( Montreal, cut for excessive detail )

Links:
The Paris Hilton Memorial Fellowship: short story by Rachel Shukert. via flyingsauce
Television, Gin, and Social Surplus: article on participatory culture. via Meta no Tame
The Ironic Urban Landscape of Death Note, or, Kira the Pop Sensation: meta in comments by the author of A Tithe to Hell.
A Tithe to Hell: loooong L/Light fanfic with the most canonically perfect beginning and ending EVER, and a gooey fanon middle. XD via sesame_seed

Back to reading The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma by Thant Myint-U. The nice thing about this book is that the author doesn't assume you know anything -- I'm about halfway through, and the "personal" part still hasn't started because the author is too busy filling in background. On the other hand, once every 40 pages or so Thant Myint-U will discuss something I am familiar with, and some of what he says contradicts what I know. ^^; So I suspect that some of his "facts" are actually pretty controversial theories, but I don't know enough to say for sure.

In other news, gonna be in Montreal this weekend ^___^. I'll be in Seattle/Vancouver three weeks from now -- from the 18th to the 24th. Anyone from around there interested in meeting up?

From now on I'll just head these posts PETE AND CARL YET AGAIN so you'll all know to skip them. XD;

( Dream )

Speaking of things I won't write, here's another one:

( Long Chatlog )

Sorry for being such a tease and always promising and never delivering. ^^; On the bright side, probably most of you don't care about the Libertines anyway.

( spoilers, but do you really care? )

In conclusion, probably a movie you want to watch high. That must be why I could smell weed the whole time...

I didn't manage to write up a post for this round, but I did manage some comments on Tari's (excellent) discussion post:

One
Two
Three

tarigwaemir really is a much better discussion-post writer. ^^; As in, she can write posts that invite discussion: when I write these things, I ramble on and on with my own opinions, and end up limiting the discussion to either agreement/disagreement or highly personal annecdotes. (Or maybe just cowing people into not posting their own opinions at all.) Tari's disciplined/restrained style is a much more effective approach, if your goal is actually getting people to, you know, weigh in.

What do you guys think? Are you more likely to comment to a post that is more open-ended and invites any and all thoughts on a topic, or one where the author expresses definite (though not intended to provoke) opinions?

Inspired by Sabina's:

http://subdee.muxtape.com/

Theme is WALL OF SOUND. Who needs dynamics when there's volume! (orz)

The mix also represents a sort of alternate reality where Pete and Carl got back together not very long after their split in 2004, and the relationship quickly devolved into a codependent mess of accusations and counter-accusations.

So it's a good thing that, like, this isn't what actually happened. Right?!!

COMPLETED INDEBTED TO llama_sama FOR MOST OF THESE SONGS: see post here. One song ("Ash Gray Sunday") is from jokersama, and a few more I burned from CD -- I'm having trouble getting into the external harddrive with most of my music on it, woe.

PS: If the music doesn't play, try opening the page in Internet Explorer.

PPS: For more on Carl&Pete and their special brand of heartwarming crazy, see this comment thread.

I plead sleep debt, your honor. (I can't stay up to watch the Daily Show or the Colbert Report anymore! *sob*)

worldserpent posted about the many many many faults of Katekyou Hitman Reborn!, and why she was entertained by it anyway. A few weeks ago lacewood made a similar, but much less forgiving post, but then went on to BECOME A FAN ANYWAY WTF. This is seriously the last time I anti-recommend anything, obviously such tactics have either none or an opposing effect -_-;.

April Fools: I liked this one at the Reborn! comm (haha, it was pages before anyone got the joke, stupid manga obviously attracts lots of stupid fans kidding, kidding, the joke was kind of niche and the community is extremely popular, so lots of people probably commented in the first rush before anyone picked up on it). There was also this one on the Loveless comm, which was AWESOME. XD

supacat's post on JE. I'm not much of a fan of the source material, but I like reading the commentary.
From that post, annnimeee's Nobuta wo Produce fic "Youthful Love, WHICH IS LOVE, seriously. .___.

