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.

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 . . .

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.

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.

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.

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.

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;

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;

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.

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.

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.

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.

What's Natural and Real?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wircelia Asks Why So Serious

The new Venia's Travels is online. Fans of green eye shadow rejoice.

Princess Melee

Last night's tweets;

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.

A watched a mosquito trying in vain to suck blood through my shirt yesterday. I shooed it away. But let it not be said I can't hurt a fly, because I threw out a plastic pie container to-day when I heard the rattling buzz of a housefly within.

My real life social world, I've realised, is 80% animals and insects. You know what? I'm Snow White. Snow muthafuckin' White, ya'll. Yeah, that's right. Snow. White. Check it.

I actually really want that new Snow White DVD, though I haven't heard of the guy doing the commentary. I guess he's probably a critic. At least the box tells you about the commentary, unlike the Sleeping Beauty DVD. I was driving around town yesterday and listened to the Sleeping Beauty soundtrack twice. I listened to it again to-day while drawing. It's so rare for me to listen to any album twice in a row, I must be going into another pretty princess phase.

I got mad when I saw there's finally a decent release of Goodfellas on DVD, years after I settled on the shitty double sided disk version I still have now. This new one has two commentaries worth listening to, one with Martin Scorsese and his crew, and another with Henry Hill himself along with the FBI agent who wrote the book with him upon which the movie's based. Hill calls into The Howard Stern Show now and then, and he can't hide the fact that he's still pretty much a scoundrel. That would be a hell of a commentary, I think. I liked the Jake LaMotta commentary on Raging Bull.

I have a lot of colouring to catch up on to-day so I'd better get to it. I'm depressed Artie Lange's been absent from Howard Stern all week, but at least there's George Takei . . .

Animal Revolution

Last night's tweets;

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.

I've repeatedly tried taking pictures of the lizards inevitably gathered on the back porch every day while I'm making breakfast, but they always scatter when I open the door. There was a particularly large one out there to-day, and I took this picture through the window;



So, for any first time visitors to this house, lizards are located in the back, daddy long legs are in the bathroom, spiders are in my bedroom, and rabbits are on the front lawn, mostly at night. By rabbits, I mean the animals, I don't want to get any exhibitionist masturbating women excited. Oh, wait, yeah I do.

Not much sleep to-day and I had lots of errands to run so I'm running a bit late now. Though I'm more or less on schedule, at least.

Bubbling Green Life

Twitter Sonnet #70

There're no swimsuits for the real genders.
Cube worlds defy navigation by poles.
Longboats need perpendicular timbers.
Viking cats lose their trophies in wormholes.
Black holes grow fat in old televisions.
Diversions from stasis are so passé.
Deer brains break on Player One's intrusions.
A cucumber sandwich you must assay.
Food in exile grants a strange aura.
At home in the sunset clouds is Lando.
The dew's not green for emerald flora.
Night mana's in distant palace shadow.
The darkness of rich community's fear.
Void between stars is the final frontier.

Feeling a bit of indigestion at around 1am last night, I decided I needed something both carbonated and very caffeinated. So I bought a six pack of Mountain Dew in bottles. This is Tim's beverage of choice, and I gather it's sort of become the unofficial beverage of World of Warcraft.

The only grocery store I know of that's open 24 hours around here is a Ralph's in La Jolla, across the street from the Mormon Palace. You can feel the money in that grocery store--there's a whole section for pharmaceuticals with leather lounge chairs and couches. I scanned my sodas in the self checkout with the usual carefully put together college kids. I read a statistic the other day that only 46% of 19 to 24 year olds are employed in the U.S. Yet everything's so well oiled in this pocket of Ralph's spa by glimmering white Mormon towers.

Anyway, I still have a lot to do to-night. Here's a spider or daddy-long-legs from a couple nights ago I forgot to post;

Pebbles in the Ethereal Shoe

Last night's tweets;

Black holes grow fat in old televisions.
Diversions from stasis are so passé.
Deer brains break on Player One's intrusions.
A cucumber sandwich you must assay.

I can see this is going to be one of my stranger sonnets.

