to-day, though--the last three episodes of Natsu no Arashi were finally subbed. I'm guessing I'm one of the few people who was looking forward to it, since the comment on one of the raw, unsubtitled uploads was, "Seems like this is the end for this crappy show." Apparently someone hasn't seen Konnichiwa Anne. And anyway, I don't see how anyone can watch this opening and not grin;

My tweets from last night;

Thirteen minutes are similar to ten.
Fireworks never end when you expect.
The new shogun prefers women to men.
All peaceful plans to sack Edo are wrecked.

I have to admit I really don't understand fireworks. They're loud and kind of boring, really. But my sister was really keen on seeing them this year for some reason, so I walked with her and my mother. I didn't dare move my car all day, since this neighbourhood seems to be where half the county goes to watch fireworks.

I did talk my sister into watching 1776, which is so far the best Independence Day movie I've ever seen, but I can't seem to drum up enthusiasm for it from anyone else.

There've been a lot of lizards around here lately. I watched Snow chase down two in the backyard, ignoring me completely in the process. I just hope he eats one of them.

I was eating lunch at the time, and I had the television on The National Geographic Channel, which has depressingly taken to referring to itself as "Natgeo". Who the fuck's that for? History buffs with short attention spans?

Actually, the show I was watching had a definite yellow journalism quality, a kind of charmingly trashy special about the Codex Gigas that clearly wanted to give you the impression that experts are pretty sure it was written by Satan and that everyone who possessed the book was cursed--the show used a lot of blatantly selective reasoning, like mentioning the decline of Emperor Rudolf II after he'd acquired the codex, or the hard times a monastery faced years after acquiring it. Somehow I remember National Geographic being a reputable publication. I suppose I was given that impression when I was a kid. Still, it's sad. Though I couldn't help loving a ghost story told with such earnestness.

#

( 2:25 AM ) posted by Setsuled

I found this beautiful resignation speech by Sarah Palin deeply inspiring;

So inspiring, I recorded my own resignation speech (for some reason Vimeo cut the sound off the first few seconds);

Resignation from Trompe Setsuled on Vimeo.

( 6:31 PM ) posted by Setsuled

Twitter Sonnet #36

I'm looking for a tree in a forest.
Another lovely World of Warcraft day.
A zombie makes an uninspired tourist.
But they're cool with going any which way.
English dubbed anime still sucks ass.
Sounds classy as a used car commercial.
It's always the same Canadian cast.
Money they make, talent they could marshal.
Ten dollars says Willow Palin's pregnant.
To-day was all about the blueberry.
Though they're really more violet in pigment.
Lenny Bruce was an orange spider faerie.
"Red was the colour of the dress she wore."
And there are neckties all over the floor.

I finally did a quest with a group last night in World of Warcraft--two players that just happened to be nearby. They probably thought I was pretty rude because I barely talked--I was playing on Tim's wall mounted television and the chat text was too small to read. But it was fun.

A couple shots of spiders on the back porch last night--

A dead one;

A live one;

( 6:51 PM ) posted by Setsuled

Last night's tweets;

English dubbed anime still sucks ass.
Sounds classy as a used car commercial.
It's always the same Canadian cast.
Money they make, talent they could marshal.

This was prompted by seeing the trailer for the upcoming U.S. theatrical release of the first Rebuild of Evangelion movie. It'd been a while since I heard English dubbed Evangelion--I'd forgotten how astonishingly awful it is. And yet it's par for the course for English dubbed anime. It's funny how they don't tell the celebrities involved with the Hayao Miyazaki dubs to adopt extremely phoney sounding affectations. "This is how it's done! Talk like your little sister begged you to do the voices while reading a story you really hate." I honestly don't know how the productions studios aren't tremendously embarrassed by these products, and then I remember all the money they make off of the incredible imported animation.

I was excited to read about the second Rebuild movie on AICN, which is currently in Japanese theatres. The AICN piece says, "The film took in $5.37m (Y512m) - for comparison, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen opened at $5.88m (Y560.7m)," which is slightly comforting after I read about the spat between Michael Bay and Megan Fox in which she said, "I mean, I can't shit on this movie because it did give me a career and open all these doors for me. But I don't want to blow smoke up people's ass. People are well aware that this is not a movie about acting."

To which Michael Bay replied that he 100% disagreed and added, "Nick Cage wasn't a big actor when I cast him, nor was Ben Affleck before I put him in Armageddon. Shia LaBeouf wasn't a big movie star before he did Transformers -- and then he exploded. Not to mention Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, from Bad Boys."

To which I reply, What?

Can Michael Bay really be that deluded a motherfucker? Holy shit, Megan Fox must have only cut off a steady stream of ass smoke for a split second. Does he honestly not know about the hit sitcoms Shia LeBeouf, Will Smith, and Martin Lawrence were all in before he cast them? Or Good Will Hunting? And--Nicholas Cage--holy shit. Really, Michael? You never heard of Moonstruck, Peggy Sue Got Married, Raising Arizona, Honeymoon in Vegas--fucking Leaving Las Vegas for which he won an academy award a year before he appeared in your aptly named The Rock for being dumb as?! Do you spend more than twenty seconds a day without a sycophant's mouth around your cock? Holy fucking shit.