More fic recs!
c_elisa, For the Kingdom of Heaven: X-men, Beast POV on a controversial mutant "cure".
mithrigil, Spires of Granite, Eyes of Black: Twelve Kingdoms, Rakushun on pilgrimage to Mt. Houzan. This recommendation is pointless because every single 12K fan here is probably already watching canis_m, but just in case.
xparrot, On the Wings of Imagination and With Healing in His Wings: Stargate Atlantis & Dragonriders of Pern. I forget who recced this. orz Google says that this crossover is not the first, but it might be the first with Sheppard as a sarcastic bronze dragon bonded to a reluctant McKay. On a related note, afrai has been running a "give me two characters, and I will write you a story where one of them is a dragon soul-bonded to the other" challenge on her ficjournal, and the results have been very entertaining so far. XD
EDIT - HOW COULD I FORGET -
vanilla_klise, Mushi ex Machina: the best Modern!AU Mushishi fic ever. See also the psuedocanon fic A Wandering Song + everything the author has ever written.

Work was hell today. I hate style handbooks. WHO CARES WHETHER THE PERIOD COMES BEFORE OR AFTER THE PARENTHESIS IN AN MLA-STYLE CITATION, I CERTAINLY DON'T.

Okay, I'm done. ...No! Wait! I also read some books this week:

Sea of Wind by Fuyumi Oni (trans. Alexander O. Smith)
War of the Oaks by Emma Bull
Tin Princess by Philip Pullman
and
The Prentice Hall Anthology of Science Fiction and Fantasy by Vrs. Authors <-- someone at work gave me this for free

I've been totally failing at bookblogging this year, but if someone wants to know what I thought of these, I'll try very hard to answer in comments.

This was written a looooooong time ago, for kinked. (Which is dead now I guess.) I never posted it, because 1) original fiction LOL, and 2) it's unfinished. Though 2) is sort of academic since even if I'd gotten to where I originally planned to end the piece (with the narrator looking up and noticing the pretty lights on the ceiling), there still wouldn't have been any point or plot. This was just supposed to be a writing exercise, and I could easily have finished it before deadline, only I guess I was reluctant to because I (unexpectedly) really liked the characters and I wanted to give them a real plot. ^^; But I never did, and so here we are today.

( Why am I posting this? I have no idea )

Thus ended my (brief) foray into origfic.

I'm going to Philadelphia tomorrow (Thursday) to visit a friend in Ze Hospital. I don't thiiiink any of you reading this are from that area, but in case I'm wrong, is there anyone who wants to meet up for dinner downtown, around 7pm?

An anonymous commentator pointed out that as much as Now: Zero resembles Death Note, it resembles the Death Note pilot chapter even more:

http://sub-divided.livejournal.com/131007.html?thread=1459903#t1459903

So the question is, does one of these translations of J.G. Ballard's work into Japanese contain the short story "Now: Zero"? Does anyone know?

EDIT: Yes.

...at least in Japan.

Irwin and I were the two best players in 4th grade Band, but the gap widened fairly quickly. XD

The credit for this goes to emblem, who found it. I'm just the person who had to immediately order it from amazon and pay the extra $2 for it to be delivered overnight.

...The package I mentioned in my last post was J.G. Ballard's The Venus Hunters, a short story collection which combines stories from 1967's The Overloaded Man with stories from 1969, 1976, and 1978. Now: Zero is the first story in the collection; it's eleven pages long. Genre-wise, it's a horror story told from the first-person perspective of that creepy guy at your office who doesn't say anything when you mistreat him, but who secretly keeps a record of every abuse (real or imagined) he's ever suffered at your hands, and who you'd be afraid was going to murder you in your sleep if you didn't know for a fact that he was a total coward and would never dare.

Yes, all that in just eleven pages. ^^; Though I might be projecting some of it. In any case, Now: Zero takes that person, and gives him an old notebook that seems entirely ordinary, except that the day after he, in a fit of sudden rage, writes down the name and fantasized death of his boss at the office, his boss dies at the time and in the manner specified in the notebook.

Wait! It gets better. You see, not only does the main character in this story possess a Death Notebook (you see what I did there? XD), he also determines (through trial-and-error: no instructions for this one, I'm afraid) that there are several conditions, or rules, under which the notebook operates. The first is that the manner of death must be feasible. For instance, he determines that whatever the "militarists" of the country say about the ever-present threat of nuclear attack, it is not feasible for every inhabitant of a disliked neighboring town to suddenly drop dead at noon.

The second rule is that only the events surrounding a death can be controlled by the notebook. He can't, for instance, change the weather, or effect the stock market. (However, it doesn't seem to occur to him that he can accomplish many more things besides death by including those things as a condition of death. If Ohba read this story (and I really think he did -- you'll see why in a moment), this may have been one of the points that set him off thinking about how much more could have been done with the premise, and wouldn't it be interesting if...? But I'm getting ahead of myself.)

