head #17

I wrote this on Thursday evening, which is when I intended to post it, but then I got bukkaked by my archenemy the Weather — who only this morning released his strangle-hold on my internets.

People have been talking a lot about Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged lately, because some really stupid fans made a movie about the novel. And, I know, anybody who has ever read (or attempted to read) Atlas Shrugged is flabbergasted by this turn of events, because Atlas Shrugged has the philosophical weight and the narrative impetus of a Cabbage Patch Kids Birth Certificate. It is a monstrously lame book, and every last one of its premises is bland, inert, and facetiously incorrect. You might as well make a movie out of a Chinese take-out menu. At least it would have attractive, distracting subtitles.

But I keep accidentally scrolling into the comments on articles like this, or that one. Or this one. Or that one.

…Maladjusted dorkwad glibertarian say what?

( Jesus wept! )

Well, that was therapeutic!

I have three really busy days this week, and then shit gradually slows down to almost nothing for the rest of the summer. On that note, I have a couple of mind-blowingly awesome projects which I hope to share with you later in the season, and also I will get those fucking translations up soon wtf. I am also beginning to be gravely concerned by my treatment of Rashoumon, which, now I look at, it is really awful. Also I was somehow finagled into translating a light novel, which is so, so unbelievably gross, oh my god, you have no idea. All of those things will be making their way to a monitor near you sometime this summer.

Next post: Needs more Sherlock, and the Kindle, too — oops!

My cat had to have one of her canine teeth pulled. Last Wednesday. The other canine tooth is beginning to loosen, too, and will have to come out sooner or later (let’s hope for "later" — I’m actually hoping to wait until it’s almost out on its own and can be yanked with forceps like the first one, because she is almost fifteen years old and has asthma and I don’t want her sedated unless there’s no other option). Of course, she was fine as soon as she got out of the cat carrier when we came from the vet’s office, and I spent four days crying intermittently because I love her to pieces and the only heirloom bequeathed to me by my bevy of Irish-American ancestors is the Sentimental Weeping Idiot gene. (The rest of her teeth are, to quote the vet, "fantastic for fifteen." So, that’s weird, probably, but really good? Please?)

Anyway. So, I still have people’s Christmas presents sitting on the piano. In the future I will invent some kind of new Christmas/Valentine’s Day hybrid celebration in order to clear my conscience in these sorts of situations. I was able to upgrade most of the cards, however. ♥

( Loooooooong post. )

SOME LINKS, FOR JESUS BETTY FRIEDAN:
1. This Paul Krugman story is hilariously topped with the words "Can Europe Be Saved?" (implication: no!!!!), but it’s actually about the ill-considered adoption of the Euro. It is not interesting, but if you like that sort of thing it could be useful, potentially.
2. This is the very hilarious review of 43’s awesome novel Decision Points, by the London Review of Books. I just now noticed it exists, because it was linked by Wonkette. I am not up in the London Review of Books on the regular.
3. From The Guardian, a piece on the fiction/internets ouroboros which I have not yet finished reading myself.


These are better screenshots of my new boyfriend, who looks, upon close inspection, like he wandered out of Labyrinth, limping, after David Bowie was finished with him. I hope he will be named something like 'Valumphis Stagne.'

This season of American Idol is too boring even for my granny.

On the other hand, this is very funny.
ETA link, because the iframe wouldn’t load.

I recently learned that I am the last person in all the world who downloads fansubs. I think this is because I originally visited Crunchyroll back when it was staffed by, I surmised, photosynthetic multi-celluar plant-people who were heroically fansubbing Naruto despite the fact that they lacked formal brain structures and spoke neither English nor Japanese — and I had my delicate sensibilities offended to an extreme degree. Also, I am not paying for fansubs. Ahaha! HAHAHA! What? Really? Are you kidding me? People are paying for fansubs? Voluntarily? Why? You kids today, with your fancy bullet trains and your Lawrence Welk records and your super-sweet iced tea.

Is that it? I think that’s it.

Next week: Sherlock! Probably. (And the Kindle.)

BORED. BORED. BORED!

From Noki: BAHAHAHAHA! Now Little Buddha will finally have some competition! (I used to own Little Buddha on VHS, incidentally.)

This is America, son! Where all the illiterate assholes are free — as assholes, and maybe, all creatures should be.

OH OH ALMOST FORGOT: SPEAKING OF WHICH. YAY! Fucking finally.

