Unstoppable Sincerity

Last night's tweets;

Idle marauders can't live in their loot.
Laziness grants one the grace of reserve.
Routes to London's rooftops are paved with soot.
Strange is the courtesy we all deserve.

I've already been drawing to-day, even though I usually take Fridays and Saturdays off, because I have to be up early to-morrow to go with my family to see Legally Blonde: The Musical. Which I guess is Easter-ish. Personally, I always find myself in the mood to watch Picnic at Hanging Rock on Easter.

With lunch to-day, I read "Houndwife", a good, new story in The Sirenia Digest. It's sort of a sequel to H.P. Lovecraft's "The Hound". It shares something of the fevered quality of the Lovecraft tale, though it's not nearly as excited. In the Prolegomenon, Caitlin quotes from a book by S.T. Joshi that discusses the possibility that "The Hound" was partially a self-parody. I haven't read the story in years, but I seem to remember taking the extreme prose more as a reflection of the particular excitability of the narrator, an expression of character.

But it was interesting reading something about parodies that are also effective as sincere stories to-day when I happened to have been watching Project A-ko with breakfast. Like Gunbuster, made around the same time, Project A-ko is ostensibly a parody but also works as an earnest story about its characters. In A-ko, it's mainly due, for me, to the flattering portrayal of the villain, B-ko, and the action sequences accompanied by electric guitar. Annoying C-ko, B-ko's odd obsession with her, and the general over the top quality of the events depicted, are all funny until they sort of unexpectedly melt into just being really fucking cool. I love how B-ko seems inexplicably turned on at this end of this bit;



It's hard to find examples of this sort of thing outside 1980s anime. Partly I think it's due to the animators spending so much time working one these things that they couldn't help developing an affection for them that comes out in the work.

I was at Tim's house last night for around five hours playing Oblivion. I'll be really surprised if a day ever comes when I'm tired of that game. I have a new Nord character who specialises in blunt weapons--I just got her to Expert and I'm enjoying knocking people flat on their backs with a mace. Adding a Damage Fatigue poison to the attacks led to some very satisfying slaughter last night. I need to kill fifty people for the master blunt trainer to train me, and Damage Health poisons seems to disqualify kills. But I'm surprised by how much fun I'm having killing them the very old fashioned way.