I keep on meaning to update this thing with various posts that I've been randomly thinking about, but then I get lazy or distracted. Myu.

Yesterday night I finished Draft Zero of an experimental/exploratory fic of mine. I already had three chapters done and most of a 4th chapter drafted for a couple of months already, but about a week ago I said to myself: "Self, you are entirely sick of leaving your million-and-one ideas unfinished. So, why don't you knock out at least one of those ideas, and finish a draft of this particular fic within a week?" I set my minimum wordcount for at least 1000 words a day, which I made with varying degrees of pwnage (from "just barely" to "PWNED"). I clocked out last night at 13 chapters and almost 27,000 words. I'm also proud of myself because I made myself write out the important plot scenes, instead of (as I tend to do in things like NaNo) writing "[insert important plot scene here]". The only places where I did that were for a fight sequence (which started and ended with important plot stuff that I wrote; it's the actual action part that's missing) and for some flashback stuff in the last chapter that really only serves to deepen the main character (he's a one-time character from the fandom, and the flashback refers to canonical stuff, with my own personal twists). So I'm taking a break and spending the weekend doing anything but being productive.

This means that I finally sat my ass down and watched something. In this case, it's the first five episodes of an anime called Tatakau Shisho: The Book of Bantorra. One of Crunchyroll's newsletters mentioned this anime, and I was sold from the moment they mentioned the "Armed Librarians", which made me think of Yomiko Readman from Read or Die. Plus, well, come on. "Armed Librarians" just sounds awesome. I would want to be an Armed Librarian! They'd be badass and bookish.

Anyway, the series is set in a fantasy world where people's souls "fossilize" into stone tables called Books when they die, which other people can read just by touching it. The Armed Librarians collect and protect these Books and keep them in the Bantorra Library, named for the god of the past. Opposing them is the Church of Drowning in God's Grace, which refuses to give up their Books to the Bantorra Library. Their basic tenet is in self-fulfillment of material desires, no matter what they are, so they can make themselves as happy as possible. This means that when they die, their Books will be perfect and pure and will ascend to God in Heaven. Thus, they refuse to hand over their Books to the Bantorra Library.I was really excited for this...but in the end I was pretty disappointed.

The main character, Volken, is an Armed Librarian who is extremely skilled in battle but with a strong sentimental streak - in other words he's a typical do-gooder hero. In fact, that sentimental streak gets him sidelined from the main action going on in episodes 2-4, and the particular circumstances of that lead him to make a run for it at the end of episode 4. The only redeeming trait so far is his badass action sequence in the first episode, where he controls these bladed rings to attack and float (if he stands on them) - he uses the rings as a moving staircase up the side of a ship. The other characters so far range from "could be interesting" to "snorefest." Volken's (likely) Designated Love Interest, Milepoch, feels like she should be more badass than she actually is. Minor spoilers: As a result of Volken stealing this one priceless artifact with an utterly unpronounceable, unspellable name and fleeing Bantorra Library, Milepoch ends up so distraught that she's distracted from her duties as an Armed Librarian, and gets permission to use this other artifact to wipe out her memories and feelings about Volken. Really? Really? I can see how this is going to end fifty miles away without my glasses on. If the anime doesn't do what I think it's going to do with this plot, good on them. Hamyuts Meseta, the leader of the ALs, is at least entertaining - she's this boobalicious woman who inexplicably leaves her button-up blouse undone all the time, and is laid-back and playful yet tough, to the point of seeming heartless. She has the ability to kill people just by flicking pebbles at them. 'Cause ya see, she's so strong that she can fling pebbles - either with her fingers or with a sling - fast enough to break the sound barrier. Another potentially interesting character is Ireia, who is an elderly maid at the Bantorra Library but also an Armed Librarian herself, one of the strongest. In the opening sequence of episode 5 (they changed it suddenly from the previous four, which I'm actually glad for 'cause that one was pretty boring for the liveliness of Ali Project's opening), they show Ireia lifting up this huge-ass rock above her head, which is pretty epic to behold. Wikipedia was where I confirmed her strength and status in the ALs, but it was also where I confirmed that she's going to die at some point, which is a bummer.

In terms of animation, the first episode was really good looking. (I guess it would have to be, since it was action-oriented.) And then it went downhill pretty damn fast. Like, by episode two fast. (Interestingly, the way I noticed was when Hamyuts drops from a flying plane onto the ground below for a mission. When she stands up and stretches, you can really tell that the quality went kaput. This probably says really bad things about my mind.) And although it pulled itself up a little for the major fight in episode four, overall it was rather standard. The backgrounds are quite nice though. The characte designs are okay - I'm mostly confused by the fact that there seems to be some sort of uniform for the Armed Librarians, yet the only significant character who ever wears it is Volken. Milepoch's wearing some sort of military uniform for some reason. One of the secondary characters, Noloty, is dressed as though she's going to a freaking beach. Everyone else is pretty much unremarkable. The music does its job, although I really enjoy the opening song "Datengoku Sansen" by Ali Project.

Plot? I don't know, there's so much going on. And not necessarily in a good way. I'm going to let this review of episodes 1-6 (spoiler-free) speak for me:

With its interesting fantasy conceit (books that, when touched, provide direct access to the memories of the deceased), superior production values, and a triptych of strong, sympathetic and tantalizingly interconnected leads, Tatakau Shisho initially seems poised on the cusp of fantasy excellence. The first sign that there's trouble in paradise comes when the visuals start slipping in episode two, and before long it becomes clear that the series is spinning dangerously out of control. It wants very badly to be a daring mixture of political fantasy, shonen-styled action and transcendental romance, but ends up pulling itself in so many different directions that it simply falls apart. Intriguing ideas are floated (the destructive capabilities of religious zeal, the persistence of humanity in the face of inhuman degradation) only to be abandoned and left dangling; the memory-book concept devolves into a hollow gimmick; the romance gets shunted aside to make way for fantasy riffs on bioterrorism and free will, which are in turn sidelined in favor of destructive action-movie thrills. Far from excellence, the resultant series is a flailing mess.

As it barrels forward, scattering half-finished subplots in it wake, the series somehow manages to hold itself together long enough to salvage a reasonably exciting climax from the rushed and ruined remains of its plot. All else failing, Hamyuts Meseta makes an excellent action heroine, and her train-top showdown with Shindeki nasty Cigal is a genuine jaw-dropper. Which brings the series to episode five where, as if exhausted by the effort of maintaining cohesion, it falls completely to pieces. Without even a cursory attempt to address its myriad of loose ends and orphaned ideas, the series lurches into a second story arc, abandoning with shocking callousness both Colio Tonies and his time-tripping romantic partner Shiron. By episode six Hamyuts Meseta too has basically exited the picture, leaving her dull do-goodnik underlings to carry the story. The series might as well have put a shotgun in its mouth and pulled the trigger. Hamyuts, Colio and Shiron aren't just characters in the series, they are the series, and without them…well, it ends up with its brains—or more accurately, its heart—all over the roof.