I played Oblivion at Tim's house yesterday. Although I did eventually play some World of Warcraft, I'm finding myself intensely bored with it lately. Oblivion is so much prettier. And, playing it again, I've been able to enjoy its unique NPC AI--"Radiant AI", as it was called, referring to the programmers' intent to create entities that will solve problems on their own based on their embedded motives and what objects and people are in their environment. It's some of the most sophisticated AI ever deployed in a video game and, as such, it can be pretty silly.

A week or two ago, I watched two archers have a fight to the death because, while they were both hunting the same deer, one man accidentally shot the other. The winner of the impromptu shoot-out ran off on a mission to kill every other archer he came across, as he was now an enemy of that faction.

Last night I was running from a town called Skingrad to a town called Chorrol when a deer ran past me followed by a wolf. I watched the wolf kill one deer before dashing off to find another. In his wake, I found a living deer whose AI appeared to have broken at the sight of the passing wolf. It munched on grass and occasionally darted its head up to look around, as though sensing danger, but wouldn't acknowledge my presence however close I was. I ended up pushing it into a pen in a nearby priory. I went into the priory for a moment, and when I came out, the deer's brain had switched back on and it was running madly about the pen in which it had awoken to find itself. But just as I was thinking I'd gotten myself a pet deer, it leapt into the stone wall of the priory and vanished.

The mysterious and unpredictable programming of Oblivion is one of the things that keeps it endlessly fresh. This, and the incredibly beautiful environments, have caused it to outlive for me Bethesda's newer game, Fallout 3, in which the AI was considerably more restrained, probably to avoid some of the more embarrassing accidents that could occur in Oblivion. But the silly stuff is almost always better than the stories Bethesda comes up with.

Anyway, I'm running late to-day and I have a lot to catch up on, so enjoy episode 5 of Neon Genesis Evangelion;

Commandeered Feeling

Last night's tweets;

There're no swimsuits for the real genders.
Cube worlds defy navigation by poles.
Longboats need perpendicular timbers.
Viking cats lose their trophies in wormholes.

So tired. Didn't get much sleep.

Last night I watched "Once More, with Feeling", the musical episode from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's sixth season. I don't think it's that bad. Okay, the villain seems like a cheap knock-off of Jim Carrey's take on The Mask and Mr. Ooogie Bogie from Nightmare Before Christmas, and there's an uneasy balance between irony, homage, and sincerity throughout the episode, but the songs aren't actually terrible, mostly, and they serve the story. If you buy into the concept of a musical in this context, some of it kind of works.

Tara and Giles singing together to foreshadow their stepping back from Willow and Buffy respectively works in relation to the show's agenda, though not from an organic storytelling standpoint, which again results from the show's increasing difficulty in parsing irony and sincerity--obviously, Whedon wants a reasonable explanation for Giles' departure from the show, but this requires again to redefine the severity of the threats which Buffy faces. I suppose one could say that an actual tale of someone facing impending apocalypse is something viewers can't relate to, and it's therefore better to reduce the relationship to an issue of family and/or business dynamics, where Giles leaving might actually be helpful. Though, then again, we also have to assume Buffy's financial situation isn't as bad as it realistically would be and that leaving Buffy and Dawn to their own devices even in a realistic world would be a potentially good thing for Giles to do.

So, if we take the threat of rampaging killer demons that keep Buffy occupied for good portions of the night to really be, say, taking care of a puppy, and we exchange taking care of Dawn and their house for learning to support oneself financially in a world where that's viable for someone without a college education, then Giles' song makes sense. And I think a lot viewers do prefer to see it this way.

The Disney glitter effect during Willow and Tara's song doesn't work at all. Maybe it's supposed to be funny. I don't think it is. The lyrics to the song make sense if you can remember Tara's characterisation--I rather liked the episode "Family" where Tara realised the Scoobies where more of a family for her than her blood kin. But the problem of Tara's and Willow's relationship rarely having been realistically portrayed is in evidence here. It's really happy and cutesy, and so it kind of comes off as a couple you don't know being overly demonstrative in a restaurant even as you sense their relationship is based on pretty much nothing--like two people with competing variations of, "I love you, schmoopi-oopkins!" "No, I love you, sugar nibbly puffs!"

