Last night's tweets;
Nordic disguises dwarf Roman costumes.
Somewhere there is a viral Robin Hood.
The wasting wax blight idea was Brit Hume's.
It was to know where candle elves stood.
A lot of last night and to-day has been spent doing some necessary reading for the next Venia's Travels chapter. I kind of wish I had years to really embed things in my memory, but in just about all my artistic pursuits, I can't escape the feeling that my time is limited in the grand scheme of things.
Still only having one cup of coffee a day, and I probably wouldn't have that much except I need my mind to get anything done. I was noticing last night how decidedly surly I was without the caffeine. I don't know if I actually have time to go through the withdrawal. Still trying to keep to eating non-spicy things. I've been eating oatmeal for breakfast (no change there), cucumber sandwiches for lunch, and saltless potato leek soup with toast for dinner. I'm going to try incorporating cous cous, too.
No-one I knew actually wanted to hand out candy to trick-or-treaters, except a six year old girl named Carly who was visiting at my parents' house last night. When the doorbell rang, my mother shushed everyone, but Carly couldn't get her mind around it, "Why can't we give them candy?" I told her I knew how she felt.
But I managed to talk my mother and sister into watching Cat People last night. I was surprised when they didn't see Irina as the heroine of the movie, and I had to remind myself that this is probably the normal interpretation. Mostly what I get from it is smug Ollie and Dr. Judd, blundering about like everything in the world is there for their benefit, and Alice completely rolling over for them. What Irina sacrifices for them, I completely don't feel like they deserve it, and she comes off as practically a saint because of it.
So far I've written just over half the next chapter of my comic. I don't know how I'm going to get through the rest without more caffeine. I might try some green tea, as some of the sites I've been looking at say it's actually beneficial for urinary tract infections. If only there were some way to shoot caffeine into my brain without it ending up in my guts.
Happy birthday, Chris Walsh
Sunday, November 01, 2009
Saturday, October 31, 2009
God is In the Wrist
Twitter Sonnet #76
Sure is a bad time for me to be sick.
I hope a lighter meal is all I need.
A Zelda fairy now'd be fantastic.
Why can't problems ever be solved with mead?
Calculators oftentimes will not help.
Much is done with Satan's power of sloth.
Water's more easy going with some kelp.
A cop can sing or bust crime but not both.
Loud chairs misunderstand their true function.
Chuckling ghost imps dance to cause chronic pains.
To winter air, dead trees apply suction.
Blood is the cranberry juice in your veins.
No man alone is a big yellow bird.
Green garbage monsters should not be disturbed.
Another video game Friday at Tim's. While he was playing Oblivion, I went through a bunch of old Nintendo and Super Nintendo ROMs I had on an old disk. It seems at one time Nintendo games were made from everything and I played a curiously goofy Jaws game that involved moving a little white diver about a small square of water, avoiding octopi gliding horizontally across the screen and collecting sea shells. The shells looked exactly like the shells in the Disney's Little Mermaid game, and I wondered how many little bits of graphics and programming were often reused.
The Bible Adventures game certainly seemed to have borrowed a lot from Super Mario Brothers 2 (or Doki Doki Panic), and I was briefly involved in the cartoon madness of Jochebed taking Moses to the river--controlling the woman speeding from one end of the screen to the other, lifting her baby like a prop as well as evil spiders and periodically throwing them. "Wow," I said to Tim. "Everyone's going to be Christian after playing this game."
The Wikipedia entry has screenshots, as well as this fascinating bit of trivia;
Bible Adventures is one of a very few games produced without a license from Nintendo. In order to bypass the NES's 10NES chip, which was intended to prevent unauthorized games, Wisdom Tree used technology licensed from Tengen which used a voltage zap to bypass the security mechanism.
Because the technology used in the cartridge was technically copyright infringement, the Bible Adventures cartridge was not sold through traditional video game retailers, and is thus a scarce collectors' item today.
What are the laws of man to 8 bit God? Well, thank heaven Wisdom Tree had the courage to go rogue and put repetitive, derivative God into the devilish grey boxes.
I played some WoW last night, then watched Blood: The Last Vampire, a rather short anime feature film by Production I.G., the same studio that makes Kimi ni Todoke. It's also very beautiful, though I think their works, like Kimi ni Todoke, the animated sequence in Kill Bill, and xxxHolic, that have less overt use of cgi, actually look far superior to Blood and Ghost in the Shell. There's a stiffness about the fusion of the two styles. But Blood's story is certainly better than average, nicely avoiding any time wasted on exposition and just showing through images and dialogue Saya's character and her relationship to the monsters, her strange sympathy with them coinciding with her commitment to killing them coming off as far more poetic this way than just another rehash of the common half demon versus real demons story. Though, as there are apparently a manga and anime series that follow the film, I'm sure a lot is eventually made more explicitly clear.
I see the film's concept is the result of a sort of contest among students of Oshii Mamoru, according to Wikipedia, and "The submissions of Kenji Kamiyama and Junichi Fujisaki became the basis for the upcoming film: a girl in a sailor suit wielding a samurai sword." Which seems pretty amazing to me as that describes about 80% of action anime. It's nice to see director Hiroyuki Kitakubo was given artistic license to take it somewhere interesting.
Well, I think I'm slowly weaning myself off caffeine. I managed to get by on just one cup of coffee yesterday and I'm going to see if I can do the same to-day.
Sure is a bad time for me to be sick.
I hope a lighter meal is all I need.
A Zelda fairy now'd be fantastic.
Why can't problems ever be solved with mead?
Calculators oftentimes will not help.
Much is done with Satan's power of sloth.
Water's more easy going with some kelp.
A cop can sing or bust crime but not both.
Loud chairs misunderstand their true function.
Chuckling ghost imps dance to cause chronic pains.
To winter air, dead trees apply suction.
Blood is the cranberry juice in your veins.
No man alone is a big yellow bird.
Green garbage monsters should not be disturbed.
Another video game Friday at Tim's. While he was playing Oblivion, I went through a bunch of old Nintendo and Super Nintendo ROMs I had on an old disk. It seems at one time Nintendo games were made from everything and I played a curiously goofy Jaws game that involved moving a little white diver about a small square of water, avoiding octopi gliding horizontally across the screen and collecting sea shells. The shells looked exactly like the shells in the Disney's Little Mermaid game, and I wondered how many little bits of graphics and programming were often reused.
The Bible Adventures game certainly seemed to have borrowed a lot from Super Mario Brothers 2 (or Doki Doki Panic), and I was briefly involved in the cartoon madness of Jochebed taking Moses to the river--controlling the woman speeding from one end of the screen to the other, lifting her baby like a prop as well as evil spiders and periodically throwing them. "Wow," I said to Tim. "Everyone's going to be Christian after playing this game."
The Wikipedia entry has screenshots, as well as this fascinating bit of trivia;
Bible Adventures is one of a very few games produced without a license from Nintendo. In order to bypass the NES's 10NES chip, which was intended to prevent unauthorized games, Wisdom Tree used technology licensed from Tengen which used a voltage zap to bypass the security mechanism.
Because the technology used in the cartridge was technically copyright infringement, the Bible Adventures cartridge was not sold through traditional video game retailers, and is thus a scarce collectors' item today.
What are the laws of man to 8 bit God? Well, thank heaven Wisdom Tree had the courage to go rogue and put repetitive, derivative God into the devilish grey boxes.
I played some WoW last night, then watched Blood: The Last Vampire, a rather short anime feature film by Production I.G., the same studio that makes Kimi ni Todoke. It's also very beautiful, though I think their works, like Kimi ni Todoke, the animated sequence in Kill Bill, and xxxHolic, that have less overt use of cgi, actually look far superior to Blood and Ghost in the Shell. There's a stiffness about the fusion of the two styles. But Blood's story is certainly better than average, nicely avoiding any time wasted on exposition and just showing through images and dialogue Saya's character and her relationship to the monsters, her strange sympathy with them coinciding with her commitment to killing them coming off as far more poetic this way than just another rehash of the common half demon versus real demons story. Though, as there are apparently a manga and anime series that follow the film, I'm sure a lot is eventually made more explicitly clear.
I see the film's concept is the result of a sort of contest among students of Oshii Mamoru, according to Wikipedia, and "The submissions of Kenji Kamiyama and Junichi Fujisaki became the basis for the upcoming film: a girl in a sailor suit wielding a samurai sword." Which seems pretty amazing to me as that describes about 80% of action anime. It's nice to see director Hiroyuki Kitakubo was given artistic license to take it somewhere interesting.
Well, I think I'm slowly weaning myself off caffeine. I managed to get by on just one cup of coffee yesterday and I'm going to see if I can do the same to-day.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Making Organs Useful
Last night's tweets;
Calculators oftentimes will not help.
Much is done with Satan's power of sloth.
Water's more easy going with some kelp.
A cop can sing or bust crime but not both.
Having a cup of coffee right now after going almost 48 hours without caffeine. I hope I'm well enough after two days of solid sleep blocks to drink the stuff that'll make me feel like myself again. So far so good. I think I'll keep drinking cranberry juice in any case. It turns out I rather like it.
So I did upload the new Venia's Travels at around 5am. No-one's more surprised than me that I finished it last night, but without caffeine, noticing any light or sound surprises me.
Even now, I'm having trouble forming thoughts or emotions. I guess I could be a Matrix battery still. Or a senator. Oh, hey, there's an opinion. Coffee bringing me back online by slow degrees.