While I'm not sure that I'd classify Hamyuts, Colio, and Shiron as the series itself, they are the characters that have (had?) the most potential to be really interesting. But by the end of episode 4, it feels as though they've already ended the particular arc with Colio and Shiron, and it's like, what? Why? Why even include that in the first place? Was the point of it just to provide a justification for the D.E.M.-like ending?

And now I'm reconsidering my impression that Volken was the main character of this series, because if you look at the promo art on both the review I linked and on the official anime website, the most prominent character isn't Volken, but Hamyuts. (And she's listed first on the character list too.) Which makes me feel slightly better about the series, and it would explain why Volken got shafted for episodes 2-5. But considering that the review I linked says Hamyuts goes offstage by episode 6, well...she'd better come back soon.

TL;DR Epic premise, disappointing results. Which goes to show that execution is everything, whether that means executing the premise with style and panache, or executing the premise with style and panache at the guillotine.

Look, author. If you're going to have a pronunciation guide at the front of your novel that spells out the correct way of pronouncing certain Welsh(?) and Irish words that may be unfamiliar to most of your audience, couldn't you at least have done a little bit more research and also spelled out the correct pronunciation for the Japanese word "kitsune", too? It's not kit-soon, it's kit-soo-nay (roughly, since the "tsu" is its own syllable in Japanese). I can understand explaining the pronunciation for some of the words, because I definitely would've been lost on trying to independently figure out the pronunciation for "Daoine Sidhe" (doon-ya shee) or "Luidaeg" (lou-sha-k). But at least the American English transliteration of "kitsune" sort of looks like how it's pronounced, and it's just one itty bitty step to adding that last syllable, "ne", into the mix.

On the other hand, most of these other words have me scratching my head as to why the author thought they'd need to be included in a pronunciation guide. Seriously, "manticore"? "Nixie"? "Kelpie"? "Puca"? And the author even helpfully provides the plural forms, too! Did you know that the plural of "banshee" is "banshees"? I certainly didn't, no ma'am!

This makes me want to chuck the book against the wall and I haven't even read a single page of prose yet. But I want to give this book a chance because it's been getting good reviews from authors I respect.

[/I'll take overreactions brought on by personal frustrations and late nights for $500, Alex!]

Yes, there is a reason I re-used the title from this entry. And it's because, once again, one little thing after another kept popping up as I was trying to be productive and bit by bit it katamari'd my rage to levels over 9000 and I really wanted to maul someone.

Today, I woke up, intending to finish off my ART260 project. I...

1) Became increasingly dissatisfied with the quality of the last few pictures I had to draw and outline. "Well, whatever, this is just for school and it'll be at a smaller size anyway, and it fits the style a bit too, so it's not that big a deal."

2) Scanned the pictures in, played around with Illustrator's Live Trace function, only to find that it wasn't producing the kinds of lines I wanted - it looked more as though I'd just run all the sketches through a Levels or Curves adjustment on Photoshop. "Grr, whatever. Smaller size, fits the style, and I'm running out of time."

3) Took way longer than I thought to color in all the sketches. "Blah! No way am I going to get this done in time to head to campus and print out at the lab. I'm going to go to Kinko's and pay for a print so that I don't show up tomorrow without a project."

4) Went to the nearby Kinko's and got told that my 13"x19" color print was going to have a 24-hour turnaround. "OH FUCK NO!"

5) Went back home, proceeded to try and save my original .psd file as a .jpeg so I can resize it, only to find that Photoshop won't save my .psd as a .jpeg because of a program error. "WHAT IS THIS I DON'T FUCKING EVEN"

6) Saved the file as a .png, resized it, brought it to Kinko's, got it printed, found out that the skin tones on the people were wonky looking. "...I GIVE UP, MAN. I GIVE THE FUCK UP."

For what it's worth, here's the final project, although because it's on Photobucket as a resized JPEG, the quality is incredibly blurry, but you should still be able to read the text. I'm planning on revisiting this at some point to get smoother lines and better coloring, but that point is definitely not now. GRAR.

(Also, I found out later that I could, actually, have just saved my .png file as a .jpeg if I needed/wanted to. I think there must be something wrong with the .psd file itself, though fuck me with scissors if I know what it is.)

Hahaha, it's Week Three of NaNoEdMo and I am so behind - still stuck at only 14 hours and 10 minutes of logged editing time. Doing the math...if I picked things up again on Monday, I'd have to log 4 hours a day in order to reach 50 hours by the end of the month. Oops! I might able to cut that down a tiny bit if I can get my ART260 final project (which is, ironically enough, about NaNoWriMo) done by tonight, because that means I'd be able to do work on Sunday. Still, I gotta step up the game.

What's really bad is that I find myself also thinking about my NaNo2007 project, Glass Houses. I think this is more a result of me banging my head against the wall over Daemonsong than it is a loss of interest in Daemonsong, and possibly also just a general lack of ability to concentrate on my part. Whatever the case, it's really annoying, although it's probably good that I'm doing even a little bit of groundwork for Glass Houses, because I do plan to tackle it at some point, so any little bit helps. Even if that point is a couple of years in the future because I don't have the talent or knowledge yet to pull off what I want to do, which is to write Glass Houses in a similar way as to the Japanese light novel form. The prose style shouldn't give me issues, since it's typically simplified with short, direct paragraphs, but the format requires illustrations that I'm not sure I have the talent to pull off (and I refuse to delegate the task to someone else). Plus, of course, there's the plotting issue to deal with (how many volumes? IT'LL NEVER END, MWAHAHAHAHA), and figuring out what kind of story I want to tell. Ideally, I'd like Glass Houses to be my "fuck it, I am going to have lots of crazy nonsensical fun with this series and you can't fuckin' stop me motherfuckers" - the tone would be similar to most of my fanfiction. At any rate, I'd definitely prefer for it to be more humorous than Daemonsong.

Okay, gotta get going. This ART260 project won't finish itself...although that'd be pretty sweet.

Damn, if it isn't one thing going wrong, it's another.

Last night, as I settled down to work on my ART224 final project due Monday...

1) I realized that the pictures that I took with the digital SLR camera that I thought were .RAWs were actually .JPEGs, resulting in an incredible loss of information and a generally crappy quality that blurred a lot of the details. (Though to be fair, I suspect part of the problem also comes from my own lack of skill with the focus function on the SLR.) Still serviceable, just nowhere near as nice.

2) Which is just as well, since apparently my version of Photoshop CS2 wouldn't open the one .RAW file that I had anyway.

3) I realized that I'd left one of the pictures I needed back in the storage section of my Mac lab computer.

Today...

1) I realized that I only had ten sheets of glossy photo paper left. And that I had exactly ten photos to print.

2) And the lab didn't have any glossy paper for me.

