head #17

It is alleged by the internet that Apple intends to come out with the latest in Mac mini technology later today. Oh, fingers crossed. Hopefully they won’t have moved the price point into another tax bracket and I will be able to afford a new one, and I can finally put poor malfunctioning Eugenie out to pasture. [EDIT: THE INTERNET LIED.]

I have been busy, sort of, but (dammit!) not busy enough. Also I have been a very bad DW citizen. I am sorry, I was reading actual books instead. A poor excuse, I know. Here are the things I would’ve posted, in order, had I been able to marshall the effort —

WARNING: This post is disturbingly long, even for me. Behind every one of those cuts is a 'normal-sized,' Emma-style entry. Even if you really love me (MOM!), do not attempt to read it all at the same time. Especially if you hope to keep loving me. And I really want you to keep loving me, really I do.

( SHERLOCK POST )

( GOOD OMENS POST )

( SUSANNA CLARKE POST )

( KINDLE POST )

( HERE ARE SOME IMAGES & PHOTOS WHICH I INTENDED TO BE AMUSING )

( A BIZARRE & MASSIVE LINKS POST )

Also, I just received this book in the mail. I’ve been trying to get it off various specialty Japanese bookstores for years, and then on a whim I searched for it on Amazon, where I found it for sale for, like, $10 used. FOILED AGAIN, CAPITALISM! YOU ARE A WORTHY OPPONENT. It is the most perfect Japanese grammar book I have ever seen and I am kind of excited to get the chance to study it; the authors wrote it specifically to aid people who are interested in doing academic research in Japanese, and it features sentential structures that I’ve never seen anyplace else. Except in actual Japanese, I mean. (I hope to use it to — among other things — bring you some gay-themed comic content that does not involve, say, the presentation of love-rape as an adorable courtship ritual.) (Or that features some female characters who are not toxically obnoxious!) (Assuming such content exists, of course.) It also has an entire index of nonintuitive Japanese expressions involving "気," one of which (気を付ける, which means "be careful" or "pay attention," or more literally "fasten your essence," haha, what? what??) left me scratching my pointy head for a week when I saw it in a Suzuki Tsuta comic (I can’t remember which one, they’ve all merged together into one giant run-on sentence strung together with でs and のs that’s made of understated masculine angst and misconstrued regret with a light grey background and a cat on it, like a fictive, gay Voltron).

(Parentheses!) (Parentheses?) (Parentheses…)

Okay, done.
See you in July!
(Of 2015.)

All right! So. Yes. Armageddon happened/is happening in Japan! That is/was pretty awful, is/wasn't it? Also, additionally, ew, America is now engaged in a fun new war with some profoundly unlucky Arabs who were no threat to our security in either the short term or the long term, and also, randomly, there's going to be a guaranteed-awful Buffy reboot appearing in a theater near you, so it looks like God or the Spaghetti Monster or Father Dis or Satan or whomever has a hand steering the tiller of fate really, really liked 2005. Um. I was following news of the inspiring uprisings in the Middle East & North Africa as closely as it is possible for someone like me to follow them, and then things started kind of turning to shit, with US-backed dictators & their armies turning on their own people or on people adjacent to their empires, Sarah Palin launching herself at India and talking in public, the American establishment ignoring/laughing at pro-democracy protestors all over the place because all the American establishment cares about is who will sell it oil and protect Israel's nutty interests, etc. and so I stopped. Also, I am not going to say anything about the horrors people have suffered/are suffering in Japan, because what would I say? Gee, bummer? Hope things turn around for you soon, Entire Nation of Japan? Nothing is the way to go there. If we went with a little more "nothing" in this horrible, horrible country, just in general, I think the world would really be a better place (no homo) (literally).

Also, speaking of which, I am not ever voting again*. I don't care who gets elected president next. I don't care if the sticky illiterate scooter-powered hordes elect John McCain, or Haley Barbour, or a genetic recombinant of Jefferson Davis and Ronald Reagan, or Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Fuck you, America. I hope the evil clown (by which I mean "Haley Barbour") eats every last one of you.

Anyway, so, watch as I change the topic with painful obviousness:

Sherlock
I still can't find my damn links, which I know are around here someplace, but let's give it a go anyway. As the official last person to comment on this series I will keep things really brief, because I love you. But, so: Firstly, I would like to draw a distinction here between Sherlock the show, which is a flashy, fun, showbiz extravaganza on the order of Doctor Who, which I find pleasantly mediocre but not terribly exciting, and Sherlock the Sherlock, who is an entirely separate order of awesomeness. I'm not sure Sherlock the show is really picking up what Conan Doyle put down in his stories (although I was impressed by the Victorian-appropriate characterization of Chinese mobsters -- AND WHAT, BY THE WAY? -- in The Blind Banker; spot-on, lads! tally-ho! view-halloo!), but I cannot say enough drooly things about Benedict Cumberbatch, whose theatrical, neurotic portrayal of the totally impossible title character is every bit as accurate and arresting as Jeremy Brett's iconic interpretation. I cannot wait until he is actually forced to play the violin on camera. Word. Secondly, I want to say that Martin Freeman's intolerably cute Watson is pretty much the reason the show is historical-grade teevee entertainment: Sherlock is a compelling but remote archetype, the antecedent of a long line of shadowed arbiters of chaos who stand between ourselves and darkness -- but Watson is the human lens through which Sherlock's abnormal brilliance is both refracted and magnified. To that end, Sherlock's Watson is somehow both perfectly ordinary and unique. His slate is blank enough that he can serve as a Mary Sue for fanfic authors all over the internet; simultaneously, though, he's so specifically calibrated that he's really difficult to write correctly. Freeman somehow communicates his epic, melancholy good-guyness by just wandering into a scene and standing in the background wearing a slightly worried expression -- this is pretty close to being a magic trick, actually -- and his obvious appreciation of Sherlock's talent comes off looking like a natural reaction, with no hint of fantardian, zeta-male creepiness. He and Sherlock, together, form a unbroken continuity of Victorian heroism. They could be horsed. It is adorable. Uh, there were things about the show itself that I liked a lot, too, including a really neat opening-episode montage that depicted Sherlock charting the streets of London on a backlit mental map while chasing a cab, the characters' pedestrian fondness for technology, and the improbable architecture of 222B Baker Street (← ETA: BAHAHA ♥). But honestly, I think that the actors, all the actors, could've been performing on a blank stage to similar effect. I find peculiar the idea that the series is 'derivative' -- the joke there, of course, is that the "detectives" of CSI, Law & Order, and NCIS et alia have been using Sherlock Holmes's magical, science-free backwards processes of deduction to solve crimes since their inception. In this case, the origin-story is merely taking back its own territory. (Haters gonna hate.) I give the series an A-, splitting the difference between the production's solid B and the actors' A+.
(Also, Lestrade is hot.)
Yes, that was "really brief."

Anybody hiding any good anime around here anyplace? I didn't even bother to finish Hakuouki; it was becoming dangerously historical. Apparently there are some OVAs coming out this summer. Yay?

I should stop announcing my web projects months in advance, I think. Probably nobody cares, but it takes me actual non-hyperbolic years to get shit online. Right now I'm having some trouble typing up scripts, for example. I do a couple of pages and then wander off to play Angry Birds for an hour.

Links
1. Check out "The Pen," by Veda, an era-appropriate Victorian gothic romance which is hot, sweet, and actually kind of creepy. Hard to hit all those targets at once, I imagine.
2. Anybody recognize the artist for this totally NSFW picture? Looks a little like Mentaiko, but sort of not. Maybe his style is evolving.
3. These sorts of things tend to annoy me -- I have to walk past Jonathan Safran Foer's idiot new book with my hands in my pockets to stop from punching myself in the head (something at which I am fairly practiced after more than a decade of bookstore-related exposure to TokyoPop's oeuvre) -- but I think this one is really, really pretty.
4. Crows: They're like people, only not completely worthless and full of shit!
5. I haven't actually watched this yet, but everybody seems to think it is amazing.

Haven't had one of these in ages:



Also, too:



Also, I am both Tumblring and Twittering again, because usually I don't have enough material for an actual post and I'm probably also preoccupied trying to figure out if that sentence-terminal て means "please do or don't do [verb]" or "I am a mangaka who likes run-on sentences."

The end.


* The Daily Beast is profoundly retarded, but in this case we're giving it a pass.

ETA: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEIIIIIIIIIIOOOOOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUUUYYYYY!!!

So, as you probably know, I am sort of sick* and I’m feeling really wiped-out and pissy and moody and I haven’t e-mailed anybody in weeks, which is compounding my feelings of guilt and assholery daily, and also I made the very worst chicken pot-pie in the history of mankind for dinner and I am just in a really bad mood in general. No translations today, sorry.

I was planning a post about all the shows I’m watching this fall (I am watching several!) (What is this, 2002?) (Yes! It is!), but I get the feeling that if I tried writing it right now, every review would be a negative F minus. So: no on that one, too. I know. (Don’t cry.)

This is what I was doing last night:


Unable to restrain my intense feminine curiosity, I clicked on the MARRAIGE FIRST image. Because, really? Are we going there, Jesus?

We are going there. I got to this exceedingly strange site, which appears to be called 'Realistic Imaginations YOUTH,' and which features web graphics that depict a bloody Christ being anally serviced by an angel in the guise of Lex Luthor. I think, based on context clues, that these are exactly the sort of people who would like to put marraige first whether you like it or not.

This was the very first thing I saw.

This was also rather nice:

Haha, yes! "Forced into the king’s harem" = "won a beauty contest." That explains a lot.
And Esther is such a ravishing rubber white woman! No wonder King Ahasuerus was so eager to marraige her.

SOME LINKS FOR YOU:
1. Dear Benedict Cumberbatch: I take it back. You’re prettier when you don’t talk.
2. Why fiscal austerity is an even worse idea than you thought it was.
3. Funny.
4. Useful.
5. Cdesign Proponentsism and You
6. Clem hates the fags! Clem hates the fags so much. Clem is not a-goin’ to wear no faggy purple clothes jest bekase sum fags killed thereselfs! (NOTE: That is a direct quote.) (NOTE: Clem is on the school board in a town in Arkansas.) (NOTE: The comments are amazing.)
7. Every 11-year-old boy in the world and I just leapt out of our computer chairs and made a wheezy lap around the living room.

That is all.


* I have some kind of very exciting hormone thing happening. It is almost like puberty, only even more awful. So far, my GP has diagnosed me with a horrible vitamin D deficiency (I have a prescription supplement), and I’m going on Monday for a thyroid uptake scan and then to an endocrinologist on the sixteenth. So, wish me luck, all right?