Pretty much nothing to say about yesterday. I worked on my comic and listened to Howard Stern for about ten hours. Thank the gods for the Stern show. It's hard to imagine anything feeling like an emergency while listening to it.
I also watched an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with dinner. The night before, when I was feeling really shitty, I'd watched "Sleep Tight", an episode of Angel with which I felt a peculiar sympathetic panic as Wesley worried about Angel killing his baby. It's as though, as I sensed things going wrong with my body and anxieties about my lack of health insurance and otherwise inability to handle something truly serious, I projected those anxieties onto Angel's behaviour, and I actually got a little scared when he threw his spiked blood against the wall, shouting about his kid. I was so happy when he was back to himself by the end.
You know, I'm feeling so sorry I said David Boreanaz was bland. He actually has a kind of Harrison Ford quality.
I'm not sure what I'll do to-night. I guess I'll go over to Tim's. Maybe play some World of Warcraft. Go to the Western Plaguelands and kill things. It's nice being able to go back to the undead area, which I think is my favourite region in World of Warcraft. The colours are sort of Invader Zim-ish.
Almost done with my coffee. I can feel my brains opening slowly to life like flower petals or a vagina. Sweet, sweet, brain vagina. I swear it's the vagina part that turns me on the most. But, oh, brains . . .
Calculators oftentimes will not help.
Much is done with Satan's power of sloth.
Water's more easy going with some kelp.
A cop can sing or bust crime but not both.
Having a cup of coffee right now after going almost 48 hours without caffeine. I hope I'm well enough after two days of solid sleep blocks to drink the stuff that'll make me feel like myself again. So far so good. I think I'll keep drinking cranberry juice in any case. It turns out I rather like it.
So I did upload the new Venia's Travels at around 5am. No-one's more surprised than me that I finished it last night, but without caffeine, noticing any light or sound surprises me.
Even now, I'm having trouble forming thoughts or emotions. I guess I could be a Matrix battery still. Or a senator. Oh, hey, there's an opinion. Coffee bringing me back online by slow degrees.
Pretty much nothing to say about yesterday. I worked on my comic and listened to Howard Stern for about ten hours. Thank the gods for the Stern show. It's hard to imagine anything feeling like an emergency while listening to it.
I also watched an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with dinner. The night before, when I was feeling really shitty, I'd watched "Sleep Tight", an episode of Angel with which I felt a peculiar sympathetic panic as Wesley worried about Angel killing his baby. It's as though, as I sensed things going wrong with my body and anxieties about my lack of health insurance and otherwise inability to handle something truly serious, I projected those anxieties onto Angel's behaviour, and I actually got a little scared when he threw his spiked blood against the wall, shouting about his kid. I was so happy when he was back to himself by the end.
You know, I'm feeling so sorry I said David Boreanaz was bland. He actually has a kind of Harrison Ford quality.
I'm not sure what I'll do to-night. I guess I'll go over to Tim's. Maybe play some World of Warcraft. Go to the Western Plaguelands and kill things. It's nice being able to go back to the undead area, which I think is my favourite region in World of Warcraft. The colours are sort of Invader Zim-ish.
Almost done with my coffee. I can feel my brains opening slowly to life like flower petals or a vagina. Sweet, sweet, brain vagina. I swear it's the vagina part that turns me on the most. But, oh, brains . . .
Venia Cleans Up
The new Venia's Travels is online. It's named after a Jesus and Mary Chain song. I finished it more out of numb momentum than tenacity.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
From the Blank Soil of the Mind
Last night's tweets;
Sure is a bad time for me to be sick.
I hope a lighter meal is all I need.
A Zelda fairy now'd be fantastic.
Why can't problems ever be solved with mead?
The new Venia's Travels chapter is likely to be up a day or two later than usual. The reason I haven't been sleeping the past few days is that I've been getting up to pee every five minutes. I've also been hungry and unable to eat at the same time. After talking with my family a bit, and doing some googling, we're working under the theory that I've got a urinary tract infection, so I've been taking some antibiotics. To-day was the first sleep I've really had in days. Obviously, this is a bad time for this. I know a lot of people read the comic on Saturdays and Mondays, so it won't really matter, but to those hoping to read it to-night or Friday morning, it probably won't be up. I have five pages totally finished, plus another two mostly coloured and one I still haven't started. I can't have caffeine, but I'm going to try work on this thing to-night. We'll see how it goes.
Drinking cranberry juice with breakfast. Tastes totally different than I thought it would . . .
Happy birthday, Natalie.
Sure is a bad time for me to be sick.
I hope a lighter meal is all I need.
A Zelda fairy now'd be fantastic.
Why can't problems ever be solved with mead?
The new Venia's Travels chapter is likely to be up a day or two later than usual. The reason I haven't been sleeping the past few days is that I've been getting up to pee every five minutes. I've also been hungry and unable to eat at the same time. After talking with my family a bit, and doing some googling, we're working under the theory that I've got a urinary tract infection, so I've been taking some antibiotics. To-day was the first sleep I've really had in days. Obviously, this is a bad time for this. I know a lot of people read the comic on Saturdays and Mondays, so it won't really matter, but to those hoping to read it to-night or Friday morning, it probably won't be up. I have five pages totally finished, plus another two mostly coloured and one I still haven't started. I can't have caffeine, but I'm going to try work on this thing to-night. We'll see how it goes.
Drinking cranberry juice with breakfast. Tastes totally different than I thought it would . . .
Happy birthday, Natalie.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Bad Wine
Twitter Sonnet #75
Can't believe I'm this hungry already.
I ate lunch about an hour ago.
Thin cucumbers can make plates unsteady.
There's no real food inside the Nintendo.
Forbidden spaghetti is black wires.
Baby ghosts will try eating anything.
Beware of tiny mayo vampires.
Digital spell casters do like to sing.
Neutral dead gnats are floating in white wine.
Their tiny Robin Hood went for the rum.
Spirit laws are canaries in a mine.
Drunk driving without alcohol's no fun.
Cram silent signals in a fat file.
Another sleepless day for the pile.
My mother suggested leaving out a small cup of chardonnay for the fruit flies or gnats or whatever they are and it seems to have worked like a charm. Though I guess I need to put some fresh bowls of it in the kitchen because a lot of them just seem to be swarming instead of drowning. This exercise has made white wine, incredibly, seem even more disgusting to me. I already thought it tasted like liquefied taffy.
I'm in day two of getting only fitful, three hour stints of slumber. It seems to've messed up my appetite, among other things. I ate lunch yesterday at around 11pm, even though I wasn't at all hungry. I had only a bowl of saltless pea soup, but I could barely cram it down. I usually eat lunch in the kitchen, but the insects were so bad I took the soup into my room and watched the third episode of Kimi ni Todoke while I ate.
Sleep deprived turned out to be the best way to watch the show, as some of my higher functions were disabled and I was able to get invested in the story. It's still beautifully designed and animated, too.
I have to wonder if my dislike for the show is due to psychological imperfections on my part. What bugs me is the naive, innocent hearted protagonist. Why should this bug me so much? Some people are naive and innocent, and those aren't crimes. Sawako's naiveté is over the top, as she persists in only marvelling about how she's finally making friends and just thinking about how great the male lead is without becoming aware of the fact that she's attracted to him. But cartoons are often about exaggeration. She's kind of like a humanoid lolcat.
Lolcats and cats don't bother me. In fact, I can appreciate the easy affection animals give because I tend to put a lot of people off without even trying. And yet, on occasions when I've encountered anything like that unconditional love from people, I tend to find it irritating. I find the idea of someone liking me without understanding me to be disturbing. Though I guess there are people who like that emotional distance, and I'm reminded of David Letterman's recent scandalous affairs with much younger women, and discussions on The Howard Stern Show about how this fits in with the sort of anti-social Letterman they know. It's kind of how I generally perceive relationships between older men and young women, though--two people unable to really connect with others take social roles and the power dynamics inherent in those roles as a surrogate for actual chemistry to satisfy sexual desire and the need for companionship.
It kind of puts me in the mind of the Xander/Anya relationship on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which always seems to me a reflexively Lucy and Ricky Ricardo set-up--Anya's persistent naiveté is tolerated by Xander because she's just such a gosh darn adorable little lady. I've remarked before on how ironic it is that a woman who was once a demon committed to causing men to suffer (even though she never seems to express any opinions about men) ends up becoming a misogynist fantasy, almost a lesson book to young misogynist men on How to Handle Those Hysterical Broads.
But she's not just a fantasy for men, and Sawako, in Kimi ni Todoke, isn't meant for men at all--it's a shojo series, which means it's meant for adolescent girls. Part of what annoys me about Sawako, and other characters like her, is that I feel like there are girls watching who wish to emulate this unaffected innocence, and there are few things more irritating than affected unaffected innocence.
I'm reminded of something Rosie O'Donnell said on Monday's Howard Stern Show about how she had to learn the difficult lesson that, while Barbara Walters was a feminist icon, she's not a feminist. This became clear, O'Donnell said, when she went to a party Walters had thrown for Michael Bloomberg and all the guests had been forced to sing parts of a dopey, affectionate song Walters had written for Bloomberg. The impression I got from O'Donnell's story was that Walters is someone who's gotten through her career mainly by maintaining a certain false innocence, or keeping herself partially brain dead in the interest of implicitly worshipping men or adhering to their sense of entitlement.