3) One of my photos (incidentally, one of the ones that ended up .JPEG) got fucked a bit - the size was off. I have no idea what the issue was - scaling? Printer layout? Whatever the case, I ended up having to chop down the other nine photo prints so that they'd be consistent with that one.

4) Wow, the print quality is even worse than I thought, and I can see some mistakes that I made when I was doing the B&W masking against the original color photo which were nigh invisible while working on the computer!

Blah, doesn't matter. The project's done and I can start worrying about ART260 and HAA237 now.

***

Today marks the first time that I've ever been able to ride the El from Midway Airport to Fullerton station without having to make a transfer. Usually, this is impossible because of the way the Brown and Orange Lines are routed: they circle around the Loop before returning back to their home stations (north in the case of the Brown Line, and south in the case of the Orange Line). So the only way I can get north from the Orange Line or south from the Brown Line is if I make a transfer at some point in the Loop.

However, today there was some construction going on along the Wells and Van Buren side of the Loop, so any Loop-bound Orange Line trains ~*~magickally transformed~*~ into northbound Brown Line trains at the Roosevelt station. What a glorious, glorious day, being able to ride the train to school without having to worry about transfers! I wish every day were like today. (...minus the school project irritations.)

On Twitter, Smart Bitches Trashy Books posted a link to this book from Samhain Publishing, in which it is not at all apparent what that man on the cover could possibly be compensating for. [/sarcasm]

(Incidentally, I love the description at the bottom of the story synopsis. "Cornea-blistering sex scenes" makes it sound like the sex scenes would give you an STD so bad that your corneas would eventually melt off. Not exactly the sexiest image, that.)

That got me thinking, though: what would the female equivalent of this phenomenon be? A woman holding two Strategically Placed melons in her arms? A woman standing in a field of flowers with one particularly delicate bloom (bonus points if it's still just a flowerbud, actually) covering up her poon?

My ART260 professor submitted my second project to the student curator, to be put up for display in the hallway of the third floor of the art building. The objective was to tell or suggest a narrative of some sort primarily through manipulation of type. That sort of thing is one of my (many) weak points as an artist, and overall I'm not really impressed with what I churned out. But then again, I'm not overly disappointed by it, either. It fulfilled the assignment requirements, and my professor thought it was good enough to put up, so I guess that's that.

Apologies for the bad lighting quality plus the flash; I was using my point-and-shoot (instead of the department's sexah digital DLR camera).







There's also a current call for student works to be submitted to the winter quarter thematic show.

Hide, Hyde, Hide and Seek: Winter Quarter Thematic Show
Submission deadline: January 15, 2010
Exhibition: Jan. 27 - Mar. 1
Opening reception: Jan. 27, 4:30pm - 6:00pm

This thematic exhibition will explore the notion of word play in three different ways: Hide, Hyde, and Hide and Seek. The interpretation can be literal; people or things, lost, missing, leaving or metaphorical; seeking, searching in spiritual, psychological and philosophical ways, as in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The artwork can adopt one of the three words or all three. Work selected for this exhibit may or may not initially appear to conform to this theme. However, consider what is hidden and what is revealed in both the work you see and the work you create.

I'd love to be able to do something for this. However, I am currently running into a big honkin' white brick wall of non-ideas at the moment.

I find myself utterly baffled that nearly all of the American-based "how-to" anime style artbooks feature some of the most generic, boring, or just plain bad anime-styled art out there. Manga Madness by David Okum is the most recent one I saw, on the shelves at Michaels while I was looking for other stuff for my ART113 project. Christopher Hart's stuff is slightly better, and this chick's work is generally competent, but this is just horrendous, totally amateur. I just...what? What?

I have a couple different reactions to being confronted with this sort of mediocrity:

1) Shame. I feel ashamed that my primary drawing talent lies in the animanga style. What makes this even worse is that sometimes I don't even think I have any ground to stand on when I talk about how crappy some of this art is. After all, what's special about my art? Not much, really, at the moment. It's generic animanga, albeit depicting characters from small-ish fandoms and occasionally a couple of OCs. I'm not such a hot-shot. [/ blatant breakage of Ebert's Law; I plead guilty by way of low self-esteem and a generally pessimistic nature]

On a bad day, Shame eventually gives way to...

2. Despair. Again, I have no reason to think that I'm any better than this mediocrity that gets published. I should just stop drawing right now, because I have no hope whatsoever of getting better because I can never focus on a single pursuit more than a few months at a time, and therefore I'll never improve. Real True Artists draw from life, or are super-realistic, or have an uber-distinctive trademark style that absolutely makes them stand out from the crowd and you absolutely cannot mistake their art for anyone else's, or they're heavily conceptual and convey lofty Universal Messages and are Slick and Edgy. Et cetera, ad nauseam, rinse, lather, and repeat.

On a good day, Shame eventually gives way to...

2) Defiance. Fuck that shit; I can draw so much better than that! I'm gonna be one of the best damn American-based animanga artists out there, yessiree, no doubts about that, fo shizzle mah nizzle. I'll practice my anatomy and learn how to draw normal people (instead of just good-looking ones) and awesomely detailed backgrounds (instead of abstract, potentially impressionist swathes of color) and figure out how to color oh-so-prettily and the whole fuckin' nine yards! AND EVERYONE WILL BOW DOWN BEFORE ME AND RECOGNIZE THEIR QUEEN

Right now, I'm currently having a Pretty Bad Day, possibly because I haven't extensively drawn in a while and so my skills are seriously out of whack. Lately I've been heavily focused on writing and music, and I've been struggling - as I have been for the past few years and as I probably will be for the rest of my life - with how to balance out a journey of improvement in three different artistic skillsets, none of which I'm willing to give up. Is there a way I can satisfactorily balance this? Or do I just have to put up and shut up and learn to prioritize one over the other? No real answers, yet.

I have no idea what to make of this book.

How are you supposed to connect with a story when you are told, by the storyteller herself, that she is a pathological liar?

Well, there's the mystery of it. "My father is a liar and so am I," says the teenage protagonist Micah Wilkins on the very first page. "But I'm going to stop. I have to stop.

"I will tell you my story and I will tell it straight. No lies, no omissions.

"That's my promise.

"This time I truly mean it."

So we read on, compelled to figure out what's true and what's not, and sympathetic to the cause of a person trying to go clean on a bad habit. Larbalestier jumps back and forth in time, from the present day (in the time following the death of Micah's love interest, Zach) to various times in the past, detailing Micah's family history, causing a disjointed, partially-fragmented narrative that can make it even harder to sort the truth from the lies. And there are many lies, not just to other characters in the story but to us, the readers. This makes it incredibly frustrating to get through the book, because sometimes it feels as though the author is constantly resetting the game for us, just when we think we've gotten the hang of things, and we're constantly called to question the veracity of the events Micah tells us about.