The ongoing plot about Willow's magic abuse is on similarly insubstantial foundations. Too much about the show seems to be a transparent chart of where Whedon would like it to go rather than where it organically would--and this may simply be a reflection of the superiority of art produced by an auteur--the more hands on deck, the more delegation between writers, the more firmly laws have to be laid down so individual visions don't inevitably clash with one another.

Spike's "Rest in Peace" song was an effective progression on his arc--it makes sense if he's in love with Buffy that it's painful for him to be around her if she's never going to reciprocate. This also makes the stalker Spike arc even more anachronistic, though.

Saving Buffy with the line about how life is "living" ought to have gotten the reply, "Yeah, I know, that's what I'm complaining about." Though I kind of liked the advancement of the Buffy's lack of passion arc with all the business about fire that doesn't burn. Buffy's close-up when she looked at the camera and asked us to sing along was extremely cheesy. Anya's hair looked really good.

The episode, for my money, wasn't as good as Friday's Dollhouse, that's for sure, though it was another exercise in moral ambiguity that I'm sure won't help ratings at all. I feel sort of disappointed in the skeevy use of "The Miller's Tale", and I'm not sure I believe a college professor would be able to afford a Dollhouse contract. But the episode was an interesting exploration of female sexuality as empowering women versus being something that represses them. The professor's hypocrisy in suggesting Kiki's sexuality grants her power even as it provides her with a cheat out of attaining the power of knowledge and enlightenment, juxtaposed with the serial killer story where women are the victim of a man who can't properly deal with female sexuality. Actually, I guess the episode might almost be an argument for women to become nuns.

So I say to you now, please, ladies, don't. Men aren't all bad, really. Look at that Paul Ballard guy, he's kind of okay. Right? I mean, from certain moral angles? And Boyd, if there was believable inflection in his voice, he'd be okay too. And sweet little Victor, what about sweet little wiped Victor? See, some of us are . . . er, harmless zombies sometimes.

Summer Ghosts and Careless Promises

At Tim's last night, I listened to him take part in a high level World of Warcraft raid with voice chat activated for everyone but him. There were two women and a thirteen year old boy. One of the women, who had a strong Brooklyn accent, had felt no restraint in cussing for the ears of the kid. ". . . get this fucking thing . . . have to level my fucking paladin . . . fucking low level quests, and I don't want to deal this shit . . . my son's about your age, the little fucker . . ." I found this incredibly refreshing.

To-day I watched the season premiere of Natsu no Arashi, which apparently came out on the 4th without my notice. Another nice comedy episode relying on Jun keeping her sex secret from Hajime, who's constantly taunting her to be more of a man. The show seems to keep finding new ways to show Hajime not figuring out Jun's a girl while it becomes increasingly obvious. The new season seems to have significantly ramped up the fan service, too--lots of superfluous animation of the ladies and lingering midriff shots. Someone who's not attracted to women might find it a bit tedious, but I think a lot of episodes of the first season are enjoyable regardless.

The new episode and the entire first season is viewable now on Crunchy Roll, a service that hosts streaming and downloadable subtitled anime--including several series being currently broadcast on Japanese television, the simulcasts sanctioned by the studios producing the shows, something I've been very much surprised has not happened sooner, given the obvious market for anime in English speaking countries.

I've just now gotten back from watching Jean Cocteau's Orphee with my sister, who'd never seen it. Still a great movie.

Twitter Sonnet #69

Flu keeps my scotch away with nausea.
You thought that this was Ceti Alpha VI!
Mutant soup's a can of panacea.
This desert planet yearns for genetics.
Cats can make quick moral support pit stops.
Cold wars make pretty busy warm widows.
There's no shortage of tasks for many cops.
The traffic wakes you cleaning your windows.
Water faces orange juice subjugation.
Holy nutrient powder burns like Hell.
Find baseball before inebriation.
To kids, titanium's an easy sell.
The ghosts remember bright, dizzy crushes.
Mario Kart races in monk's clutches.