And yet, a part of me still wonders if I might hate innocence too much. After all, some people worship others simply because they're that impressed. And if someone likes someone a lot, past the point of being rational, certainly they might come off as being a bit dopey. It's frustrating, because I think back to times when girls have seemed overly demonstrative of affection with me in light of how well I thought they understood me and I feel sort of ashamed about how put off I'd reflexively felt by it. Maybe they were just doing what they thought they were supposed to, maybe they really liked an aspect of me I didn't understand. I hate the idea of disliking someone just because they like me and or disliking someone because I don't necessarily agree that they ought to like me. But I guess I can at least say I was never truly mean to someone for it, though I bet I might have seemed cold.
In any case, when it comes to fiction for girls, Revolutionary Girl Utena's definitely more my speed. I watched the 12th episode again this afternoon with breakfast, and found myself loving the big feminist subtext.
This actually makes me feel very happy to think of it making an impression on young women--Utena, the girl finding her true self by taking on the powers normally given to men, the powerful male character whose destructive sense of entitlement is shown without casting him as a two-dimensional villain, and even the non-feminist Himemiya isn't shown to be mentally deficient, just having been indoctrinated into a system that keeps her down more than she realises. Utena fights for her and herself regardless of any expressed desire on Himemiya's part for more freedom, and yet Utena isn't a tyrant. This show doesn't annoy me one bit.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
The Time Awake
Last night's tweets;
Forbidden spaghetti is black wires.
Baby ghosts will try eating anything.
Beware of tiny mayo vampires.
Digital spell casters do like to sing.
Just woke up a few minutes ago. Well, I was only sort of sleeping. My sister called me and interrupted several hours of attempting to sleep. At least I knew the person calling. For days now, I've been woken at various times in the day by people trying to reach someone named "Cretin". Apparently people have been trying to reach the guy who used to have my number for some time. I also got a call from a guy looking for "Lisa". He sounded reflexively suspicious and angry when he heard a male voice.
After drawing and inking two pages yesterday, I'm irritated to think I might fall behind to-day. You know what? I'm not going to let it happen. Maybe I'll sleep a bit, though.
Forbidden spaghetti is black wires.
Baby ghosts will try eating anything.
Beware of tiny mayo vampires.
Digital spell casters do like to sing.
Just woke up a few minutes ago. Well, I was only sort of sleeping. My sister called me and interrupted several hours of attempting to sleep. At least I knew the person calling. For days now, I've been woken at various times in the day by people trying to reach someone named "Cretin". Apparently people have been trying to reach the guy who used to have my number for some time. I also got a call from a guy looking for "Lisa". He sounded reflexively suspicious and angry when he heard a male voice.
After drawing and inking two pages yesterday, I'm irritated to think I might fall behind to-day. You know what? I'm not going to let it happen. Maybe I'll sleep a bit, though.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Travels and Invisible Territories
Last night's tweets;
Can't believe I'm this hungry already.
I ate lunch about an hour ago.
Thin cucumbers can make plates unsteady.
There's no real food inside the Nintendo.
I've already pencilled two pages to-day. Here at Setsuled Ltd., we call that penciltastic! Or maybe pencilgasm. Well, no, that sounds like it carries a lot of meaning irrelevant to the subject. Now, after lunch, there'll be much inking and colouring.
I probably didn't work as late last night as I could've. I stopped at around 3am because I was extremely and inexplicably hungry. I had some angel hair noodles in vodka sauce with chopped garlic while watching Angel, and then made the rather bad decision to play some World of Warcraft for a little while. I didn't stop until around 5:40 am, after I'd for some reason decided to ride all the way from the Arathi Highlands to Ironforge with my undead warrior, flagging myself for PVP several times on the way there, though no-one noticed. I'm starting to feel like I might want to try playing for a while on a PVP server.
Some bad bananas from a week ago seem to have left a team of gnats in the house. Where are my spider friends now? You guys need to step up. Maybe I need to stop carrying you outside . . .
Looks like someone uploaded Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress to YouTube a week ago in good quality. George Lucas got the plot for Star Wars from this movie. If you're looking for something to do, watching this movie's not a bad idea;
Can't believe I'm this hungry already.
I ate lunch about an hour ago.
Thin cucumbers can make plates unsteady.
There's no real food inside the Nintendo.
I've already pencilled two pages to-day. Here at Setsuled Ltd., we call that penciltastic! Or maybe pencilgasm. Well, no, that sounds like it carries a lot of meaning irrelevant to the subject. Now, after lunch, there'll be much inking and colouring.
I probably didn't work as late last night as I could've. I stopped at around 3am because I was extremely and inexplicably hungry. I had some angel hair noodles in vodka sauce with chopped garlic while watching Angel, and then made the rather bad decision to play some World of Warcraft for a little while. I didn't stop until around 5:40 am, after I'd for some reason decided to ride all the way from the Arathi Highlands to Ironforge with my undead warrior, flagging myself for PVP several times on the way there, though no-one noticed. I'm starting to feel like I might want to try playing for a while on a PVP server.
Some bad bananas from a week ago seem to have left a team of gnats in the house. Where are my spider friends now? You guys need to step up. Maybe I need to stop carrying you outside . . .
Looks like someone uploaded Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress to YouTube a week ago in good quality. George Lucas got the plot for Star Wars from this movie. If you're looking for something to do, watching this movie's not a bad idea;
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Tangles in Nature
Twitter Sonnet #74
I can't tell you there's a wrong thing to eat.
But nations fit only the guts of Rome.
Chinese Pac-Man's nuts trying to compete.
And me, I can't get beyond Thunderdome.
No amount of dead Ents will yield a gem.
Cheap Chinese food bleeds soy sauce everywhere.
One hole in hell has a real bad modem.
Cam stonings are a tomato's nightmare.
Shadows tangle roots in black and white woods.
Spirits slip in through strange executions.
Thick cards deliver the sensory goods.
Blank screens block final programme transmissions.
Morrissey and a hillside desolate.
Good nature please leave this man with us yet.
Those last two lines are a reference to the beginning of The Smiths' "This Charming Man";
Punctured bicycle
on a hillside desolate
will Nature make a man of me yet?
Odd way to end a sonnet that began with a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 reference, I guess, but I was really hit harder than I'd have expected by the news that Morrissey was unwell and that it was part of something that had been going on for some time. I think if there's any one thing that I can point to to explain the fact that I've survived the last five years it would be Morrissey or maybe Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei. Sounds like he's out of the hospital now, at least. Jonathan Ross apparently sent him flowers and cupcakes, though I have to wonder if cupcakes were the best idea for someone in poor health.
I have a lot to do to-day, partly because I slacked off so much Friday and Saturday. Well, I've kind of set aside Friday as my "day off" in my schedule, but I really ought to've gotten more done yesterday. I've just felt really sluggish for reasons I can't explain.
Last night I watched Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood again, his adaptation of Macbeth. Isuzu Yamada creates a particularly gruesome Lady Macbeth with her blackened teeth, which were fashionable for affluent women in Japan at the time;
It's a movie filled with great images, though. This time I was also particularly digging the endless, tangled branches and roots of Spider's Web Forest at the beginning;
I can't tell you there's a wrong thing to eat.
But nations fit only the guts of Rome.
Chinese Pac-Man's nuts trying to compete.
And me, I can't get beyond Thunderdome.
No amount of dead Ents will yield a gem.
Cheap Chinese food bleeds soy sauce everywhere.
One hole in hell has a real bad modem.
Cam stonings are a tomato's nightmare.
Shadows tangle roots in black and white woods.
Spirits slip in through strange executions.
Thick cards deliver the sensory goods.
Blank screens block final programme transmissions.
Morrissey and a hillside desolate.
Good nature please leave this man with us yet.
Those last two lines are a reference to the beginning of The Smiths' "This Charming Man";
Punctured bicycle
on a hillside desolate
will Nature make a man of me yet?
Odd way to end a sonnet that began with a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 reference, I guess, but I was really hit harder than I'd have expected by the news that Morrissey was unwell and that it was part of something that had been going on for some time. I think if there's any one thing that I can point to to explain the fact that I've survived the last five years it would be Morrissey or maybe Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei. Sounds like he's out of the hospital now, at least. Jonathan Ross apparently sent him flowers and cupcakes, though I have to wonder if cupcakes were the best idea for someone in poor health.
I have a lot to do to-day, partly because I slacked off so much Friday and Saturday. Well, I've kind of set aside Friday as my "day off" in my schedule, but I really ought to've gotten more done yesterday. I've just felt really sluggish for reasons I can't explain.
Last night I watched Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood again, his adaptation of Macbeth. Isuzu Yamada creates a particularly gruesome Lady Macbeth with her blackened teeth, which were fashionable for affluent women in Japan at the time;
It's a movie filled with great images, though. This time I was also particularly digging the endless, tangled branches and roots of Spider's Web Forest at the beginning;
This Charming Man
Morrissey collapsed onstage last night after performing "This Charming Man" and was taken to the hospital. I'm having a crazy fanboy moment here--I really want him to be okay.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Dolls and Animated Trees
Last night's tweets;
No amount of dead Ents will yield a gem.
Cheap Chinese food bleeds soy sauce everywhere.
One hole in hell has a real bad modem.
Cam stonings are a tomato's nightmare.
I watched the new Dollhouse while I ate dinner last night. Directed by Commander Riker himself, Jonathan Frakes, it was better than Star Trek: Insurrection and certainly better than Thunderbirds. Though a lot of things about it didn't really make sense, particularly the end when Priya decides to become a doll again. Yet I enjoyed the melancholy music accompanied moral dilemma scene transitions in the episode. And I liked how Topher telling Priya her love for Victor was real carried a lot of weight. Poor puppy faced Victor, waiting all day in that spot for Sierra.
