langwidere: i am repulsed by wholesomeness. (i made it! it is true.)
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.)

i like cox.

Apr. 1st, 2011 03:28 pm
langwidere: a cintia dicker editorial (diet coke makes you beautiful)
I have some kind of gross stomach flu! Luckily, I am still on "spring break" (haha, it is snowing) so I can roll myself into the bathroom* as many times a day as I would like (I would not like to roll myself into the bathroom any times a day, to be honest) (well, maybe once a day). Disaster averted.

Also I have a very terrible new haircut. When my mother saw it, she said: "Oooo, it looks like you killed a rare and sacred bird and then put the carcass on your head!" I am still wondering, actively, whether or not she intended this comment to be a compliment. (It's just hair; I find these sorts of things merely annoying.)

Between the bathroom-rolls, I have spent all my time today watching a person called "Brian Cox" on the YouTube**. I first encountered Brian Cox at The Tinned Fruit Conundrum, as you do, and at the time I thought he was a cast member from Little Britain or something. In my defense, he is a physicist, and physicists are practically indistinguishable from comedians in nearly all applications. Also, I thought he was high. And wearing lipstick. I expected a man in a dress to come wandering into the scene and hit him in the face with a fish. Gradually I began to realize that he was a serious individual and probably neither actually really high nor wearing cosmetics, but instead of losing interest I somehow began to find him even more compelling. This is because I can't understand a word that comes out of his mouth (also he is incredibly good-looking and he has shiny black hair, two things which always help me to maintain my interest in anything). He smiles incessantly, for some reason, even when he is calling people fuckwits, so it is impossible to read his lips. His words have too many vowels, and not enough syllables. Trying to figure out what he's talking about is a process of discovery. I eventually realized, for example, that the often-repeated word "feeengz" means "things," because once I heard him apply the root "feeengh" to the prefix "nuff," to create the term "nufffeeengh," a cognate to the English word "nothing." This process is a million times more interesting than whatever dumb/boring space thing he is always blabbering about in inappropriately dramaturgical, Sherloquesque tones. ♥

Would you like to see some vaguely comical photos? )


* as you can see by the photos, I mean this literally

** What has happened to the YouTube today? I realize that the occasion of April 1 presents an utterly irresistible opportunity for asshats to promulgate sanctioned acts of blatant idiocy upon the internets, but I'm not quite understanding how the 1911 thing is supposed to be funny.
langwidere: sherlock holmes and dr. watson, from the recent bbc series (totally going for the kiss)
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!!!
langwidere: a fox-eared lamento character (キツネ耳)
Wheeeeee~!! There was snow and rain and wind last week and it killed my power/phone/internets/will to live for three days, and then upon finally being able to boot my somewhat elderly computer I discovered that my external HD was having digital seizures (it would randomly load and then disappear and then become unwritable or unreadable, etc.), so I spent four fun-filled days panicking/backing up files/buying and installing a new drive/auuugh. Naturally all my shit did not fit on my somewhat elderly computer’s hard disk at once, so I had to do it in batches and wait for my dying external drive to gradually cycle through its various stations of the electronic cross before I could get everything off it. Haha, fun.

Anyway, so, how have you been doing? Good? Okay.

I have nothing for you, go away.

No, no, I’m just kidding. I have… some links!
Click them, click them! )

I’m going to start twattering my links when I find them, from now on. In case you live for my linkposts (MOM!!).

Also I made a new layout for Cynn Corvus, out of that old drawing-ish thing I made in 2009 that looks a Anglo-Japanese lady cosplaying as the Virgin Mary dressed up as a kitsune in a kabuki play. Awesome, I know already.
I’ll put up a new index in the next couple of days, as soon as I find some nice artwork to deface make one.
I think everything else is good for a few months. It better be!
I’m thinking of making The Heart Goes 9 into a DW comm (I should have content going up in a couple of weeks). It would be much easier for me to structure entries, especially at first when I am guaranteed to have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. Also I would have more control over who has access to my translations, in the event that somebody tries to fuck with me (I do not anticipate that this will happen at all — but we are talking about a potential audience composed almost entirely of fujoshi of various stripes, so anything is possible). Obvs I would leave the thing open unless I was forced to lock it. Also I wouldn’t have to make a layout!

Anybody care? Silence = "no."

ETA: Is our children learning? This is was probably posted by a future President of the United States.

langwidere: aisling and pangur bán (you must go where i cannot)
I don’t want to talk about Christmas right now, because it was a little depressing, and right now I am ENRAGED. WHY AM I ENRAGED, YOU ASK? WELL, THIS IS WHY. I THINK YOU DONE JUST SLAPPED ALL THE CUSSWORDS RIGHT OUT MY MOUTH, THE BBC. SHIT.

Here is a physical representation of my boredom, in HTML code, with musical numbers:
(It doesn't have musical numbers.)
Too bored to think up cut text. )

Lastly, many really awesome and apparently insane people visit my website!