Somehow, despite this constant resetting, we do actually get somewhere in the story. The big reveal happens in the second part, where we find out a certain secret about Micah's "family illness" that, in retrospect, was hinted at right on the very first page and in the subsequent pages...and yet it made absolutely no sense to me. It felt as though Larbalestier was trying to merge two different genres, but messed up the balance somehow. She resolves it a little in the third part of the book, but despite how various story events are explained in light of the Big Reveal, I still found myself wondering why the hell I should believe this. Especially since, at a couple of points in the book, Micah actually insults the readers for believing what she says. This Amazon review nails it down best:

How hard is it to fool someone who doesn't know you? Not very. They don't know your nuances, they don't have any basis for comparison, and they are polite enough to give you the benefit of the doubt. So, lying to someone who doesn't know you, and then laughing at them for believing you, isn't a test of cleverness. It's not even a solid test of one's ability to lie - a real test would be to lie to someone who knows you well, and still get away with it.

It feels like an abuse of the goodwill of an audience to be entertained by the tales of a storyteller. We will suspend our disbelief if you give us something solid to suspend it on. Having that foundation continually break under the weight of a completely unreliable narrator is tiring and disheartening.

Conceptually, however, I'm still fascinated by this book, and I suspect it'll be a pretty important book in YA literature for a while. Larbalestier has apparently said (I can't remember where) that the basis of this story was finding out that so many of her fellow novelists were apparently liars as children, and she began to wonder about the connection between lying and between telling a story. Where is the line drawn, and why? To me, the distinction lies in the audience's preconceptions about what we are about to hear or read. In fiction, we know that what we are about to experience is not real, but we expect it to be as believable as possible. In real life, we expect the truth, as a matter of common courtesy and of being able to function in society, and to not get the truth is a betrayal.

But there's a different dynamic happening in Liar, something that treads this foggy line between the stories of fiction and the stories of real-life lies. Truth and meta-truth; lies and meta-lies. We know that this is a work of fiction, so we have no expectations about its veracity, and instead only ask for it to be believable. And yet, by virtue of the unreliable narrator, who is a pathological liar, these fictional events are made even more unreal, unbelievable.

There's something interesting here. Tough to get through, tough to swallow (I seriously can't stand that Big Reveal in the second part; it feels so out of place), and I feel that there is something lacking in the execution. But maybe that "something lacking" is part and parcel of the intended effect of the story? I can't say that I enjoyed Liar in the same way I enjoy many of my other books. I don't find it satisfying, but I do find it incredibly thought-provoking. And in the end, it's up to readers to figure out what they prioritize in reading - either on a more general level or more specifically - and why.

RE: NaNoWriMo 2009

Hear that in the distance? That looming, rumbling noise? That's not a thunderstorm* - that's the sound of countless writers pounding away at their keyboards, trying to vomit out as many words as possible in week one of NaNoWriMo before they black out temporarily in week two.

For once, I'm not going to have this problem - I'm revisiting my script from last year. Which I probably blabbed about at some point earlier in this LJ. Instead of doing 50,000 words in a month, I'm shooting for 50 hours of revision in a month. So far I've logged 3.5 hours, and I'm a little bit dlkjlakfjlakjdfa about having to deal with tangled plot threads and flat characters and paper-thin worldbuilding that makes no sense. But I console myself that at least Daemonsong is in hellah bettah shape than Glass Houses, hoo boy. I'm still excited, though - I think I have something potentially readable here. I don't think it'll become a bestseller, assuming that I manage to snag an agent and get this professionally published, but I think I can be proud of it.

It feels weird not to have a wordcount goal, not to be exulting in cracky-ass plot breakthroughs and bitching about how everything I'm writing is crap ('cause it is, particularly at that point). But I suppose I make up for my deviations by roping a meatspace friend of mine into his very first NaNo novel. I get to be his unofficial NaNo mentor - or NaNo nagger, probably. I also have a final project for my ART260 class in which I may take on the NaNoWriMo experience as my subject matter.

***

RE: Bibliophilia

Since logging Trick of the Light into my reading journal and writing up a review here, I've blown past a couple of other books. I wish I could do a more in-depth review of them, but since I'm running into my last few weeks of fall quarter, the projects and work are starting to pile on a bit and I can't concentrate as well as I'd like, and I don't want to put this off any longer. So, here's thoughts on some of the stuff I've read lately.

The Devil You Know by Mike Carey
Highly recommended. I picked this up because someone on fandom_lounge described it as a "more mature version of the Dresden Files". It lives up quite well to that particular description, although obviously it's a lot more complex than just SRS BSNS DRESDEN FILES. It's set in London, and centers around Felix Castor, an exorcist who returns to the trade after he quit because he majorly fucked up an exorcism for a friend. The wit and humor that one could expect to find in one of the Dresden Files books is a lot more toned down in The Devil You Know, but both take an irreverent, blackly humorous approach to the dark things in life and I enjoyed it greatly. In contrast to the Dresden Files, we see character change in Felix almost immediately, but I think that's a function of the fact that part of the emotional plotline is why he decides to ultimately return to the trade of exorcism. There's also a slightly out-of-left-field yet completely charming and loltastic twist right at the end, after the main plotline is tied up and done, which makes me want to pick up the rest of the series even more.


The Mermaid's Madness by Jim C. Hines (jimhines)
Highly recommended, though you should read the first book first. Takes place about a year after The Stepsister Scheme. In an annual diplomatic ceremony gone wrong, Queen Beatrice's soul is stolen from her when she's stabbed with a magical knife wielded by Lirea, a rather off-kilter mermaid princess who has killed her father, taken the throne, and is now looking for her sister Lannadae, intending on her killing her as well in order to cement her authority as queen of the merfolk (who prefer to be called undine). Danielle (Cinderella), Talia (Sleeping Beauty), and Snow (White) race against time to find the mermaid who created Lirea's knife, in the hopes that they can save Bea's soul before Bea's body dies. Of course, nothing is that simple, and they quickly find that things are a lot more complicated than they thought.

I'd been looking forward to this next installment of the Princess novels for months already, and I wasn't disappointed. As good as The Stepsister Scheme was, the plotting of The Mermaid's Madness is better focused, and it also has the added benefit of expanding POV characters to Talia, Snow, and even poor, battered Lirea. It makes me wonder, however, what The Stepsister Scheme would have been like if we'd seen Talia and Snow as POV characters there. I'm not sure it would have worked that well for me - I can lose patience with multiple viewpoints pretty fast (which is why I stopped reading GRRM's novels after the second one). But since I already knew and loved the characters from the previous novel, it was a lot easier for me to get inside their heads in the second novel. I think the effect of having Danielle as the POV character is similar to the "stranger in a strange land" trope, which in this case is Danielle the peasant girl suddenly having to navigate the world of royalty after marrying Prince Charming (who really is a genuinely nice guy, heroic without having to save Danielle or any of the other princesses). This carries over to the readers, and we're taken along, wide-eyed, with Danielle to explore this fantastical world, which is simultaneously familiar and foreign. It's not until we get acquainted and acclimated to the world and characters of The Stepsister Scheme that we can better appreciate the viewpoint shifts in The Mermaid's Madness.