Otherwise yesterday was mostly an unbelievable amount of World of Warcraft, mostly at Tim's house. He and I ran through some dungeon in Desolace he'd never been in before and we fought a bunch of plants and rock monsters. I finally got to level 52 with my undead warrior and went rampaging in the Scarlet Monastery with the sword Dragon's Call. It's nice having little dragon babies appear randomly to help me out.
And I was overjoyed to find GG finally got around to subbing and uploading the twelfth episode of Zan Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei. I guess the translator who'd been working on the show previously had quit the group and it took them weeks to find a replacement. More or less an episode worth the wait. Seeing Itoshiki-Sensei and his students arguing about how to hide a dormant missile lodged in the ground outside the school couldn't fail to be fun.
The end of the episode features a short, fake television series called The Naughty Ms. Kaere which seems to be poking fun at the rampant fan service in new anime. I tried another new series, 11eyes, the other day and noticed that what both it and Kampfer have in common is that three seconds rarely go by without a panty shot. There's an unmistakable air of desperation about it, and I remembered Tim telling me how the anime industry's taken a big hit in the past couple years. It's kind of sexy, I guess, though kind of superfluous to anyone with access to porno, I'd think. It's still better than short skirts that magically conceal panties from every angle. Though on that subject, Tim tells me the new season of Inu-Yasha is actually quite good compared to the somewhat disappointing end of the previous season. I might need to catch up on that series--it's been too long since I've had any new Rumiko Takahashi anime to appreciate.
Happy Birthday, Sa Jathan.
No amount of dead Ents will yield a gem.
Cheap Chinese food bleeds soy sauce everywhere.
One hole in hell has a real bad modem.
Cam stonings are a tomato's nightmare.
I watched the new Dollhouse while I ate dinner last night. Directed by Commander Riker himself, Jonathan Frakes, it was better than Star Trek: Insurrection and certainly better than Thunderbirds. Though a lot of things about it didn't really make sense, particularly the end when Priya decides to become a doll again. Yet I enjoyed the melancholy music accompanied moral dilemma scene transitions in the episode. And I liked how Topher telling Priya her love for Victor was real carried a lot of weight. Poor puppy faced Victor, waiting all day in that spot for Sierra.
Otherwise yesterday was mostly an unbelievable amount of World of Warcraft, mostly at Tim's house. He and I ran through some dungeon in Desolace he'd never been in before and we fought a bunch of plants and rock monsters. I finally got to level 52 with my undead warrior and went rampaging in the Scarlet Monastery with the sword Dragon's Call. It's nice having little dragon babies appear randomly to help me out.
And I was overjoyed to find GG finally got around to subbing and uploading the twelfth episode of Zan Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei. I guess the translator who'd been working on the show previously had quit the group and it took them weeks to find a replacement. More or less an episode worth the wait. Seeing Itoshiki-Sensei and his students arguing about how to hide a dormant missile lodged in the ground outside the school couldn't fail to be fun.
The end of the episode features a short, fake television series called The Naughty Ms. Kaere which seems to be poking fun at the rampant fan service in new anime. I tried another new series, 11eyes, the other day and noticed that what both it and Kampfer have in common is that three seconds rarely go by without a panty shot. There's an unmistakable air of desperation about it, and I remembered Tim telling me how the anime industry's taken a big hit in the past couple years. It's kind of sexy, I guess, though kind of superfluous to anyone with access to porno, I'd think. It's still better than short skirts that magically conceal panties from every angle. Though on that subject, Tim tells me the new season of Inu-Yasha is actually quite good compared to the somewhat disappointing end of the previous season. I might need to catch up on that series--it's been too long since I've had any new Rumiko Takahashi anime to appreciate.
Happy Birthday, Sa Jathan.
Friday, October 23, 2009
The Regiment You Might Not Know You're In
Last night's tweets;
I can't tell you there's a wrong thing to eat.
But nations fit only the guts of Rome.
Chinese Pac-Man's nuts trying to compete.
And me, I can't get beyond Thunderdome.
I finished reading Book I of War and Peace last night, which is about a fourth of the whole book. At this point, I can say Tolstoy has convincingly portrayed the frailty of the human soul with awesome skill. The story continually shifts from one group of characters, location, and situation to another, each time describing people, old and young, with inevitably flawed perspectives making decisions for themselves and others based on imperfect data. On meeting Napoleon at the end of Book I, Prince Andrei seems to have the only moment of pure insight into reality when he realises how human the legendary emperor is. It's the final nail in the coffin for confidence in the idea that someone, somewhere, really knows anything.
The urgency of battle seems to put characters closer to a realistic point of view on life and death, only to be forgotten later when the young soldier, Rostov, is telling his comrades about his brush with death and can't help exaggerating;
He asked Rostov where and how he had received the wound. This pleased Rostov and he began telling them about it, growing more and more impassioned as he talked. He described the Shongraben action exactly as men who have taken part in battles generally do describe them, that is, as they would like them to have been, as they have heard them described by others, and making them sound more glorious, and quite unlike what they actually were. Rostov was a truthful young man and would on no account have told a deliberate lie. He began with the intention of relating everything exactly as it happened, but imperceptibly, unconsciously, and inevitably, he slipped into falsehood. If he had told the truth to his listeners, who, like himself, had heard numerous stories of cavalry attacks, had formed a definite idea of what an attack was, and were expecting to hear such a story, either they would not have believed him, or, still worse, they would have thought Rostov himself was at fault, since what generally happened to those taking part in a cavalry charge had not happened to him.
This phenomenon is presented again and again, from a marriage arranged between two nobles almost entirely by a pervasive, unspoken anxiety in their immediate society about finances and how an inheritance out to be socially processed, to decisions about romantic engagements based either on flawed youthful reasoning or rigid, traditional formulae.
These portraits of fundamental human clumsiness might have only been humorous except Tolstoy also manages to evoke a feeling of tenderness for the characters and a sadness about how little control people really have over their lives and how arbitrary their affections are.
I also watched "Dead Things", a sixth season episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that had several elements I really liked, though it suffered from weak foundations in a few ways. I found this bit from the episode's Wikipedia entry interesting;
Sarah Michelle Gellar, who played Buffy, disliked the way her character was treated in this episode, telling Entertainment Weekly, "I had trouble with the one where Buffy had sex with Spike on the balcony while watching their friends. I really thought that was out of character. And I didn't like what it stood for. That was the moment that I had the most problems with." Writer Steven S. DeKnight says, "I totally understand why that part made her uncomfortable... I wish that I could say it was my idea but it's something Joss Whedon had in the back of his head for a year. It just so happened that it happened in my episode." Despite Gellar's dislike, this episode is DeKnight's personal favorite because "it had humor at the beginning and then it had that great twist where [the nerds] accidentally killed Katrina and then it got dark, dark, dark, dark. We really wanted to highlight how unhappy Buffy was with herself and really show why she was mistreating Spike because she hated herself."
And I could tell watching the episode that Gellar wasn't into it, particularly at the end when she rather unconvincingly breaks down in Tara's arms, though I thought Buffy expressing a fear of being forgiven was an interesting bit of Characterisation that Might have Been--I mean, I'm not convinced Buffy has that much self-hatred. What's happening now seems to be putting Buffy through Faith's paces--the episode even features Buffy thinking she accidentally killed someone. But the story lacks the foundation of the Faith arc. Saying Buffy feels guilty about being with Spike doesn't feel like quite enough, mainly because it places too much of its weight on the show's pretty vague idea of what it means for someone to have a soul. Tara, as seems repeatedly to be the case, is the unimpeachable agent of rational thought, plainly telling Buffy it's okay to like Spike.
Again, I can't help thinking how great a Faith/Spike relationship could've been. Buffy/Spike is still pretty sexy, in my opinion, though. I just wish I could buy the darkness in Buffy.
I can't tell you there's a wrong thing to eat.
But nations fit only the guts of Rome.
Chinese Pac-Man's nuts trying to compete.
And me, I can't get beyond Thunderdome.
I finished reading Book I of War and Peace last night, which is about a fourth of the whole book. At this point, I can say Tolstoy has convincingly portrayed the frailty of the human soul with awesome skill. The story continually shifts from one group of characters, location, and situation to another, each time describing people, old and young, with inevitably flawed perspectives making decisions for themselves and others based on imperfect data. On meeting Napoleon at the end of Book I, Prince Andrei seems to have the only moment of pure insight into reality when he realises how human the legendary emperor is. It's the final nail in the coffin for confidence in the idea that someone, somewhere, really knows anything.
The urgency of battle seems to put characters closer to a realistic point of view on life and death, only to be forgotten later when the young soldier, Rostov, is telling his comrades about his brush with death and can't help exaggerating;
He asked Rostov where and how he had received the wound. This pleased Rostov and he began telling them about it, growing more and more impassioned as he talked. He described the Shongraben action exactly as men who have taken part in battles generally do describe them, that is, as they would like them to have been, as they have heard them described by others, and making them sound more glorious, and quite unlike what they actually were. Rostov was a truthful young man and would on no account have told a deliberate lie. He began with the intention of relating everything exactly as it happened, but imperceptibly, unconsciously, and inevitably, he slipped into falsehood. If he had told the truth to his listeners, who, like himself, had heard numerous stories of cavalry attacks, had formed a definite idea of what an attack was, and were expecting to hear such a story, either they would not have believed him, or, still worse, they would have thought Rostov himself was at fault, since what generally happened to those taking part in a cavalry charge had not happened to him.
