Setsuled's Journal

I read the new Sirenia Digest story, "The Z Word", while eating breakfast this morning and enjoyed it. I presume the title's a reference to Shaun of the Dead, or it's a really big coincidence, as the story also concerns zombies. But on coincidences, the story also features someone listening to ABBA on repeat to the annoyance of another character, and it was only just a couple weeks ago my grandmother was blasting "Dancing Queen" on repeat to my intense irritation.*

What's really nice about the story is it blends zombie horror with relationship drama, the reanimation of the protagonist's dead boyfriend resembling the sort of vertigo provoked by interaction with someone you used to be in a relationship with. He resembles who you loved, but now he's dead, and the fact that he's moving in a familiar way is sort of horrible. That type of horror is behind a lot of zombie stories, but when the writer can feel her way through it, it still works.

The story's accompanied by another of Vince Locke's illustrations of emaciated and expressionless naked people that looks like it took ten minutes out of his day. They always look like vaguely naughty doodles of action figure still lives, which is weird because a quick image search for Vince Locke shows he does much better with single pages of comic. I hope Caitlin's not giving him money for these.

I was enjoying some David Lynch coffee while reading. In case you were wondering if the stuff's any good, it's fucking phenomenal. And it's nice knowing I'm in some small way funding Lynch's projects.

Yesterday was a really good day. I finished drawing early enough to go to Tim's and try out Soulcalibur IV. Tim got the PlayStation 3 version, so Darth Vader's one of the characters available to the players. Since Tim and I prefer switching to the Japanese voice tracks instead of Soulcalibur's infamously lousy English voice actors, we were treated to someone sounding enough like James Earl Jones saying badass things in Japanese which was unexpectedly really fucking cool. And it was just nice to be playing Soulcalibur again. I'd forgotten what an important part of life it is--beating the shit out of samurai and demon gods over and over again. I think we all need to do that now and then.

Later, I hung out in Second Life with Natalie and Dragoness for a while before watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I can't remember the last time I enjoyed that movie so much.


*It's funnier when Phil Ken Sebben does it.