Pop Porn Genealogy

With Playboy's decision to make Marge Simpson a centrefold, I think we can say Playboy's only about eight years behind the times. That might be good for a laugh, but if Playboy wants cartoon nudity guys can actually jerk off to, they must needs look to the Far East. Considering how the popular "Bunny Girl" look in Japan is a direct descendant of the Playboy Bunny, and a lot of mainstream studios do hentai versions of their own series, you'd think there would be plenty of high profile manga artists willing to draw a Playboy centrefold. Though I'd bet Playboy would disapprove of harbouring a Japanese Bunny Girl due to corporate foolishness about copyright protection.

Doing a google image search for Marilyn Monroe a couple months ago, I came across a directory of every Playmate from 1953 to 2004. Looking at it, one notices a few things. For one, the pictures become increasingly lame as time passes, increasingly overproduced and homogenous. 1969 looks like the last time you see dark nipples with wide areolas, and after 1998, almost all the nipples are pink and barely perceptible. Part of me wonders if this is reflective of a counter-instinct to the increasing comfort with nudity in mainstream culture--if the nipples can't be covered, they shall be gradually eradicated.*

I find pictures like August, 1987 simply baffling. I know there was a preoccupation with shoulder pads for women in the 80s, but it's hard for me to get my mind around the idea that this was sexy. And it occurs to me that the Internet has really changed porn aesthetics--once, such pictures were relegated to relatively difficult to acquire magazines. Now, they're everywhere, so the styles are less contained, less idiosyncratic. Also, vintage porn, porn from before 1970, isn't so much treated as porn anymore, and it has broad (no pun intended) circulation in geek culture, not just pulp illustrations, but also photos of models like Bettie Page. So porn from those older eras ironically seems to be from a less remote aesthetic than porn from the 80s.

My tweets from last night;

Cats can make quick moral support pit stops.
Cold wars make pretty busy warm widows.
There's no shortage of tasks for many cops.
The traffic wakes you cleaning your windows.

Snow kept making quick stops on the back porch last night. He'd mew at me inquiringly, but would only accept a few quick pets. I think he really wants in the house.

I managed to get up bright and early at 2:30pm to-day, following two days where I was forced to sleep until 4pm in order to get eight hours. Hopefully I can keep this up. Before sleep last night, I read a bit of my new copy of War and Peace--I'd stopped reading for a while when I noticed in some fine print in my old edition that the translator had abridged the work. I'm not sure in what way and where because it's still huge--it's the hardcover Barnes and Noble edition from more than ten years ago. Anyway, it pissed me off and I couldn't read anymore until I bought the Signet paperback edition a couple days ago, making sure to find the word "unabridged" before buying it.

I shopped around a little bit and noticed in something like 90% of the editions the translators are women. That's sexy, though I'm not sure why. One thing I miss about my old copy is that it was translated by a "Princess Alexandra Kropotkin." She was probably 80 or something--the book itself is filled with aged princes and princesses--but I liked imagining an ascetic Princess Toadstool carefully writing every page dressed in a pink taffeta ballroom gown. Sorry, Your Highness, but you shouldn't have abridged the book.

*Though, one need only look at my comics to see I have nothing against pink, subtle nipples.

Wrath and Logic

Last night's tweets;

Flu keeps my scotch away with nausea.
You thought that this was Ceti Alpha VI!
Mutant soup's a can of panacea.
This desert planet yearns for genetics.



It's important to revisit Star Trek II now and then. It remains by far the best Star Trek movie, despite a number of flaws in its plot. Ceti Alpha VI, an entire planet, exploded in Federation territory and no-one noticed? Kirk really left Khan and his crew stranded on Ceti Alpha V and never thought to check up on them, or no-one in the Federation did? If you think about it, Khan's got plenty of good reasons to be angry. That he blames Kirk for the death of his wife is only a very short walk into the realm of madness.

