Love Stories, Fairy Tales, and Fabrications

I've put my skills as webcomic writer/artist, such as they are, up for auction at Care Faith Hope, a live journal community dedicated to raising money for my friend Moira and her husband T, who's in need of heart surgery. The two don't have health insurance, so they're very much in need. Aside from my offer, there are a lot of other cool looking items and services up for auction, so please check it out.

Twitter Sonnet #65

My arrabbiata's nude of noodles.
Garlic's the goal of the noblest searches.
Sweetly physical are the heart's doodles.
Strange women smoke in the biggest churches.
Zombie Jabba spies his favourite Twi'Lek.
Dancing alone in a noisy strip mall.
She's sacred as a barber pole's phallic.
Distracted cartoon angels never fall.
Planets orbit thanks to networked rabbits.
Many Alices aren't really crazy.
Cross hatched holes make efficient travel nets.
While a fierce cat's motives might be hazy.
Beauty's on the edge of a screen by Sartre.
Stars mark the limits of a young dom's heart.

I watched the last episode of Bakemonogatari to-day, which turned out to be very sweet. Senjoghara's vulnerabilities came through subtly enough from behind her latent dom personality, and Araragi's inexhaustible shyness wasn't quite as annoying to me as it once was. I still definitely sympathise more with Senjogohara, though I am usually the one who likes to get the ball rolling in relationships.

I can see now that Senjogohara's sexual advances were entirely aimed at making Araragi uncomfortable--I still wish there had been at least one real, juicy make-out scene. Oh, well. The show's still 8 billion times better than most anime. It certainly blew CANAAN out of the water, which suffered from having its finale released at the same time. CANAAN was an example of arbitrarily assigned melodrama to character types, and Bakemonogatari turned out to be subversions of anime character types to illuminate human, otaku depth. Very nice.

Roger Ebert conducted an interesting interview with Michael Moore about his upcoming film, Capitalism, a Love Story. This was the most fascinating part to me;

"Nobody wants to look stupid, " he told me, "so everybody sort of nods their heads and goes, Oh yeah, yeah, I understand that. You're not supposed to understand it. It's like a snipe hunt on Wall Street.

It's amazing to me how much trouble was caused simply because some people weren't willing to look stupid. Partly I blame internet culture--I think a lot of people have grown so comfortable substituting googled knowledge for their own, and the past nine years have been so much about taunting public officials for being stupid, that now people are absolutely terrified to look like they don't know something. Though there's also the possibility that many of these people didn't necessarily get through all their college classes in a totally honest fashion and they don't know what they are and are not supposed to know.