Though The Mermaid's Madness is better than The Stepsister Scheme in some ways, I do think that much of its charm comes from already knowing the characters from the previous book. In particular, there's a particular subplot involving Talia's romantic aspirations that gets explored a bit further, and which ends sort of in a cliffhanger that leads readers to expect some sort of resolution in the next two books (Red Hood's Revenge and a yet untitled fourth novel). I also enjoyed the hints at the darker side of Snow's normally bubbly, flirty character, a dark side potentially inherited from her mother. And though Danielle can neither fight like Talia can, or do magic like Snow, she's strong in her own right, with an empathic, idealist streak that is prevented from becoming too sweet with moments of sarcasm (probably learned from hanging around Snow and Talia).

(Yeah, I know I said these reviews would be short, but this was taken from a Notepad document I'd had written up for a while.)


Boneshaker by Cherie Priest (cmpriest)
Recommended. Set in an alternate-history America where the gold rush was moved up by a couple of decades, resulting in a larger population up in Seattle and the continuation of the Civil War far past where it ended in the real world. Dr. Leviticus Blue built The Incredible Boneshaking Drill as a response to Russia trying to dig up oil in Alaska, but a test run gone awry devastated most of downtown Seattle and released a noxious gas that turns its victims into the living dead. Fifteen years later, most of the survivors now live on the outskirts of a walled-off Seattle, and Blue's widow Briar Wilkes just wants to forget the past and raise her son, Zeke, to be a respectable and outstanding citizen. But Zeke is convinced that his father i innocent, and sets out to prove it by sneaking out of his house and into the city, forcing Briar to chase after him.

If you're into the steampunk genre, you'll want to give this book a try. If you're not much of a steampunk fan, you may still want to give this book a try. Cherie's writing is sharp and clean, and she seamlessly weaves real and imagined history into the fabric of the story, which both is and is not what you think it is. Although I tend towards epic plots of good vs. evil, with lots of explosions and fights and action, I greatly enjoyed this microcosmic story of a mother trying reconnect, both literally and figuratively, with her son. True, there are explosions (and ZOMBIES!) and fights, but what really carries it along is the climax of Briar and Zeke's emotional story thread. The plot of Boneshaker is very family-centric, I think, and there's a nice parallel between Briar and Wilkes and two other characters who I'll refrain from mentioning here for spoiler reasons. Probably her best book yet, although I haven't read Fathom.


Dark Delicacies II ed. by Del Howison and Jeff Gelb
Generally apathetic. Assorted short stories in the horror genre. I picked this up from my library in preparation for revising The Struggle Within, and was surprised to find that the variety of stories contained within this anthology were mostly as unconventional as my own story. Unfortunately, I've already returned the book to the library, so I can't quite make as specific of references as I'd like, but let's see what I can do here.

So, you may ask, was I pleasantly surprised or unpleasantly surprised? I have to admit that I wasn't really impressed with the first crop of stories, though I'm still unsure whether it's just that I don't have a good eye, ear, or heart or any other part body for the genre, or that I don't possess the right disposition to truly enjoy short stories, or if it was something inherent in the particular stories themselves. Well, okay, I am quite sure all three play a part in how much I enjoyed or didn't enjoy this anthology; what I'm less certain on is the proportion of these sentiments to each other. I definitely got a morbid kick out of the last short story, called "The Ammonite Violin" by an author whose name I can't remember, which beautifully unreal and dreamy. There was also an entry from the author of World War Z that was rather interesting (and I want to check out World War Z eventually). Another one, called "Where There's a Will..." or something along those lines, had me doubling back and reading the story again to understand what the hell was going on in the ending. I like the idea of the ending, but am not convinced of its fictional veracity (if you catch what I mean).

There were at least three stories that bored me or didn't interest me at all, and a fourth one which confused the everloving hell out of me. One of them was the first one in the anthology, involving a vampire trapped on the Titanic trying to hide his true nature from the rising sun. I know, I know, what a potentially interesting premise, right? But the author didn't pull it off well at all. Another involved a man in a troubled marriage being inexplicably chased by a literal hellhound - not convincing either. Then there was a story involving the torture of what seems to be a political prisoner or a prisoner of war, a Mobius strip-type story where you seem to be getting somewhere but then you end up right back where you started (and thus I have now somewhat spoiled that short story for you). Using that sort of structure is a pretty gimmicky gamble. I wasn't impressed because I'd seen it before in the fantasy anthology Flights (ed. by Al Sarratonio), and I believe Neil Gaiman also wrote one such short story. Of the three, I'm not sure which one I'd rate as the best. The story that confused me was called "I Live Inside Your Mouth" or something like that, and it felt like this weird mishmash of Japanese horror and American horror. I had high hopes for it, because the author was great at establishing atmosphere, but ultimately I felt the plot wasn't clear enough.

If you're a horror genre fan, you might want to give this a look for at least the last short story.


Books on my current reading list include:

Liar by Justine Larbalestier
Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld
Skinwalker by Faith Hunter
Gothic Charm School by Jillian Venters (cupcake_goth)
The Art of Piano Playing by Heinrich Neuhaus

So that's contemporary YA, steampunk YA, urban fantasy, self-help pop culture non-fiction(???), and an academic primer/treatise. Yes, this is quite the bibliophilic salad at the moment.

---

*Well, maybe in Chicago it is, since it feels like it's been raining for the entire damn fall season.

Sexy, smart Trixa Iktomi runs a profitable a bar in Las Vegas, dealing in more than just booze. For the past couple of years, she's been specializing in the information trade on both the mortal and immortal ends of the spectrum, hoping to find some clue as to the identity of the demon who murdered her younger brother, Kimano. When she hears of a powerful artifact known as the Light of Life, she knows she's got the ultimate bargaining tool for use in getting the details that she wants. First, though, she has to actually find the thing. And then she has figure out what side - angelic or infernal - she's on in the end, because neither of them are gonna let her walk away with the Light of Life.

I'm a big fan of Thurman's Cal Leandros series, so when I spotted this on the shelves of the DePaul B&N a while back, I was expecting good things from it. Trick of the Light features a witty, sharp, sarcastic narrative voice (told in 1st-person from Trixa's POV) that's characteristic of the Cal Leandros books. Unfortunately, it feels as though Thurman fell a little too much in love with Trixa's voice, because gurl howdy the narrative infodumping was over nine thousand. It starts right in the first chapter, as Trixa and her two demon-hunting wards, Zeke and Griffin, burn down a nightclub owned by a demon that pissed off Trixa recently. I really wanted to like Trixa as a strong and unapologetically self-assured female protagonist; I can sort of forgive Trixa's excessive smugness and vanity as a result of a certain spoiler (which shouldn't really a be too much of a spoiler if you just stop and think about things for three seconds), but I think part of what breaks the character for me is that she doesn't have the same sense of vulnerability that, say, Cal Leandros has. Snarking as a defense mechanism is easier to grasp; snarking because you're Just That Damn Good is a lot less charming. I mean, yes, I know she's devastated over losing her younger brother, but it simply didn't resonate with me. Part of the problem is, as I already hinted at earlier, Thurman's tendency in this book to tell more than she shows. As a result, the effects of Kimano's death on Trixa come off as distant and stilted - as though Trixa wanted revenge because that's what she should want, rather than what she actually wanted.