This phenomenon is presented again and again, from a marriage arranged between two nobles almost entirely by a pervasive, unspoken anxiety in their immediate society about finances and how an inheritance out to be socially processed, to decisions about romantic engagements based either on flawed youthful reasoning or rigid, traditional formulae.
These portraits of fundamental human clumsiness might have only been humorous except Tolstoy also manages to evoke a feeling of tenderness for the characters and a sadness about how little control people really have over their lives and how arbitrary their affections are.
I also watched "Dead Things", a sixth season episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that had several elements I really liked, though it suffered from weak foundations in a few ways. I found this bit from the episode's Wikipedia entry interesting;
Sarah Michelle Gellar, who played Buffy, disliked the way her character was treated in this episode, telling Entertainment Weekly, "I had trouble with the one where Buffy had sex with Spike on the balcony while watching their friends. I really thought that was out of character. And I didn't like what it stood for. That was the moment that I had the most problems with." Writer Steven S. DeKnight says, "I totally understand why that part made her uncomfortable... I wish that I could say it was my idea but it's something Joss Whedon had in the back of his head for a year. It just so happened that it happened in my episode." Despite Gellar's dislike, this episode is DeKnight's personal favorite because "it had humor at the beginning and then it had that great twist where [the nerds] accidentally killed Katrina and then it got dark, dark, dark, dark. We really wanted to highlight how unhappy Buffy was with herself and really show why she was mistreating Spike because she hated herself."
And I could tell watching the episode that Gellar wasn't into it, particularly at the end when she rather unconvincingly breaks down in Tara's arms, though I thought Buffy expressing a fear of being forgiven was an interesting bit of Characterisation that Might have Been--I mean, I'm not convinced Buffy has that much self-hatred. What's happening now seems to be putting Buffy through Faith's paces--the episode even features Buffy thinking she accidentally killed someone. But the story lacks the foundation of the Faith arc. Saying Buffy feels guilty about being with Spike doesn't feel like quite enough, mainly because it places too much of its weight on the show's pretty vague idea of what it means for someone to have a soul. Tara, as seems repeatedly to be the case, is the unimpeachable agent of rational thought, plainly telling Buffy it's okay to like Spike.
Again, I can't help thinking how great a Faith/Spike relationship could've been. Buffy/Spike is still pretty sexy, in my opinion, though. I just wish I could buy the darkness in Buffy.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Long Grace
Twitter Sonnet #73
Sunset is almost the start of a day.
Lobotomies cut down on lots of fuss.
Pissing won't really much change what you weigh.
There is no end to the water in us.
Water won't resurrect Richard Pryor.
Spirits steal their sheets from pretty women.
Records vanish in digital fire.
Slow frost is the most pervasive venom.
Pizza's the perennial invention.
Coffee reminded me to have some scotch.
Blue letters lost in white space convention.
Took for a compass a broke pocket watch.
Battleship pushpins illustrate blind aims.
Psychos swing flashlights for sanity's planes.
That's a spider from a couple nights ago in my bathroom sink. Music is by Henry Mancini, "Drip Dry Waltz" from the Charade soundtrack.
I had a rather late start yesterday but managed to pencil, ink, and mostly colour a page and to-day I've already pencilled one. Not bad considering I didn't finish the script until two days ago, though I'd already gone over in my head three or four times what I wanted to happen in this chapter since Friday. I'd have had it written sooner if it weren't for some crap sleep nights.
Last night I watched "Waiting in the Wings", the third season episode of Angel that introduced the world to Summer Glau. Between her and Amy Acker, there're some pretty stunning necks on display.
Though, and I'm no expert on ballet, I couldn't help feeling like Summer Glau's actually not that great of a ballerina. At least compared to what I'm used to from watching The Red Shoes and Tales of Hoffman over and over. But maybe it's unfair to compare her to Moira Shearer.
Anyway, the episode also had a lot of nice looking sets, nice dim, warm lighting, and nice necks. It's probably the most aesthetically pleasing thing Joss Whedon's ever made.
Sunset is almost the start of a day.
Lobotomies cut down on lots of fuss.
Pissing won't really much change what you weigh.
There is no end to the water in us.
Water won't resurrect Richard Pryor.
Spirits steal their sheets from pretty women.
Records vanish in digital fire.
Slow frost is the most pervasive venom.
Pizza's the perennial invention.
Coffee reminded me to have some scotch.
Blue letters lost in white space convention.
Took for a compass a broke pocket watch.
Battleship pushpins illustrate blind aims.
Psychos swing flashlights for sanity's planes.
That's a spider from a couple nights ago in my bathroom sink. Music is by Henry Mancini, "Drip Dry Waltz" from the Charade soundtrack.
I had a rather late start yesterday but managed to pencil, ink, and mostly colour a page and to-day I've already pencilled one. Not bad considering I didn't finish the script until two days ago, though I'd already gone over in my head three or four times what I wanted to happen in this chapter since Friday. I'd have had it written sooner if it weren't for some crap sleep nights.
Last night I watched "Waiting in the Wings", the third season episode of Angel that introduced the world to Summer Glau. Between her and Amy Acker, there're some pretty stunning necks on display.
Though, and I'm no expert on ballet, I couldn't help feeling like Summer Glau's actually not that great of a ballerina. At least compared to what I'm used to from watching The Red Shoes and Tales of Hoffman over and over. But maybe it's unfair to compare her to Moira Shearer.
Anyway, the episode also had a lot of nice looking sets, nice dim, warm lighting, and nice necks. It's probably the most aesthetically pleasing thing Joss Whedon's ever made.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Physical Entities
Last night's tweets;
Water won't resurrect Richard Pryor.
Spirits steal their sheets from pretty women.
Records vanish in digital fire.
Slow frost is the most pervasive venom.
I went to see Paranormal Activity last night--I got a real kick out of it. Only four actors appear in the film, but there are definitely five characters. The demon, the fifth character, is created incredibly well without dialogue. We learn how it thinks and the nature of its desires entirely through its actions. It's simple to say it wants Katie, but the primal, cruel, possessive way in which it wants her I think speaks to the part in all of us that cowers at the threat of terrible violence. The movie's about the control of physical abuse, and about an entity that is totally composed of that motive, lacking a physical form or any other discernable aspects of personality. It's really good, and quite a fun haunted house.
With breakfast to-day, I watched episodes of two anime series that probably couldn't be more different from each other. First I watched the first episode of Kimi ni Todoke, a shojo series so far rather typical with its plot of a socially awkward, almost totally guileless and beautiful teenage girl and her attempts to talk to the guy she likes that just so happen to repeatedly demonstrate that she has a pure and loving heart. In this case, the girl, Sawako, is made fun of for resembling the ghost girl from The Ring (and so everyone calls her "Sadako") and most people assume she can summon spirits.
What makes this show work is that this typical story is told with some very atypically beautiful imagery. Transitions and editing are all unbelievably pretty without looking like typical shojo. It was so nice looking that the story was totally overwhelmed and I didn't mind.
So I went from a series aggressively targeting a young female audience to the third episode of Kampfer, a show aggressively targeting a young male audience. And/or possibly lesbian, because the episode tells a story of the young man who's been turned into a beautiful teenage girl and sent to school in a magically cordoned off all girls section of his high school where he's startled to find that not only are all the students lesbians, but that they're ravenously attracted to him (or her).
I can't imagine how boring or even obnoxious this show might be to someone not attracted to women, but I just can't bring myself to complain. I am wooed.
Water won't resurrect Richard Pryor.
Spirits steal their sheets from pretty women.
Records vanish in digital fire.
Slow frost is the most pervasive venom.
I went to see Paranormal Activity last night--I got a real kick out of it. Only four actors appear in the film, but there are definitely five characters. The demon, the fifth character, is created incredibly well without dialogue. We learn how it thinks and the nature of its desires entirely through its actions. It's simple to say it wants Katie, but the primal, cruel, possessive way in which it wants her I think speaks to the part in all of us that cowers at the threat of terrible violence. The movie's about the control of physical abuse, and about an entity that is totally composed of that motive, lacking a physical form or any other discernable aspects of personality. It's really good, and quite a fun haunted house.
With breakfast to-day, I watched episodes of two anime series that probably couldn't be more different from each other. First I watched the first episode of Kimi ni Todoke, a shojo series so far rather typical with its plot of a socially awkward, almost totally guileless and beautiful teenage girl and her attempts to talk to the guy she likes that just so happen to repeatedly demonstrate that she has a pure and loving heart. In this case, the girl, Sawako, is made fun of for resembling the ghost girl from The Ring (and so everyone calls her "Sadako") and most people assume she can summon spirits.
What makes this show work is that this typical story is told with some very atypically beautiful imagery. Transitions and editing are all unbelievably pretty without looking like typical shojo. It was so nice looking that the story was totally overwhelmed and I didn't mind.
So I went from a series aggressively targeting a young female audience to the third episode of Kampfer, a show aggressively targeting a young male audience. And/or possibly lesbian, because the episode tells a story of the young man who's been turned into a beautiful teenage girl and sent to school in a magically cordoned off all girls section of his high school where he's startled to find that not only are all the students lesbians, but that they're ravenously attracted to him (or her).
