Setsuled's Journal

I'm only around fourteen pages into War and Peace, but I'm marvelling at how many characters Tolstoy's already managed to introduce and make interesting. Young Pierre's passionate endorsement of Napoleon as being the champion of the people with his strong arm tactics reminded me of modern American middle and lower class supporters of John McCain. I guess the answer as to why young, uneducated people would support a ruler whose policies are antithetical to their interests is that the ignorant instinctively respect uncomplicated power. Well, I can't say I know much about the French royalty that preceded Napoleon.

Code Geass to-day also had me thinking about dictators, now that the series protagonist has become a possibly brutal Emperor of Britannia. The series has plenty of flaws, but I am somewhat impressed that it uses the modern pop bishonen trend to portray a charismatic freedom fighter's metamorphosis into a despotic ruler.

I've finished inking Chapter 8 of Venia's Travels to-day and I have a whole lot of colouring to do. But I'm ahead of where I was last chapter at this point. I'm starting to get used to this schedule--I think I just need to face the fact that I'm never going to get these chapters done as quickly as I got Boschen and Nesuko's chapters done, and its simply a reflection of the fact that I put a lot more work into them. I'm glad I've worked out a system that lets me make a higher quality comic while still managing to update it fortnightly.

Some nice games of chess last night. One game with Lezlie got so down to the wire it ended up being decided by the fact that I had one more pawn than she did. As I said to her, it was like a single grain of rice missing from our otherwise equal bags of a hundred.

I can't beat my iPod chess at its hardest mode of difficulty. I tried again a couple days ago while walking back from my parents' house--I got so absorbed, I turned down two wrong streets and walked past my grandmother's house twice. Good thing there were no spider webs.