Zeke and Griffin are definitely my favorite characters. Both of them are orphans who were discovered by Trixa some years ago rummaging around in the garbage near her bar. She gave them jobs, food, and a place to stay, and now the three of them are as close as family (...although Zeke likes to casually flirt with Trixa, lol). Zeke's a trigger-happy sociopath who's trying (...sort of) to feel what "normal" people feel, while Griffin acts as Zeke's conscience. The interaction between the two is a joy to watch unfold, and there's a really satisfying payoff in the end, involving both a sort of predictable progression of their relationship but also a really interesting twist on their origins. They kind of remind me of Nick and Alan from Sarah Rees Brennan's The Demon's Lexicon, although I think Zeke and Griffin are on more equal terms than Nick and Alan are.

Overall, though, I was pretty disappointed with this book. I kept getting annoyed with Trixa as narrator, and I was bored silly by the whole Light of Life plot - which is sad considering that it's pretty much the main plot of the novel. (And really, could you come up with a more generic name for an artifact? Yeesh!) I have to admit that I didn't see the twist with Zeke and Griffin coming, and I enjoyed that greatly, but like I said those two are my favorite characters in the book. There's a hint of some overlap with the Cal Leandros storyverse, though (Trixa mentions a certain Robin Goodfellow that she knows back in New York), so I may continue picking up subsequent books to see what Thurman does with that. And of course I'd love to see what happens to Zeke and Griffin.

If you're new to Thurman's work, stay away from Trick of the Light and stick with the Cal Leandros novels.

Setlist:

1. Bacchanalia
2. Triskaidekaphobia
3. Wasted
4. Cold
5. Almost
6. Sphinx
7. Cynthia's Lullaby No Longer Yours Truly
8. Eidolon
9. Gospel of the Shadow of Nobody

No, you're not imagining that strikethrough - I'd intended to play "Cynthia's Lullaby" but messed it up beyond compare within the first few measures because I'd suddenly forgotten how to play it, so I took a chance with "No Longer Yours Truly" (which I think I might just change to "Written Letter #2"...) and I think I did pretty well. I fudged the opening of "Almost" and some of the transitions of "Wasted" that I hadn't yet fully figured out, but all in all I think I did pretty well in performing, both vocally and instrumentally.

The thing that failed, though, was that I got barely any audience feedback at all. If it weren't for the fact that I invited some of my friends along (thank you, bluemaiden88, Melissa, and Pierre) I wouldn't have gotten any applause or acknowledgment that I was performing. This isn't the first time I've experienced audience apathy, but usually that's towards the end of the night, not the beginning. True, I did get two guys telling me afterwards that they thought I was good, and I had a high school girl with her friends take a picture of me as I was performing (?!), but...no applause. I used to think that I'd feel more comfortable if people weren't paying too much attention to me, but mostly I just feel invisible and like I'm not supposed to be performing.

Which, well, I wasn't supposed to be performing today, actually, according to the people at Borders - someone probably forgot to enter me into the records or something, because my name wasn't on the performance list despite me emailing back and forth with the performance manager at Borders and him saying he'd write me up for 10/16. But they let me stay anyway. Because of that and the other thing I just mentioned about about no audience feedback, though, I didn't feel bad for leaving after just that one set, even though that set was probably only half an hour long.

I've probably outgrown Borders, I think. Time to move on to greener pastures and start getting into venues where people actually go to listen to music. (That way, if there's no applause, I'll know for damn certain my music is crap.) The next destination on my list is Ashbary's Coffeehouse, which...is going to be a pain to be going to for a number of reasons, but I guess I just have to put up with it if I want to get anywhere decent with performing my music.

On the bright side, I did get enough tip money tonight to pay for a movie ticket - I might go see Zombieland tomorrow with two friends of mine from college.

Sirantha Jax possesses a gene that allows her to jump through a dimension known as "grimspace". This abiliy allows her to transport ships through space at FTL speeds. She was the Corp's most successful jumper until a failed jump killed her pilot/lover, as well as everyone else on board except herself. Quarantined in a de facto jail afterwards, Jax manages to break out with the help of a man named March, who brings her into a larger conspiracy involving a renegade group with designs on engineering a new kind of jumper...and the real reason why Jax's disastrous jump happened in the first place.

I was really impressed with this book. The present tense 1st-person POV took some getting used to, but Jax is a strong character, both kickass and vulnerable. The two main plot threads - the renegade group's plans for creating more jumpers and the reasons behind Jax's failed jump - are deftly intertwined. The worldbuilding of Grimspace is evocative, from the marshy world of Marakeq to the domed city of Gehenna, set on a planet where, thanks to atmospheric conditions, things always seem to be shrouded in a red sunset glow.

Then there's the romance between Jax and March, which I thought was pretty well-handled, considering that it's only two weeks after the crash that killed Jax's first lover Kai that Jax does another jump with the telepathic March as her new pilot. This sounds innocuous at first, but because of the nature of navigating grimspace, the shared connection between a pilot and a jumper is so intense that it frequently paves the way for a romantic or sexual relationship between the two, as an outlet for those intense sensations. I'm left wondering whether jumpers and pilots are always opposite sex, but maybe I'll find that out in the next two books. At any rate, neither Jax nor March are ready for a romantic relationship. Jax is, as I said, still in the thick of getting over the loss of Kai, while March is rusty on his skills as a pilot and hiding a dark secret in his past (as many romantic heroes do). Jax's struggles with her feelings for March and Kai are sympathetic and believable.

The other characters that populate the novel have their own charm as well. My favorites seem to be Jax's handheld information device (I can't remember the name of it right now) and a mantis-like alien mercenary named Velith, who doesn't appear until near the end of Grimspace but whom I'm given to understand plays a more prominent role in the third novel. Dina the butch lesbian is fun, too, especially in conjunction with the snarky natures of both March and Jax. I hope we get to see more of her background in the next two novels.

Overally, highly recommended. I'd love to pick up my own copy of this book and the next two books. Love the cover art, too.

Kate Connor used to be a Level Four Demon Hunter for the Vatican. Now she's a Level Four Model Housewife, juggling the demands of her teenage daughter, her toddler son, and her ambitious politician husband. She thought she long left the world of demon hunting, but the demons have other ideas, turning up in the pet food aisle of the local San Diablo Wal-Mart and crashing through Kate's kitchen window one hour before a major cocktail party. Apprehensive about her rusty skills but determined to protect her friends and family, Kate races against a high demon from hell to find a famed artifact that could potentially raise the dead - a lot of dead.