And yet, the moment when I was reminded that this movie still totally works is when I still felt satisfied when Kirk sent over the code to lower Reliant's shields. You're still invested in Kirk beating Khan. Why? Well, it's the thematic dichotomy of the whole movie--Khan, who would have the whole universe bend to his will alone, versus "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one." The slightly stilted dialogue, the performances, along with James Horner's incredible score all serve to bring out this fundamental struggle in a big and sort of awe inspiring way that help the space shots feel vast, I'd argue even contribute to making the Enterprise and the Reliant seem bigger. Everything in Star Trek III feels small by comparison.

The only thing that really doesn't work for me is the father/son story, but stories between parents and their offspring pretty much universally fall flat on me. Maybe it's because I reject the idea that blood relations contribute as much or more to a relationship than actual interaction. But it goes with the ideas of life, death, and age. In a way, Kirk at the end of the movie is where Khan is at the beginning--where Khan has lost his wife, Kirk's lost his closest friend, and observing the differences between how the two deal with the loss is illuminating. We know Kirk's stubborn--he refuses to believe in "the no-win scenario," and I think it's fair to say that neither does Khan. Spock twice references the influence of the "human ego", first in relation to Kirk and then in relation to Khan. So we can appreciate what Kirk's giving up at the end of the movie when he can still feel "young" even in spite of what he's lost.

Last night's spider or daddy-long-legs in my bathroom;

Normal Clouds

Twitter Sonnet #68

Hotel squatters are pretty thoughtless hosts.
Stomachs are the first things in the picture.
There are no real ruins on western coasts.
Try finding a Sappho action figure.
Sometimes film's a necessary mirage.
Sauron kind of only knows where you're not.
Still cars are scary in a mall garage.
If bricks were books, chimneys would know a lot.
Yellow groceries are built of square lemons.
Normal clouds are buttered, floating grits.
Zeus balls spam and ramen for his cannons.
Beneath heaven's tea set, a suitor sits.
The scared speed demon's English is pidgin.
Anything can be burned in an engine.

On her twitter to-day, Amanda Palmer posted a link to this very beautiful Smiths cover she did;



I miss Comic-Con. Though I guess I may be the only one in my social circle who does.

I woke up at 4pm to-day. I needed the full eight hours of sleep, but it was hard won. Very noisy around here to-day, and I think I still haven't finished making up for all the sleep I lost last week.

Adventures in new television with breakfast to-day confirmed again for me that I like Japan's schlock better than America's. First I watched yesterday's brand new, episode 1 of the latest CLAMP series, Kobato. Supposedly it's seinen (aimed at men), according to Wikipedia, but I could have sworn it was shojo (aimed at teenage girls) from the fact that the whole story appears to be from the perspective of a supernatural, pretty, relatively sexless and comically clumsy young girl whose mission is to heal people's hearts but not fall in love with them. But male appetites, or socially recognised male appetites, seem to be pretty different in Japan. The story wasn't very exciting--alternating between adequately funny and obligingly sweet. A male lead character appeared only briefly to punch out a guy who was about to hit the female lead, but he left to appear aloof and mysterious. I realised how simply the fiction appreciating human heart is--we'll always instinctively like the guy after that. He could be trying to destroy the world, but we'll just think, "Why's he doing that? He's such a nice guy." If the show had decided to make the guy a true jerk who just happened to be decent enough to know it's not right to hit a woman, we'd wonder why the show was wasting our time.

After this, I watched half an episode of Medium, which I thought I'd give a shot since it is number one in the ratings right now. I thought I might see what's doing with mainstream American culture.

I like the Saul Bass inspired opening, and Patricia Arquette's eerily flat deliveries are still charming. But, as seems to be the inevitable fate of nearly all lead actresses, she apparently decided to get a short, dowdy haircut.

As for the show itself, it appears to be the barest skeleton of a detective show. The episode in question dealt with the murder of a stripper whom the police captain Arquette works with believed was more innocent than she actually was--it turned out to be a pretty rote tale of a girl trying to extort money from her married boyfriend. The meat of the story apparently was a possible possession tale working as a metaphor for Arquette's dealing with her teenage daughter's growing pains. I can see the brain storming session--"Normal parents are worried about their kids being bad, so let's have the psychic mom have visions of her daughter being really bad."