I can't imagine how boring or even obnoxious this show might be to someone not attracted to women, but I just can't bring myself to complain. I am wooed.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Just Over the Edge
Last night's tweets;
Sunset is almost the start of a day.
Lobotomies cut down on lots of fuss.
Pissing won't really much change what you weigh.
There is no end to the water in us.
World of Warcraft turned out to be the best thing to do on practically no sleep, and I got Lelia to level 50 by killing a bunch of tree elementals in Felwood, a quest that was red to my character, meaning it was supposedly too difficult. But I beat it without dying or even using a healing potion. I've noticed the difficulty gauges tend to underestimate the warrior.
Playing WoW seemed to perfectly suit the tiny bit of my brain (brains!) that was working, making me feel fully engaged. I'd tried watching a movie and couldn't quite do it. My attention span for everything made minutes seem four times as long even as I missed a lot of details.
The movie I was trying to watch was Scrooged, which I hadn't seen since I was a kid. I hadn't realised before how many close-ups there are in that movie, it really is strange. Bill Murray's an actor capable of a lot of subtle expression, but I don't think his face was ever meant for such intense scrutiny. I can only imagine how strange it was on a big screen. It certainly very much feels like something shot for television. A big head fills the screen followed by another big head, often making the characters seem oddly isolated. This might have been okay with Ingrid Bergman, but even then you'd want to tie the characters into the same space more often. As it is, we're alternating between Murray's pot marks and Karen Allen's already profoundly demoralised bearing. What the hell happened to her after Raiders of the Lost Ark? The plucky spitfire's long gone, in Scrooged and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, she can't quite conceal the impression of someone who's totally given up on any hope of being happy. Maybe it's simply the public saying, "Raiders of the Lost Ark made us fall deeply in love with Harrison Ford while we could take or leave you." It's not like the movie was originally called Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Did Allen envision a universe with a Marion Ravenwood and the Temple of Doom?
But Scrooged is kind of quietly ambitious. Okay, the premise might simply be A Christmas Carol in modern times, but I get the sense here that Richard Donner wanted to make a truly great comedy while failing to gasp how to do comedy at some fundamental level. I suspect a lot of Murray's best lines are improvised, and that Donner studied comedy filmmaking so well that he knew it's important to give comedic actors a lot of slack. I remember when Ben Stiller was on The Howard Stern Show a little while ago and he and Artie Lange* reminisced about Mystery Men, a movie they'd worked on together, where the director, whose only experience was doing commercials, insisted on doing take after take while discouraging improvisation, resulting in the very slick but unfunny finished product.
On the other hand, Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha was originally to have starred a famous Japanese comedic actor named Shinatro Katsu, but Kurosawa dismissed Katsu after Katsu had insisted on a greater level of control in the film. The almost universal critical opinion of Kagemusha is that it suffers from having Natsuya Nakadai as a replacement, since Nakadai, while a talented dramatic actor, was unable to successfully pull off comedy. One can easily imagine a better film with an actor capable of subtle comedic expression performing exactly the same scenes with the same lines. So I guess it depends on the movie as to whether improvisation improves the comedy.
Anyway, Bill Murray, at that point in his career, was praised for playing roles with a certain lack of commitment to the fictional world of the movie, essentially goofing on the events of the film and thereby making him feel like an ally of the audience. Though I've long felt the appeal, especially in Ghostbusters, is in the fact that he very convincingly plays someone who does realise the reality of the situations he's in, but isn't easily excited.
In Scrooged, he seems at times to be self-consciously detached from the movie, as though he's taking the critiques of his past performances as a prescription for his future performances. He's clearly smiling at a child he's supposedly yelling at in thoughtless wrath in one scene, and in the same scene he seems to share in finding absurd his own intension to staple antlers to mice. All this actually implies curious layers of self-loathing and apathy that I don't think the movie ever really recognises.
And, jeez, I was surprised to see Robert Mitchum. I couldn't believe my eyes. "Well, that guy looks a lot like Robert Mitchum. But it couldn't be. Could it?" I checked imdb. "It is!" Gods, I would've loved a movie focusing on a relationship between Mitchum and Murray. Laconic, almost lethargic detachment meets comedic detachment. Add in Greta Garbo and you'd have the makings of a perfectly fascinating movie.
With breakfast to-day, I watched the second episode of a new anime series called Kampfer. As far as I know, this is the first action/comedy anime since Ranma 1/2 to feature a main character who routinely switches between being biologically male and biologically female. It made me appreciate again what a great job Kappei Yamagushi and Megumi Hayashibara did at sounding like the same person with different vocal chords. One of the Ranma soundtracks I have features the two performing a duet where they managed to blur their voices incredibly seamlessly. Mainly what made it work was Hayashibara's willingness to adopt not only male dialect (men and women, in Japanese, use different words for a few things. Refering to oneself, for example, "I", men informally say "boku" and women informally say "atashi") but also the brasher, traditional Japanese male vocal mannerisms.
On Kampfer, though, the voice actress playing the lead character's female form sounds like a typical female voice actress, which is odd since the character's default form is male and the male voice actor doesn't sound particularly feminine. This misses out on the comedy Ranma 1/2 mined from the macho martial artist Ranma fiercely asserting his manhood when he was in female form, though Kampfer actually has a few lines limply trying to replicate this.
Otherwise, Kampfer is strikingly typical--I saw "strikingly" because it plays hardball with its conforming to popular anime forms--it has the bright, white-ish colours, the spiky hair, the lots of fan service, the cute little animals who say humorously adult things. It's utterly typical, but that doesn't really work against it, because it tries really hard to be the great typical most people want. In the second episode, one of the many beautiful female characters all but begs the male lead to have sex with her but he completely fails to notice--the whole thing is kind of like that, as is much of modern anime, just a minor epiphany shy of porno.
*Boy, I was glad to see Artie Lange was back on The Howard Stern Show to-day after his depression had kept him in for more than a week. This after he'd done a charity show, so I think this probably ought to be an object lesson to people who dismiss depression as a sort of sham.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Please, Sir, I would Like Some Brains
Twitter Sonnet #72
Rock walls block entrance from the north ocean.
Skeleton warriors will not be stopped.
Denny's wars are all practically fiction.
The sky lunch lady serves Pacific slop.
The drive through is littered with old corpses.
Grey wolves have shorter back legs than house cats.
Starship Enterprise bought mortgaged houses.
To Fred's eventually must return Fats.
I will stay with this current coffee hand.
There'll be no alcohol right now, either.
When clever rats play chess in a strange land.
A plain human mind looks like a piker.
Sleep spirits lie defeated in the dirt!
Tremble, squishy insurgent skull yoghurt!
I wish I'd thought not to have tea, but it's probably unfair of me to blame the cup of tea I had at 2am for the fact that I didn't sleep, at all, until 2pm and then only for an hour and a half. The worst part is lying in bed, getting angry about all the time that's being wasted, and the wakefulness being exacerbated by that anger. And my brain spin, spinning. I'd played a good game of chess in Second Life before I went to bed, so that might've been part of the problem, too.
I went with for lunch/breakfast/midnight snack at The Living Room at noon. I guess it's been at least three years since I saw her last. We had a nice time catching up, so long as I could keep stringing thoughts together well enough. The Living Room still had their wonderful pesto tomato onion and lettuce bagels Trisa and I first enjoyed probably at least half a decade ago. It was incredible how, for the brief period of time to-day, life seemed exactly as it was when Trisa still lived in San Diego and I'd stay up 'til noon regularly to go to The Living Room for breakfast with her. Though she does text a lot more, with her boyfriend, Daniel, who's lived with her a few years and apparently misses her a lot while she's away from Portland. I watched my sister texting this evening at my parents' house. It's still something by brain doesn't seem wired for.
I'm finding I need to prevent myself from mentioning brains in my tweets. I almost mentioned brains in the third to last line, but went with "mind" instead. What is this irresistible urge I feel to bring up brains? To share the mental image with others, to augment the sensory . . . impact of . . . grey but pink with the . . . this coating of blood . . . soft . . . brains. Brains. BRAINs. . . . BRAAAAAAINS.
brrrrrrrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAIAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNS.
Rock walls block entrance from the north ocean.
Skeleton warriors will not be stopped.
Denny's wars are all practically fiction.
The sky lunch lady serves Pacific slop.
The drive through is littered with old corpses.
Grey wolves have shorter back legs than house cats.
Starship Enterprise bought mortgaged houses.
To Fred's eventually must return Fats.
I will stay with this current coffee hand.
There'll be no alcohol right now, either.
When clever rats play chess in a strange land.
A plain human mind looks like a piker.
Sleep spirits lie defeated in the dirt!
Tremble, squishy insurgent skull yoghurt!
I wish I'd thought not to have tea, but it's probably unfair of me to blame the cup of tea I had at 2am for the fact that I didn't sleep, at all, until 2pm and then only for an hour and a half. The worst part is lying in bed, getting angry about all the time that's being wasted, and the wakefulness being exacerbated by that anger. And my brain spin, spinning. I'd played a good game of chess in Second Life before I went to bed, so that might've been part of the problem, too.
I went with
I'm finding I need to prevent myself from mentioning brains in my tweets. I almost mentioned brains in the third to last line, but went with "mind" instead. What is this irresistible urge I feel to bring up brains? To share the mental image with others, to augment the sensory . . . impact of . . . grey but pink with the . . . this coating of blood . . . soft . . . brains. Brains. BRAINs. . . . BRAAAAAAINS.
brrrrrrrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAIAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNS.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Grey Cat Mystery
Last night's tweets;
The drive through is littered with old corpses.