In other news! IN OTHER NEWS, Legolas will appear in The Hobbit, which is only right and fitting given that part of the story takes place in Mirkwood, and he is the prince of that country. (Haha, I have been reading Narnia! Can you tell?) I am deeply alarmed by the fact that McKellen hasn’t signed on to be Gandalf again, however, and I will probably stampede later. All by myself. For great justice.

Please, man. Gandalf is the closest a dork will ever get to having a personal relationship with God.
You have to!
langwidere: a cintia dicker editorial (diet coke makes you beautiful)
Haven’t had one of these for awhile:



I wish there was some way to get the BBC World News without all the stupid sports shit in it.
(And then we’ll work on a version of the NYT without Douthat & Brooks.)
langwidere: i am repulsed by wholesomeness. (must be the truth)


 



I had to open up a PhotoBucket account, because Localhostr is dying and Flickr has, apparently, become the new favorite haunt of desperate dorky FaceBook losers who want random strangers to think they have millions and millions of ultra-hip friends. (This is also why I stopped using iPhoto; I don't want my photos 'pinned' to a stupid fucking digital map so everybody who knows me will realize how well-traveled and urbane I am, and I also don't need 'face-recognition technology' to help me identify and then organize photos of my oodles and oodles of pals — because doing that by hand would just take, you know, absolute decades. Because I'm so popular. Like, really, really popular. Look at me! Look at me! It was the pictures that got small.)
langwidere: i am repulsed by wholesomeness. (the hair is canon)
I'm doing it backwards this time! Because I am already chasing the e-mail train like a sad drunk hobo toting a picnic-plaid bindle:

My teeth came out fine (I only had two of them removed instead of four, because it was taxing enough to convince the dentist — whom I had never seen before and who was not the usual guy — that I shouldn't have pretty much every tooth in my head extracted and replaced with adamantine dental appliances) (I plan to have the other two removed in the normal way this fall) and initially I felt a little dopey about the panic attacks. But, then they switched me from Vicodin to Percocet with no break, I had a horrible reaction, my blood pressure shot up like a rocket, and I subsequently discovered that the month of high-spectrum antibiotics and narcotics had given me a gastric ulcer. Whee! I'm suddenly a 78-year-old man! Go get grandpa his slippers, little Johnny, he can't find his walker! My blood pressure is far, far lower than it was, but it's still a little high for me (it is usually a semi-reptilian 100/70-ish), so that's fun. I can expect it to be higher than normal and to spike occasionally for the next two months (!!), but I should be okay. Eventually!

Oh, and also: Also, I am now on an exciting semi-toxic proton-pump inhibitor drug called "Nexium," because of the ulcer, which is unbearably painful, and I can't take any supplements. Not even fish oil! The doctor actually told me no fish oil. What kind of a doctor tells a patient to stop taking fish oil? And no spearmint tea, either! No lipoic acid! No astragalus! I woke up this morning with my itchy eyes swelled nearly shut, and I believe I have recently broken the record for Most Consecutive Lip-Flapping Snot-Launching Explosive Sneezes in a 43-Second Interval. Also, I've had to take Albuterol nine times in the last two weeks! I haven't had to take Albuterol more than twice a year for a decade.

It could have been far worse, though. Really. Much worse. So, I'm just going to cut the whine with a little seltzer (not that I can drink seltzer right now), close my eyes, and think of England:
ALARMING SEGUE ALERT!!!
You know what I like? Sherlock. I really, really like Sherlock. In fact, if I liked Sherlock just a little bit more, my official mailing address would be: 221B BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH'S GARBAGE BINS, LONDON, ENGLAND NW1 6XE. (I had to take Yahoo! Answers' word about the postcode; London is very confusing. Like, evidently Baker Street is located in Marylebone, which is part of the City of Westminster? Which is a part of London? I guess? Is the City of Westminster a neighborhood? So, why not call it 'the Neighborhood of Westminster'?) (If I ever manage to make it to any part of London, I will probably be robbed and then forced into slavery by a tightly-knit gang of ordinary British rats in less than three minutes!) Anyway, I will be writing about Sherlock a lot in the future (there will be gifs), but for now just go download it and content yourself with these reviews (including this one, which was written by, apparently, Helen Keller).

Also: BANG! KAPOW! BLAM! BOINGGGGGG! LOOK OUT!!

(For the first time maybe ever, I really like my DW layout.)

Lastly, I just bought my last Libre comic, and I am now looking for a good free raws comm/source. Anybody have a favorite?


* In American, this expression translates to: Hold onto your meatballs, and don't ever sneeze.