Not to mention he took Megan Fox's characterisation of Transformers as an attack on his career as a director. What a fucking infant.

( 9:02 PM ) posted by Setsuled

I just came back from lunch at my parents' house where my mother had the television on CNN's endless Michael Jackson coverage, in this case Larry King's tour of Neverland Ranch, and I couldn't help thinking of this;

As much as Citizen Kane was an illumination of the ultimate, distilled destiny of the American Dream, so, it seems to me, is the life of Michael Jackson. It's the hardwired sense that the rational objective in life is to obtain sovereignty through money. It doesn't mean Jackson was cruel or despotic--neither was Kane, or William Randolph Hearst. It's just a reflection of the shame felt by Americans for depending on anyone else financially--creating one's own financial fiefdom is the natural result of pulling away from that shame. As Leland said Kane wanted love "on your own terms";

Both Michael Jackson and Charles Foster Kane were people obsessed with reclaiming something from childhood--innocence, or more specifically, the ability to accept love. They were both, as children, betrayed by the world of adults so what they're left with is the American psychological programme and the freedom to exercise it to its conclusion. I find myself thinking again about the sort of freedom granted by internet socialising and how text and online society might reflect the fundamental nature of the American psyche.

Anyway, I'm running very late to-day. Look what I just screwed to my desk!

Last night's tweets;

I'm looking for a tree in a forest.
Another lovely World of Warcraft day.
A zombie makes an uninspired tourist.
But they're cool with going any which way.

I was also sorry to hear Karl Malden passed away to-day. Looks like it's another celebrity apocalypse. I guess this one started with Dom DeLuise? Why didn't Dom DeLuise get round the clock CNN coverage?

( 8:48 PM ) posted by Setsuled

Twitter Sonnet #35

Only the farmer you need is missing.
He always buys bait in the pier cafe.
Proper world wars often break for fishing.
Parrot networks are loud, lofty and fey.
Harpies never do anything alone.
They'll drink boxes of tea in one sitting.
The night is as boring as a bald bone.
While an idle, hungry fire's spitting.
A cow can keep a building very warm.
But it's much smarter to keep it frozen.
Some tasty fish swim in a handy swarm.
Stranger meat's delivered by the dozen.
The world is almost as flat as flat bread.
And wet as Weary Willy's nose was red.

I forgot to mention yesterday how happy I was that Al Franken finally got the Minnesota senate seat. But, jeez, you wouldn't know it from the news channels to-day--all I see when I switch between CNN and MSNBC is Michael Jackson coverage. Yeah, it's a sad story and everything, but enough already.

I'm starting to run out of steam, but I actually got quite a lot done to-day so far--I've already drawn and inked a page, gone to the bank, and unloaded the dishwasher. I have a bottle of sake I want to finish off, maybe I can to-night.

I've been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer for a couple months now and last week I reached the end of the third season, so now I'm switching between Angel and Buffy. I'm kind of considering abandoning Buffy though--next to even just the first couple episodes, Buffy is clearly nowhere near as good as Angel. Though, to be fair, Buffy at college was a quickly abandoned storyline for a reason and the mayor turning into a lousy cgi monster had to be one of the worst payoffs in television history, so this isn't exactly Buffy at its best.

I am surprised to find third season Buffy in widescreen--I guess I really haven't watched it since it first aired, when the network probably cropped the image. The odd thing, though, is that it often doesn't seem to have been composed for wide screen. Whedon seems to forget what was actually in one shot when he switches to the next--like here--

Oddly halved, nervous Buffy face doesn't quite match up when we cut to--

Buffy face in false contemplation.

I guess it doesn't seem strange after all the cameos by the boom mic in the third season, but Whedon seems to mess up at least one shot in every premiere--a film crew member's sneakers accidentally make it into a shot on the series premiere of Angel, and who can forget this accidental showcase of Alan Tudyk's mime skills from the Firefly premiere;

But I guess I can't imagine the stress of running three television series at once. None of these problems seem as bad as Willow's haircut, which I think actually mainly speaks well for the show. Gods, I miss second season Willow. She calls a guy a "cutie patootie" in a third season episode. Ugh. Willow brand cute must have been a difficult balancing act, but she tumbled right off the tightrope on that one.

Anelnoath
Venia's Travels
Boschen and Nesuko

links:
News
The Agonist
Crooks and Liars
The Guardian
The Japan Times
National Public Radio
The New York Times

Blogs
Poppy Z Brite
Dame Darcy's Journal
Neil Gaiman
Caitlin R Kiernan
M'isa's Journal

Art and Entertainment
Tori Amos
David Bowie
The Cure
William Gibson
Martin Johnson
Karlsweb
Leia's Metal Bikini
Nebari.Net
Peanuts
Rasputina
Remotely Lame
Roger Ebert
Scott McCloud

Reference
Dictionary
Moviefone
Norse Mythology
Jeff Russell's Starship Dimensions (everyone needs this)
Tarot readings
World Clock(it's nifty!)

e-mail: setsuled@yahoo.com

Presenting Setsuled's blog . . .