Grey wolves have shorter back legs than house cats.
Starship Enterprise bought mortgaged houses.
To Fred's eventually must return Fats.
An unexpected build-up of things I need to do to-day. I need to write the script for the next Venia's Travels, I need to work on the project for the winner of the auction for Moira, I need to get to the grocery store, and at some point I have to remember to brush my teeth.
Last night, Tim ran my undead warrior through The Sunken Temple in The Swamp of Sorrows--it's in a lake called "The Pool of Tears", an Alice in Wonderland reference I've always appreciated. The temple itself is slimy, filled with maggots, lizards, and dragons. Tim told me about going through the place the day before and barely surviving, even though he was using one of his characters in the high 70s. After he attacked one of the bosses it'd triggered hundreds of monsters to rush into the room and attack him.
I acquired several really useful items from the run, including my first purple item, a sword called Dragon's Call, which only has a 1% to 2% chance of appearing. I won't be able to use it until I level up three more times, but I'm pretty excited about the idea of randomly summoning a dragon while I'm fighting. Sort of reminds me of how Oden worked in Final Fantasy VII and VIII. I guess maybe the reason I haven't been able to get into World of Warcraft very much is that I've been totally neglecting the community aspect. I still don't see myself buying any of the add-ons, though.
The episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer I watched last night, "Gone", was one of my favourites of the series. It was nice seeing (so to speak) Buffy enjoy being invisible. I think this is the first episode I'd never seen before--I think magic junkie Willow episode actually compelled me to stop watching the show until halfway through the seventh season. If I'd waited just one more episode, things might have been different.
There was a mysterious big grey cat in the backyard a few moments ago. He or she was so big, I almost thought it was a raccoon. Poor Snow mewed pitifully a few times before he fled.
The drive through is littered with old corpses.
Grey wolves have shorter back legs than house cats.
Starship Enterprise bought mortgaged houses.
To Fred's eventually must return Fats.
An unexpected build-up of things I need to do to-day. I need to write the script for the next Venia's Travels, I need to work on the project for the winner of the auction for Moira, I need to get to the grocery store, and at some point I have to remember to brush my teeth.
Last night, Tim ran my undead warrior through The Sunken Temple in The Swamp of Sorrows--it's in a lake called "The Pool of Tears", an Alice in Wonderland reference I've always appreciated. The temple itself is slimy, filled with maggots, lizards, and dragons. Tim told me about going through the place the day before and barely surviving, even though he was using one of his characters in the high 70s. After he attacked one of the bosses it'd triggered hundreds of monsters to rush into the room and attack him.
I acquired several really useful items from the run, including my first purple item, a sword called Dragon's Call, which only has a 1% to 2% chance of appearing. I won't be able to use it until I level up three more times, but I'm pretty excited about the idea of randomly summoning a dragon while I'm fighting. Sort of reminds me of how Oden worked in Final Fantasy VII and VIII. I guess maybe the reason I haven't been able to get into World of Warcraft very much is that I've been totally neglecting the community aspect. I still don't see myself buying any of the add-ons, though.
The episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer I watched last night, "Gone", was one of my favourites of the series. It was nice seeing (so to speak) Buffy enjoy being invisible. I think this is the first episode I'd never seen before--I think magic junkie Willow episode actually compelled me to stop watching the show until halfway through the seventh season. If I'd waited just one more episode, things might have been different.
There was a mysterious big grey cat in the backyard a few moments ago. He or she was so big, I almost thought it was a raccoon. Poor Snow mewed pitifully a few times before he fled.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Finding the Right Fake Place and Violence
Much ado about video games yesterday. At Tim's house, he and I watched a bunch of the promotional material for the upcoming BioWare game Dragon Wars, the best of which was this video;
That's Claudia Black doing the voice of the witch lady. It's nice to see her in something more visually interesting than Stargate again. The game also features Tim Curry and Kate Mulgrew. The official web site for the game has a free download of the game's character creation section, allowing you to make a character now and save him or her to your hard drive for use when you eventually purchase the game, an idea with an instantly recognisable multitude of merits for selling the game. Though as character creation goes, I found it a little disappointing, though I suspect most people would consider it a vast improvement on the norm--basically, it eliminates the total freedom of model editing found in games like Oblivion, The Sims, and Second Life and instead has a series of menus with sliders that looks like such freeform editing, but is really a disguised selection of pre-made shapes. This is good news if you, like most people, aren't confident in your 3D modelling skills, but it's bad news for cocky bastards like me who like to spend hours just making character faces.
The character creation demo also features what appears to be the game's prologue video which is almost a complete, blow for blow reproduction of the opening of Peter Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring film. Much of the architecture, as with Oblivion and the newer World of Warcraft materials, borrows copiously from the Lord of the Rings. And like most American fantasy designs, a lot of the game's visual style looks sort of dumpy and with only a vague understanding of how things worked in the Middle Ages. The wardrobe in the above video looks a bit Asian inspired, sort of Lineage -ish, but almost every other video I've seen features the squat, WoW-like muscleman look.
This video I found particularly funny as it features one of the designers talking about how the dwarven cities were inspired by Aztec aesthetics and the human cities were meant to look Anglo Saxon while footage of both locations plays revealing what appear to be shopping malls with a few Lord of the Rings-ish sculpted patterns.
But I'm actually more excited about this game than I've been for any upcoming game in a while. It's from BioWare, which means there will be an interesting dialogue interface with intermittently decent writing, and it looks like they won't be shy about including sex and violence. If this all sounds like faint praise from me, I should point out that I think most video game designers are among the laziest douche bags in the world. There's no reason video games can't be as visually interesting as a movie, as well written as one, and as engaging as they were seventeen years ago. I get the impression that nowadays any task for which the software won't do 80% of the work doesn't seem to the designers worth putting much effort into.
Meanwhile, I took some screenshots in Oblivion last night, which still looks a lot prettier and is more interactive than anything out there or coming soon.
While I was playing that, Tim was playing a war strategy game that allows you to choose from a number of different countries and advance them through a number of technological ages. He was using the Aztecs and he'd advanced them to the Industrial Age before obliterated the invading Spanish. That karma had to pay off somewhere.
I also read several chapters of War and Peace yesterday. I'm in a bit just before The Battle of Austerlitz, which pitted the Russian and Austrian Emperors against Napoleon. Tolstoy does a fabulous job of conveying a young hussar's complete love and dedication to his Emperor and contrasting it with a brass who seem far more concerned with social politics than military matters. There's a real melancholy illumination of human nature in a lot of this book.
And I did play an hour of World of Warcraft last night, not accomplishing much as, in trying to reach Felwood from Ashenvale, I accidentally rode into Darkshire with my undead warrior. I rode all the way to the northern coast expecting to find another path into Felwood. I didn't. Then I swam along the coast finding nothing but a sheer wall of mountains all along the way until I ended up back in Aszhara on the eastern coast, which is where I'd started. It was a total waste of time. But that's kind of what the game feels like most of the time anyway. It's weird how the compulsion to level up keeps me playing.
Last night's tweets;
Rock walls block entrance from the north ocean.
Skeleton warriors will not be stopped.
Denny's wars are all practically fiction.
The sky lunch lady serves Pacific slop.
That's Claudia Black doing the voice of the witch lady. It's nice to see her in something more visually interesting than Stargate again. The game also features Tim Curry and Kate Mulgrew. The official web site for the game has a free download of the game's character creation section, allowing you to make a character now and save him or her to your hard drive for use when you eventually purchase the game, an idea with an instantly recognisable multitude of merits for selling the game. Though as character creation goes, I found it a little disappointing, though I suspect most people would consider it a vast improvement on the norm--basically, it eliminates the total freedom of model editing found in games like Oblivion, The Sims, and Second Life and instead has a series of menus with sliders that looks like such freeform editing, but is really a disguised selection of pre-made shapes. This is good news if you, like most people, aren't confident in your 3D modelling skills, but it's bad news for cocky bastards like me who like to spend hours just making character faces.
The character creation demo also features what appears to be the game's prologue video which is almost a complete, blow for blow reproduction of the opening of Peter Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring film. Much of the architecture, as with Oblivion and the newer World of Warcraft materials, borrows copiously from the Lord of the Rings. And like most American fantasy designs, a lot of the game's visual style looks sort of dumpy and with only a vague understanding of how things worked in the Middle Ages. The wardrobe in the above video looks a bit Asian inspired, sort of Lineage -ish, but almost every other video I've seen features the squat, WoW-like muscleman look.
This video I found particularly funny as it features one of the designers talking about how the dwarven cities were inspired by Aztec aesthetics and the human cities were meant to look Anglo Saxon while footage of both locations plays revealing what appear to be shopping malls with a few Lord of the Rings-ish sculpted patterns.
But I'm actually more excited about this game than I've been for any upcoming game in a while. It's from BioWare, which means there will be an interesting dialogue interface with intermittently decent writing, and it looks like they won't be shy about including sex and violence. If this all sounds like faint praise from me, I should point out that I think most video game designers are among the laziest douche bags in the world. There's no reason video games can't be as visually interesting as a movie, as well written as one, and as engaging as they were seventeen years ago. I get the impression that nowadays any task for which the software won't do 80% of the work doesn't seem to the designers worth putting much effort into.
Meanwhile, I took some screenshots in Oblivion last night, which still looks a lot prettier and is more interactive than anything out there or coming soon.