The writing style is clear and smartly written, although I thought there were times where the author spent a little too much time on minutiae. I really liked how she handled the various twists and turns of the plot, though perhaps I'm only more aware of them because I've been reading up lately on how to analyze the parts of a story's plot.

The worldbuilding is (perhaps appropriately) a little bland and generic. I tend to have little patience for parenthood-centric stories, so that aspect of this book simultaneously bored me but also fascinated me with its depiction of a "mythical norm" sort of family. There's not much to write home about the demon-hunting Forza of the Vatican or the demons themselves, either. But it's the combination of these two aspects that provides a somewhat different reading experience from the typical urban fantasy stories. Carpe Demon, I suppose, would be an example of "suburban fantasy", hah.

Carpe Demon is a solid effort, and recommended for those who want something slightly out of the ordinary from straight contemporary fiction, but not as otherworldly as some urban fantasy stories can get. Myself, though, I'm not sure whether I'll pick up the next couple of books.

Established in 1977 or so, Branko's is a family-owned sandwich stop just off of Fullerton, near DePaul University. It's run by a Macedonian couple who are super-nice and super-courteous. The food is standard American sandwich shop fare, affordably priced, but they make it nice and hot and serve it to you with a smile. It's excellent comfort food, and in fact I'm sitting here typing this entry while eating some fried cheese sticks that I got from there.

I started going there in my sophomore year because I kept on passing by it on my way to the art building. Its proximity made it ideal for me to pop in during a studio class break, get some minor eats, and pop back out to get back to class. Recently, I've begun stopping by the place after classes to get food to-go that I then eat at the school cafeteria while sitting with friends. Mr. and Mrs. Branko both know me by face now and have learned what my usual orders are (either cheese sticks or a regular hot dog with ketchup only and a side of fries, plus Mountain Dew), and so I sometimes get minor discounts for being a regular customer.

All in all, the food is good, but it's the service and comfortable intimacy of the small sandwich shop that makes Branko's a regular stop for me.

***

I'd wanted to finish up an ART224 project that's due tomorrow before going to ART113 later tonight, but the lab times are from 6-10pm. Which kind of fails considering that I have ART113 from 6-8:40pm. But since ART113 is a studio day today, I may possibly get away with leaving early to do stuff for ART224, since I don't foresee that the main part of my ART113 project is going to take too long. On the other hand, I could just do it during ART260 tomorrow (since I think that's another studio day). Decisions, decisions.

Two book reviews to go up soon. There are also some thinky thoughts that have been swimming around in my head about the consumption of music/film/books vs. the consumption of visual art and what that means for an artist trying to expand her horizons, and about my place as a second-generation Filipino-American and exploring the boundaries of where I'm Filipino and where I'm American, but I need to (attempt to) study for my ART237 midterm on Thursday as well as pull together something more coherent, so those will have to wait until I find more brain cells.

Also, Borders performance on Friday! Old friends may possibly accompany me again so I'm not so alone, though I do have a friend from college who wants a looksee. I think I had a working setlist floating around somewhere but hell if I can find it in my room (which, not surprisingly, is kind of a mess again!).

I both know and don't know what I'm going to do for NaNoWriMo this year.

I know I'm not going to do the usual 50k novel draft like I've doing the past few years. Instead, I'm thinking of revisiting my old drafts, poring through them and seeing what I can revise or rewrite or expand on. This includes Glass Houses, Daemonsong, and Natural Fury and its AU short story The Struggle Within. Although the last two are technically fanfic, all I'd have to do is file off the serial numbers and do some other revising and I'd be good to go. Looking back on 'em, though, I find it interesting that the current plot of Natural Fury, divorced from its fandom origins, isn't normally the kind of story I'd want to pick up and read (that is, a coming-of-age story). I'm really thinking about abandoning Natural Fury and letting The Struggle Within (which needs a re-titling) be my chronicle of that particular 'verse. The Struggle Within, unfortunately, has a rather depressing ending for the main character, whereas in Natural Fury it was more of a bittersweet ending, but at this point I'm not confident enough about the idea or story of Natural Fury to give it the necessary attention. Maybe in a couple of years, but not now. I actually want to work with Kira and Luke - I keep thinking it might be nice to do a short story with those two, or a vignette, or something to explore their characters and world some more.

I don't know, however, how I'm going to quantify my progress for this sort of thing. Do I say, okay, every week I have to have spent at least such-and-such hours on original work (and original work only)? Can I pin down a wordcount? I'm leaning heavily towards a time-based goal, since I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to quantify something that may not be actual prose but, instead, notes or somesuch. But without a wordcount goal of some sort, I may end up just waffling around and spending all of my time on worldbuilding research.

***

Came up with a potential riff in G-minor. Very simple, no lyrics yet. I really enjoy the flatted minor keys, and G-minor is a particular favorite. I've already got two songs in G-minor, technically, but "Queen of Denial" is less of a performance piece and more of a milestone piece, and I haven't figured out a good enough arrangement for "Mirror" yet. Maybe I'll revisit them years in the future, when I'll (ostensibly) have made improvements in my composition skills, but for now I'll let them lie.

Nightmare Inspector must be one of very few stories out there that has a rather literal "it was all a dream!" ending that makes total, logical sense.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised, though. The story does revolve around the existence of a Japanese mythological creature known as a baku, who eats nightmares. Baku are typically depicted as looking like tapirs (and in fact modern Japanese uses the same word to refer to both things), but in Nightmare Inspector the main baku is a pretty shota named Hiruko, whose sad, violent past prior to becoming a baku is integral to the climax of the entire 9-volume series.

The pacing and story of Nightmare Inspector follows a similar pattern to Hell Girl: episodic mini-plots of Hiruko helping customers with their nightmares interspersed with plot-related happenings and disturbing revelations about the mysterious, supernatural characters that populate the world, most notably the titular character. Despite his cold, apathetic demeanor, Hiruko actually does care enough about his customers to help them deal with their nightmares, walking them through their life and fears that manifest themselves in their nightmares before actually eating the nightmare itself. (Which would make him, like, the best therapist ever. Seriously, helping patients understand their traumas before nomming down on the traumas and thus relieving them of it? If it weren't for Hiruko's wyrd personality - or, hell, the fact that [SPOILER REDACTED] - he could make a killing in the profession.) Not all baku are as benevolent as Hiruko, however, as readers come to see. Corrupted by the single, driving desire to eat nothing but nightmares, some baku are obsessed with creating the Worst Nightmares Ever, for the worse the nightmare, the tastier it is to the baku. This aspect, too, is essential to understanding the weaving of plot threads that lead up to the climax.