So, Glee was actually really good tonight, probably just because I said it sucked — although I think it should probably change its name to We Love You, Kurt, Because You Are So Very Adorable and Also Good at Acting. So, it is exactly like Buffy: The Crap Years: every fourth episode is great enough that you forget how bad the other three were, I adore exactly one character and I want to split-kick everybody else in the face, and imaginary gayness is still far more entertaining than imaginary straightness. Dude, I’d better go refill my Accutane prescription! Don’t wanna run out of that stuff :[

Here’s the always-awesome BTB on Glee’s use of the word "tranny." Glee is possibly the only show on television that enrages both fundamentalist Christians and vagina-necklace feminists in equal and constant measure, which is actually kind of comical, sadly enough; I don’t find it transgressive (usually), because it is almost impossible for me to be "offended" by anything that could be even generically classified as art. Also, I am pretty chill with the idea that all Americans — black Americans, gay Americans, Asian-Americans, whatever other kinds of Americans may be hiding out there who have yet to receive their convenient, easy-to-apply identity-politics labels in the mail — labor under stereotypes which can be fruitfully engaged and mocked in public, without hurting anybody. So if, say, Asian-Americans find themselves battling the deeply insulting notion that they all look alike and are indistinguishable from one another (which is just weird, anyway), and then someone on a popular teevee show (Glee, remember) refers to an Asian-American character as the "Other Asian," that doesn’t twist my knickers into an anchor knot at all. Not because I am a hipster racist! (I promise!) But because, you know, at least somebody finally noticed. I can understand why other people might be sort of put-off by it, though. This is America! A lot of brave men died in the cold at Valley Forge so that you could be offended by anything you like. But, I cannot understand why these already-angry people continue to get so het up about every possible 'controversial’ topic that ever appears on Glee, nor do I understand why they keep watching it if it’s so terribly, terribly abusive to their fragile psyches. Turn Glee off and find something else to do with your time, kids! It’s fun and easy. I turn the teevee off five or six times a day. Just, please don’t get all boycott-happy on me and start accusing me of being a bad feminist because I won’t stop watching Glee myself. That’s some Rush Limbaugh shit right there, is what that is. It’s only a teevee show! Just like Sarah Palin.

Anyway, my renaissance of Glee love is not what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about this:



Or, I will want to talk about it (I’m sure) after I’ve read it. I am a little worried about it, quite frankly; Dream looks very muscular and competent and butch in this comic, as though he's the one who goes around opening all of the other Endless's pickle jars. Also, he is sporting a relatively restrained hairstyle, and he is wearing a very restrained (and incredibly un-Japanese) outfit. With a color on it! That is a little unfortunate for him, I think. Dream is engaged in a hot, highly-constested race for Biggest Hater of Colors on My Clothes with his bff/soulmate Angelina Jolie, and I would hate to see him lose just because of this one story. You know how Angelina gloats.

But, what I really wanted to talk about was this thing I found on Demonoid while I was futilely Googling Sandman comics as I waited for my copy of Dream Hunters to be shipped to me. It is called The Song of Orpheus, and boy, does it ever suck.

( Let me explain why, because I can tell by that look in your eyes that you care. )

Yes, yes, of course I will find this thing in the comics store and buy it. I am not like that. You know what I am like! I learned Japanese so that I could stop subjecting my precious, precious eyeballs to the illegitimate whore-bath that is scanlations. I will totally give Neil Gaiman his richly-deserved Orpheus money, because Gaiman is still kind of hot, and who wants to make hot people sad? I am a total masochist who likes it when Daddy hits me.

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?

I’m reading The Man Who Was Thursday. I’ve been reading The Man Who Was Thursday for like ten months, even though it is only 150 pages of large-ish print. This is because it’s kind of boring, and also because I have major, first-degree problems with dead white Christian English dudes telling me what time it is. Seriously: You are defending a world in which homosexuality was a fucking felony*. Because of Britannia, and ladies, and the Queen (or possibly the King). So really, really, really, Mr. Chesterton: Shut the fuck up. For Jesus.

Now I have a marginal amount of sympathy for T.S. Eliot.

(Which is made even more difficult by the fact that some of the shit Chesterton wrote was amazing! PAIN.)

Anyway, so, at the beginning of the book, Chesterton’s intentionally-annoying protagonist attends Chesterton’s (possibly intentionally-hilarious) interpretation of an anarchist’s meeting. And then:

Before he had done so, the long, lean man with the American beard was again upon his feet, and was repeating in a high American monotone —

"I beg to second the election of Comrade Syme."

Which made me think of this:



That is all.

* Among many other problems.