While I was playing that, Tim was playing a war strategy game that allows you to choose from a number of different countries and advance them through a number of technological ages. He was using the Aztecs and he'd advanced them to the Industrial Age before obliterated the invading Spanish. That karma had to pay off somewhere.
I also read several chapters of War and Peace yesterday. I'm in a bit just before The Battle of Austerlitz, which pitted the Russian and Austrian Emperors against Napoleon. Tolstoy does a fabulous job of conveying a young hussar's complete love and dedication to his Emperor and contrasting it with a brass who seem far more concerned with social politics than military matters. There's a real melancholy illumination of human nature in a lot of this book.
And I did play an hour of World of Warcraft last night, not accomplishing much as, in trying to reach Felwood from Ashenvale, I accidentally rode into Darkshire with my undead warrior. I rode all the way to the northern coast expecting to find another path into Felwood. I didn't. Then I swam along the coast finding nothing but a sheer wall of mountains all along the way until I ended up back in Aszhara on the eastern coast, which is where I'd started. It was a total waste of time. But that's kind of what the game feels like most of the time anyway. It's weird how the compulsion to level up keeps me playing.
Last night's tweets;
Rock walls block entrance from the north ocean.
Skeleton warriors will not be stopped.
Denny's wars are all practically fiction.
The sky lunch lady serves Pacific slop.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Akagiyama Missile
Twitter Sonnet #71
Scarecrows have subversive exercise plans.
Mongooses don't care about a nice ass.
Octopi have many attentive fans.
Lizards and cats fearlessly chew the grass.
Sandwiches are bigger at a distance.
The mosquito is the art nouveau fly.
I'll sell you bird feed for less than tuppence.
Sleep deprivation's a natural high.
Toadstools are frighteningly ambitious.
The Princess is really in all castles.
Her best apples are large Red Delicious.
Her trebuchets always outclass missiles.
On remote water lily floats a name.
B-Ko is the greatest alphabet dame.
I have almost no energy to-day. It's been kind of like this for days, though. Everything I've done for about a week has felt like an enormous pain in the ass. I suppose blame ought to lie with this completely lousy sleeping schedule. I seem to go several days with six hours of sleep at most, and then have a day like to-day where I get nine hours.
And, as is usually the case when I talk about my bad sleeping hours, I feel like I have to concede that what is unacceptable to me is perfectly fine to most people. People who look at me and say, "Really? You usually get more than six hours? YOU LILY LIVERED MILKSOP. That's more sleep than I get every night!" So, okay, good for you, all of you. Here's to you.
This past week a single glass of whiskey has been the sum total of my alcohol consumption. Lack of sleep and alcohol just don't pleasantly mix for me. I'm really glad I'm done with Venias Travels' chapter 36. I kept thinking about the Fellowship of the Ring commentary where the filmmakers complained about how difficult it was to edit the council at Rivendell. I am particularly happy with the colours I used for panels without backgrounds this time, though. Queen Lithwolna's colouration seemed to lend itself well to quite a number of bold, solid colours. I guess she turned out looking a bit Chinese, huh? Though my main inspiration for her were a number of different artist renderings of Salome.
Since I'm going now by Wikipedia's episode order listing for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, I ended up watching two episodes of Buffy in a row over the past couple nights, "Smashed" and "Wrecked". It's an interesting pair of episodes as they deal with two plots that I have almost exact opposite feelings about--I really like the Buffy/Spike love plot, and I really dislike the magic addicted Willow plot.
I'm not sure magic junkie Willow's a bad plot, it might just be my perspective. By and large, I find media dealing with drug addiction to be tiresome and silly, even pieces most people seem to think are brilliant, like Requiem for a Dream. Maybe because they usually boil down to, "Oh my god, drugs make them lose sight of everything that really matters!" To me, that's, at best, fodder for an aspect of a story, but not the focus. Maybe it's because I've had occasion to become utterly exasperated with actual drug addicts I've cared about. I kind of don't need a show to tick through every box for me again--yep, they won't get off their asses for even the things they genuinely seem to want. Yep, they'll manipulate you into feeling like you're the weird one for calling them on their behaviour. Yep, it all checks out.
Though, of course, the problem with junkie Willow is mainly that it lays the allegory on heavy and kind of suddenly. For a while it'd been people uncomfortable with vaguely possibly power mad Willow, now it's suddenly Willow who likes to get high all the time and of course that's what we were concerned about all along, right?
But Buffy and Spike--that's great. It's the closest Buffy gets to facing the fact that she has no personality, or rather, that what she thinks is her personality is a sham. I guess that's what's so sexy about it--as she and Spike are fucking so violently a house is coming down around them, there's a sense that a whole, purer Buffy has been preserved by her (or rather the writers') dogged determination to stick to the "I just want to be a normal girl" plot. Though it might not be unintentional, as this is pretty close to the character stuff that came out when Buffy dumped Riley.
I finished updating my comic stuff at around 2am. I didn't want to just dive into World of Warcraft or something, so I watched To Catch a Thief again. Gods, Grace Kelly is wonderful in that movie. Hitchcock's usual, subtly strange makeup and wardrobe for women grows on you until you can't see straight, I'll insist to anyone. Kelly's sleeveless pink top with the white curly vines and her little white gloves--oh, those little white gloves. And then, on top of it, that great Cheshire cat smile of hers. I always smile along, I just can't stop myself. On a wide screen television, with the restored DVD, Grace Kelly driving madly with beautiful Nice in the background is heaven. There's no better word for it.
Scarecrows have subversive exercise plans.
Mongooses don't care about a nice ass.
Octopi have many attentive fans.
Lizards and cats fearlessly chew the grass.
Sandwiches are bigger at a distance.
The mosquito is the art nouveau fly.
I'll sell you bird feed for less than tuppence.
Sleep deprivation's a natural high.
Toadstools are frighteningly ambitious.
The Princess is really in all castles.
Her best apples are large Red Delicious.
Her trebuchets always outclass missiles.
On remote water lily floats a name.
B-Ko is the greatest alphabet dame.
I have almost no energy to-day. It's been kind of like this for days, though. Everything I've done for about a week has felt like an enormous pain in the ass. I suppose blame ought to lie with this completely lousy sleeping schedule. I seem to go several days with six hours of sleep at most, and then have a day like to-day where I get nine hours.
And, as is usually the case when I talk about my bad sleeping hours, I feel like I have to concede that what is unacceptable to me is perfectly fine to most people. People who look at me and say, "Really? You usually get more than six hours? YOU LILY LIVERED MILKSOP. That's more sleep than I get every night!" So, okay, good for you, all of you. Here's to you.
This past week a single glass of whiskey has been the sum total of my alcohol consumption. Lack of sleep and alcohol just don't pleasantly mix for me. I'm really glad I'm done with Venias Travels' chapter 36. I kept thinking about the Fellowship of the Ring commentary where the filmmakers complained about how difficult it was to edit the council at Rivendell. I am particularly happy with the colours I used for panels without backgrounds this time, though. Queen Lithwolna's colouration seemed to lend itself well to quite a number of bold, solid colours. I guess she turned out looking a bit Chinese, huh? Though my main inspiration for her were a number of different artist renderings of Salome.
Since I'm going now by Wikipedia's episode order listing for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, I ended up watching two episodes of Buffy in a row over the past couple nights, "Smashed" and "Wrecked". It's an interesting pair of episodes as they deal with two plots that I have almost exact opposite feelings about--I really like the Buffy/Spike love plot, and I really dislike the magic addicted Willow plot.
I'm not sure magic junkie Willow's a bad plot, it might just be my perspective. By and large, I find media dealing with drug addiction to be tiresome and silly, even pieces most people seem to think are brilliant, like Requiem for a Dream. Maybe because they usually boil down to, "Oh my god, drugs make them lose sight of everything that really matters!" To me, that's, at best, fodder for an aspect of a story, but not the focus. Maybe it's because I've had occasion to become utterly exasperated with actual drug addicts I've cared about. I kind of don't need a show to tick through every box for me again--yep, they won't get off their asses for even the things they genuinely seem to want. Yep, they'll manipulate you into feeling like you're the weird one for calling them on their behaviour. Yep, it all checks out.
Though, of course, the problem with junkie Willow is mainly that it lays the allegory on heavy and kind of suddenly. For a while it'd been people uncomfortable with vaguely possibly power mad Willow, now it's suddenly Willow who likes to get high all the time and of course that's what we were concerned about all along, right?
But Buffy and Spike--that's great. It's the closest Buffy gets to facing the fact that she has no personality, or rather, that what she thinks is her personality is a sham. I guess that's what's so sexy about it--as she and Spike are fucking so violently a house is coming down around them, there's a sense that a whole, purer Buffy has been preserved by her (or rather the writers') dogged determination to stick to the "I just want to be a normal girl" plot. Though it might not be unintentional, as this is pretty close to the character stuff that came out when Buffy dumped Riley.
I finished updating my comic stuff at around 2am. I didn't want to just dive into World of Warcraft or something, so I watched To Catch a Thief again. Gods, Grace Kelly is wonderful in that movie. Hitchcock's usual, subtly strange makeup and wardrobe for women grows on you until you can't see straight, I'll insist to anyone. Kelly's sleeveless pink top with the white curly vines and her little white gloves--oh, those little white gloves. And then, on top of it, that great Cheshire cat smile of hers. I always smile along, I just can't stop myself. On a wide screen television, with the restored DVD, Grace Kelly driving madly with beautiful Nice in the background is heaven. There's no better word for it.