I got tired of it halfway through the episode, and figured I'm running late to-day anyway. But I can't help wondering what it says about me that I preferred the guilty pleasure pretty girl fantasy over the thinly veiled exploitation of normal family preoccupations. Maybe it just means I'm not married with kids.

Hung out in Second Life a bit last night again, winning another game of chess. A pretty close game this time, but I managed to win with an unobserved pawn and pair of rooks on the left side of the board. It was definitely my most elegant checkmate in a while, but it came at the 11th hour.

Laws of Men

Last night's tweets;

Sometimes film's a necessary mirage.
Sauron kind of only knows where you're not.
Still cars are scary in a mall garage.
If bricks were books, chimneys would know a lot.

I saw Capitalism: A Love Story last night. It was good, though I didn't enjoy it as much as I've enjoyed Michael Moore movies and television shows in the past. I think he's kind of lost the ability to be funny, and yet he still thinks it's important to try. And I'm really tired of low angle shots swirling around him with a national monument or corporate building in the background. But several scenes do make a powerful argument--workers striking when they found they were to be fired without pay they were contracted to receive, a privately owned juvenile detention facility bribing judges to wrongly detain young teenagers for years. The movie does convey the importance of restraining free enterprise, as there are inevitably people who would see to their own bottom line before the damage their efforts might cause to others.

I finished watching Othello to-day. I don't think I'll ever be able to picture Iago again without seeing Bob Hoskins in my mind. And it was a good production otherwise, I particularly liked Desdemona's costumes;




Iago's machinations, of course, are another good example of a master manipulator allowing his victims to manipulate themselves as much as possible. Othello's unbending passion for separating "honest" people from deceivers was as much at fault for the destruction of the truest person in his life as Iago's work. He loved "too well" because he was too ready to go to great and terrible lengths in the name of pure love. I think if there's any lesson one should take from this play, it's to err on the side of trusting peace.

Can't Sleep

Knights on White Metal Shelves

Last nights tweets;

Hotel squatters are pretty thoughtless hosts.
Stomachs are the first things in the picture.
There are no real ruins on western coasts.
Try finding a Sappho action figure.

I played chess at The Isle of Lesbos again last night. That makes three games now, each with a different person. I've won all three, but the past two were difficult. Very satisfying games.

I found myself finished with dinner at around 4:30am, and decidedly suddenly to start watching a BBC Jonathan Miller production of Othello starring Anthony Hopkins and Bob Hoskins. Far better than Miller's King Lear production so far, mainly because it seems like Hoskins and Hopkins had pretty much free rein. The scenes of the two of them together, as Iago and Othello, respectively, are wonderful, and most of the supporting players come off as very commonplace by comparison, especially a duke who droned on like a typewriter, running all his lines together like he'd just stopped to do the play on his way somewhere more important.

Hopkins' delivery was often much quieter than everyone else's, which were clearly conditioned for the stage. Hopkins knows that on film and television, an "in door" voice can be utilised to great effect. But I'm only halfway through the video, I'll wait until I've watched the whole thing before I pass too much judgement.

Much time and money's already been spent to-day on getting an oil change. But now I have wonderful, black, viscous evil. I think I might see a movie, but before that I need to work on the next Venia's Travels script. Hopefully this headache will have transformed into something useful by then.

Augmented Stomachs in Mazes

Twitter Sonnet #67

I don't know what anyone really wants.
Familiar faces peer across a bean.
Vegetables and legumes cruise the old haunts.
Somehow a brunette stripper made the scene.
Don't forget tomato sauce in tin cans.
Sudden sickness might spur you off whiskeys.
Hazardous are potent good beverage lands.
It seems Jagger suggests we are monkeys.
Varied are the things which the undead eats.
Vampire horses I'm not thinking of.
Bleeding are all shamans Frankenstein meets.
Grocery store women are all quick to love.
Computers have no real power switches.
Human stomachs are sick sons of bitches.