ETA: I just found this review, in which a lady favorably compares Sherlock to opera? For no reason? And then she admits that opera sucks. I kind of like her, I think.
langwidere: a cintia dicker editorial (diet coke makes you beautiful)
NEWS!
I’m keeping most of the awfulest news to myself now. I opened up an Instapaper account to list articles about homophobia, institutionalized bigotry/imbecility, and the underlying 'science' (or lack thereof), so from now on I’m going to concentrate only on things I find interesting, whether they are news or not. (HI, MOM!)
I don’t like Doctor Who either, bwana.
Anything that gets him off House’s Anatomy. Or, actually, The House’s Anatomy Jamboree and Sponsored Advertisement for the Federally-Mandated Birth Control and Compulsory Euthanasia Program.
Ireland is becoming more authentically destitute! The tourists and seventeenth-generation 'immigrants' will be happier, now. If it occurs to the modern Irish to reenact the Potato Famine, they’ll be rolling in American dollars faster than you can say: "Put 'em all together and they spell MOTHER."
Let’s make sure we get this in the correct chronological order, shall we? So, the police in Belgium raided the seat of the Catholic Church there, as part of an ongoing investigation into sex abuse by priests and clerics. This made the child psychologist who is in charge of the Church’s own investigation into its own abuses cwwwy wike a widdlw gurw. Then, some cardinal complained that some other cardinal, who is apparently a child molester, wasn’t dealt with swiftly or harshly enough. That made the Pope mad! Boy, did that ever make the Pope mad. It made the Pope mad because where the Pope lives, it is apparently the 15th fucking century. If the police in Brussels can somehow find a way to use a time machine to travel to the Vatican — which has thus far managed to maintain its horrendous autonomy because, again, it exists in the 15th fucking century — and arrest everybody who lives there on strong suspicion of being appalling motherfuckers, I think the world will be a slightly less miserable place. Also, Cardinal Complainer is probably going to be the next Pope! Because, in additional to being pedophiles, Catholic clerics are evidently also masochists.
If there were really a God, this nice lady would be the Pope, and the world really would be a better place. (WARNING: Get the Kleenexes before you read this story.)
“If you want to create a movement, take it a little slower.” By which he meant "monosyllabically." And hand out free cars. American audiences are suckers for a free car.
There are people who think Devon Aoki is funny-looking? Wow. Glasses are cool now, guys. Also, cutest Hollywood couple ever (if they’re actually dating). Also, this is the first interesting-looking movie I’ve seen advertised in ages. Yippee!
Gay people even have better tasteless criminals.
I kind of love Lainey (can you tell?) — and this article is one of the primary reasons. She’s a total snob, a label whore, and scold… and she adores Harry Potter. If she were a dude, I shudder to even fucking think. (The movie itself looks almost as bad as the last one.) (Except for Snape, of course.)

AND THEN:




Lastly, and SPEAKING OF HARRY POTTER, here is a space photo of a big scary "tower" in the 'Scorpius' constellation. A big, scary tower. Yes, indeedy. That’s a tower! It sure is. A scary, scary tower. A tower. That’s scary! (It’s a tower.)
langwidere: the everything is terrible logo (everything really is terrible)
SUM NÜZ 4 U (BOTH REAL & NOT REAL):
# Looks like they’re thinking of starting up the Hundred Years’ War again! Fun for the whole family!
# Could this be the stupidest thing I’ve ever read? I mean: They actually argued themselves out of their own conclusions.
# But, no. No. It was only the second-stupidest thing I’ve ever read. This is the winner. (Just in case you had any cause to actually believe the libertardian partyline, this one proves that it is the moron, and not the cream, which rises to the top.)
# At the risk of inspiring life-threatening Angels & Demons flashbacks, check out this ultra-boring article about a new theory suggesting there may be more Higgs bosons whizzing around not-space than scientists previously thought. No, I don’t care, either.
# Continuing the literary theme (just ride it): All the Pretty Horses!
# Feeling suicidal this afternoon? No? Well, I can fix that in a hurry!
# And part two!
# This article about To Kill a Mockingbird made my head explode, like, nine different times. Not in a good way. (I actually sent them a comment, which I do not believe they will publish as it was around 4000 words long and had no punctuation.)
# American Apparel is the company whose models look like the lice-ridden, witch-chinned, underfed, scraggly-haired, hollow-eyed fugmonster survivors of an apocalyptic science fiction plague. Down to the horrible hodgepodge of mismatched, ill-fitting clothing. The illiteracy is just a fun bonus.
# I’ve eaten salad every day for lunch for the last three years. WHAT’S YOUR POINT?
# A really nice Safari reader hack. Now to figure out why/how to use Safari reader!
# Can someone tell me what this tutorial is meant to teach you? My guess: How to paint like a 3-year-old with developmental disabilities. Because what is that?

AND THEN:




O HEI IT LOOKS LIKE I RAN OUT OF SPACE FOR A POST OOOPS TRY AGAIN LATER.
langwidere: i am repulsed by wholesomeness. (Default)
(I posted this to my WP blog yesterday, which is made of failage and will be gone in 3 or fewer hours:)



Eric Pickles heads up the new British government’s Ministry of Silly Names — but I fear they have a long way to go before they overtake the former contingent, which was populated with representatives named things like "Lord Adonis," "Alistair Darling," "Ed Balls," and "Jack Straw." But, never give up, Pickles!

Never give up.