So what is the climax? Well, I sort of spoiled it for y'all at the beginning of this entry, but it's another thing entirely (of course) to read the conclusion for yourself. If you can borrow this series from somewhere or someone (Melissa dumped it on me, haha), then by all means check it out. It's got beautiful art; a somewhat repetitive storyline that gets substantially more interesting and melancholy at some point after volume 6; amusing characters that, unfortunately, also sometimes feel a bit shallow and hard to "get"; and an interesting take on the baku mythos that explains enough for readers to understand the story but still leaves room for questions and other possibilities.

I touched briefly upon my love for the first book in a previous LJ post, but I've since plowed through the second and third books, and have been very, very impressed with it. I love the conflictedness of Weeks' characters (well, most of them - I had no love or interest for any of the irredeemably "bad" characters), and the pacing is intensely fast, with more twists than a Twizzler. The "hoshit!" moments are genuinely surprising (to me, at least), and yet they fit with the story overall and heighten the stakes and tension.

Unfortunately, the fast pacing necessarily means that there are trade-offs, most notably the worldbuilding but also including the many storylines of the various groups of characters. The effect was akin to taking a high-resolution .RAW photo from a digital camera and converting it into a .JPEG: both are still generally very high-quality files, but in the compression of .RAW format to .JPEG, there's still some information that's lost which lowers the quality of the photo, ever so slightly. However, if you're not actively looking for it, you're not really going to notice the loss of information. Assuming that the original file is skillfully taken, it can be appreciated whether it's a .RAW or .JPEG. In this case, there were many points in the second and third books of the Night Angel trilogy that I felt deserved to be fleshed out more, though if that had happened the books would have been substantially longer. I kept on imagining how this trilogy would've looked as a more drawn-out series; I kept on seeing mini-plots that could've filled an entire book by themselves. Nevertheless, Weeks provides enough to satisfy the reader and to convince the reader to care about the characters and their story.

Interviews I've read say that Weeks has a non-Midcyru standalone novel slated for publication in 2010, and that he does plan to return to Midcyru for another trilogy at some point in the future. I look forward to both, and in the meantime, I need to snatch up copies of the Night Angel trilogy for my own personal collection...
Also, have I mentioned that I love the covers? :D Seriously, those covers were part of why I was intrigued by the series in the first place. Book covers: DOIN' 'EM RIGHT. I hope I get to learn more about designing book covers in one of my design classes.

I've had this link-o-llection lying around for almost a month now. orz

Best. Soda. Display. Ever.

Steampunk duel on YouTube. It's like Victorian-era Gundams duking it out!

yhlee talks about merely convincing your reader that a complex, multi-layered world exists, as opposed to SHOWING everything to the reader:

If you are trying for a certain kind of mimesis, the trick is in hinting: instead of playing the fool's game of trying to generate everything pixel by pixel, provide instead the key stuff and then a bunch of--best analogy I have here is fractal generators. Something small that generates something complex; and you are offloading a lot of world-generating functions to the reader (or gameplayer, etc.), who will take that fractal generator and produce the pixels for you.

jimhines offers up a list of Neil Gaiman "facts".

cleolinda explains that the problem with working for yourself or working freelance is that it's task-based as opposed to time-based, which changes how you perceive yourself to be "done" with work.

Should there be a manga canon?

***

Been getting used to a school schedule again. Finding myself dealing with less and more problems than I thought.

I recently finished a project for my 3-D Foundations class in which we had to create a "chair" using only two pieces of cardboard and hot glue. I put "chair" in quotes because, as the professor put it, it didn't have to look like a conventional chair, but it did need to function like one, supporting one person's weight. My initial idea was something involving a weird 3-D star-like form, but after hearing the professor discuss the architectural concept of a "decorated shed", I decided to be lazy and apply that concept to my project.



In this case, the place where you sit - the top of the main gear - is merely a 6"x6" square column that's 18" high and reinforced by an X-shaped structure on the inside. Everything else is just chewy, papery icing.







I'm pretty happy with how this turned out, actually. The problem is trying to figure out what to do with this thing once it's graded and I have to bring it home. I don't want to just chop it up and throw it away, but it's not like I have any room anywhere for that thing.

On Reading
There are many books I've enjoyed, and others that I've admired for various reasons. These days, I've mostly been reading half as a reader and half as a writer, and the writer half of me...well, let's put it this way. My comedy screenwriting professor liked to tell my class that, with all the work he's done in comedy, he never actually laughs at anything anymore. Instead, if there was something he found funny, he'd just go: "That's funny. That's really funny. That's sort of how I am with my reading-as-a-writer right now. I'll read something and go, "Hey, wow, that was really cool. I'mma try to keep that in mind for later.

Brent Weeks' The Way of Shadows was one of the rare books that made my eyes go "O_O!" and my mouth go "NO FSCKIN WAI!". I can't remember the last time I was this impressed by anything I've read. In fact, I think the last thing I read that elicited that sort of HOLY FUCKING SHIT ON A SANDWICH reaction was an epic Teen Titans fanfic of 2.5 million words and 270 chapters written by an old online friend of mine. That was about three years ago or thereabouts.

And the thing is, The Way of Shadows isn't necessarily "original" in many areas. Young street rat is frustrated with his weak status and trains to become an assassin, and becomes one of the bestest best best assassins evar; the world is standard-ish medieval fantasy fare with cobbled inspiration from various Earth cultures (I actually found the cultural worldbuilding kind of meh and a bit inconsistent); the writing isn't necessarily poetic or striking, though it's clear and clean, which is fine by me (and anyway pretty prose wouldn't work with most of the character POVs anyway). But just...the way the author handles his characters and the plot points and the progression of revealing those plot points makes me want to nail this book to the wall next to my desk with a large neon sign pointing to it that says "THIS IS HOW YOU PLOT A BOOK".

I want to buy my own copy of this book, sit down with it, and start analyzing its struture. I've got a library copy of the third book on hand and I'm waiting patiently (sort of) for the second book to arrive at my library. I am prayingprayingpraying that this trilogy doesn't pull a Matrix on me, where the first installment is practically godly while the second and third seem like the were defecated from hell.

-

On Politicians
From yeloson: Dear Mr. President - Your daughter is a ninja.

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On School
Good news! I just saved money on car insurance textbooks by switching to Geico Chegg.com! According to the site, not only did I save $180 by renting my textbooks this quarter, but I also got to plant four trees in Cameroon!

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On Pretty Pictures
I have Las Vegas pictures uploaded onto Photobucket, and am working (...sort of) on the write-up.

Thanks to pinkpolarity, I have discovered the wonder that is eyeshadowsluts! Hee. I've spent some time there going through the backposts and looking at all the pictures and advice. They have some interesting looks on there. Like this one, which is freaky as fuck but also fucking awesome.

I also poked through YouTube for makeup how-to videos, and found this one, which I promptly proceeded to emulate using the tools available. I obviously didn't do a perfect job, but I think that with some practice I could get used to doing it, since this is going closer to the kind of look I've been coveting for like ages. XD I'm not sure how well you can see it in these pictures, though.

( In which Reileen also plays around with Post-It flash filters, what )

-Reileen
slippery with forgetting