I was having a really nice time until I had to throw up at around 11am. I still don't know for sure what it was--was it the scotch I'd had last night, which I really enjoyed, or the cous cous in which I'd put freshly chopped garlic, which I also really enjoyed? Stupid, fucking stomach. Why do you have to ruin things?

And I was in such a wonderful good mood last night. I didn't even get upset when the computer crashed while I was in the middle of playing World of Warcraft. It crashed again this afternoon while I wasn't doing anything with it but playing an mp3--the whole thing just shuts off. I suppose I ought to get myself around to actually installing the new power supply I paid sixty dollars for several months ago.

But, yes, otherwise a really good evening. I played Oblivion at Tim's and had a good time kiting vampires out of their caves into broad daylight and letting them kill legionnaires. Then, in Word of Warcraft, I discovered what a great place Feralas is to level up my undead warrior, who's gotten really good at bleeding enemies--a "damage over time" effect. And I never stopped feeling satisfaction at devouring a humanoid opponent after slaughtering them. Alice Cooper's "Feed My Frankenstein" came on at a very appropriate moment last night.

I realised last night I'd forgotten to watch Friday's Dollhouse, so I watched it with breakfast to-day. Another episode I really liked, creating an interesting dilemma for the audience to decide between an emotionally distant father and a doting mother created by the Dollhouse. I suppose it's not surprising the show's tanking in the ratings--audiences don't tend to flock en masse to media that presents two opposing philosophies while making neither a clear villain.

Madeleine returned, wearing two outfits--a grey suit-ish dress and a grey blue skirt with blazer--that further emphasised her connexion to Madeleine from Vertigo. I liked her reaction to seeing Mother Echo getting wiped--the show presents, in the end, two points of view; 1) The ability to obliterate sorrow over the lose of a child is good and 2) Obliterating sorrow from losing a child is bad. That the former perspective isn't short changed even though one senses the writers are more in the latter camp is one of the things I absolutely love about this show.

The Essential Animation

Lots of unexpected nudity in children's shows I watched while eating breakfast to-day. Here's a tip, ladies (and this probably goes for guys, too); if you're in an anime series, never, ever change clothes unless you want to be seen naked. I don't care if you're on a show aimed at preschoolers--this is one of the laws of physics in anime. And stay away from bath houses, for shizzle (cf. Gunbuster--even a bath house in space isn't remote enough).

First I decided to get back into watching Nadia: The Secret of the Blue Water, which I'd stopped at episode 11 for some reason. But Ponyo put me back in the mood for it. The concept for Nadia came from Hayao Miyazaki--the idea of a series featuring Captain Nemo and the new cast of characters around him. But the show's directed by Hideaki Anno, which is interesting, too, as Anno and Miyazaki are probably the two most influential anime film directors working to-day. A crucial difference between the two, I think, is that Anno is much, much hornier. Focus has been shifting for a couple episodes to the female characters more and more distinctly, and the accidental Peeping Tom bit was by far the best animated in episode 12.

I also watched the eleventh episode of Galaxy Express 999, which always manages to tell completely bizarre stories and somehow make them seem perfectly normal. It's some of the worst animation I've seen, but I definitely have to say that's part of its charm.



I sure love the way Leiji Matsumoto designed women. To-day's story had the 999 stop at a planet apparently made entirely of slime. A couple slime creatures sneak on board and attempt to become human by taking Maetel's and Tetsuro's shapes and stealing their clothes.



The father blob shows up to set his brood straight (or amorphous) by explaining how solid creatures diminish with age, returning the show once again to the theme of mortal melancholy. The episode has a subplot about young lovers going to the slime planet to commit suicide together. Why can't we have children's shows like this in the U.S.?

Here's a spider from a couple nights ago;



Music's by Shiro Sagisu from the His and Her Circumstances soundtrack. The song's called "Yoin' Yojou".

Last nights tweets;

Don't forget tomato sauce in tin cans.
Sudden sickness might spur you off whiskeys.
Hazardous are potent good beverage lands.
It seems Jagger suggests we are monkeys.