( spoilers for Now: Zero & implied spoilers for Death Note )

The only review of this story I found online described it as "inconsequential," ahaha. I can sort of see why. Despite a very strong beginning, Now: Zero doesn't quite succeed as a horror story -- that is, while you're reading it, you are profoundly horrified, but once you've gotten to the end...once you've reached the last line...once the moment has passed...reality once again asserts itself (STRONGLY, in this case). The horror doesn't linger, like it does in truly great horror stories. Now: Zero combines truly excellent ideas with great writing, but just misses coming together in a really effective way.

It's of such situations that fanfiction is born, as they say. XD

Background on JG Ballard: I hadn't heard of him, but he's apparently been very influential (he's cited as the forebear of cyberpunk!). emblem has been reading some of his stuff and her report is that it's weird. His stories are apparently heavily laced with a feeling of impending doom, which sometimes arrives by the end of the story. One of the websites I was reading observes that Ballard was an alcoholic and that this is reflected in his characters' relationships, which are generally "pleasant in the morning, argumentative in the afternoon, and abusive at night."

Ballard is 77 now. Growing up, he spent two years in a Japanese interment camp in Shanghai. He wrote a novel about it, later made into an Oscar-winning film which was directed by Steven Speilberg, written by Tom Stoppard, and starred John Malcovich and Christian Bale (who debuted). *_* <-- wants to see this so bad.

EDIT: See this for a way in which this story is *not* like Death Note.
EDIT2: See this comment for similarities between the story and the Death Note pilot.
EDIT3: "Now: Zero" was published in Japanese. Recently, in fact. Apparently, the connection between it and Death Note is not unknown to Japanese fans. ^^; There go my dreams of groundbreaking investigative journalism.

MOAR LJ FAIL LINKS
http://seperis.livejournal.com/583653.html
http://community.livejournal.com/sf_drama/612153.html
http://msilverstar.insanejournal.com/37790.html

The third link is from worldserpent, the first is from I Forget. The second came up in a google search. In order: funny comments from users responding to the LJ "news" post, babelfish translation of the more straightforward Russian news post (warning: link is full of xenophobia and bad soviet jokes), roundup of responses by the Advisory Board.

Also via Charmian, a link to a totally new offense: http://stewardess.insanejournal.com/228035.html
Wherein LJ edits the "Top Interests" page to remove "sex," "porn," "fanfiction," and "fandom." I don't know about you guys, but I've never felt more loved! :D :D :D ...:(
EDIT: 'faeries' and 'bisexuality' also removed, along with terms like "hardcore" and "bondage."
EDIT2: Aaaand they're back. I gotta say, LJ staff is unlucky when this stuff breaks over the weekend, when the crisis management staff are away from their desks.


REACTIONS TO (JUMP) MANGA
Warning: links point to recent manga chapters. The chapter number is in the URL after the series title if you want to avoid spoilers.

http://www.onemanga.com/Naruto/392/14/
THAT WILL NEVER STOP BEING DISTURBING NO MATTER HOW MANY TIMES IT HAPPENS AHHHHH. (On the other hand, this will never stop being cool.)
http://www.onemanga.com/Bleach/314/
Aizen Explains it All. XD The evil plan makes a surprising amount of sense! And I'm surprisingly excited for the result:
( spoilers )
http://www.onemanga.com/Hunter_X_Hunter/272/
Hunter x Hunter is doing some interesting things with the passage of time which would be incredibly cool if they weren't so incredibly FRUSTRATING. XD; They'll be cool in the volume release, I guess.


OTHER
Waiting for a certain package from amazon. emblem knows what I'm talking about.

Livejournal abolishes Basic accounts for new users, tells no one.

Comments disabled as I have nothing much to say; just wanted to help get the word out. (My opinion, for what it's worth, is here.)

How do you write a story about a negative space? I mean a story about someone who *never* thinks about a certain subject, and why they do not.

If the point was obsessive avoidance, I would -- IN THEORY -- know how to proceed. That is, I'd use the b_hallward method of paradoxically bringing the subject up over and over -- presense emphasizes absence! Strange, but true.

But in this case what I am talking about is NOT avoidance -- not the kind of mental tortuousness behind (for example) politicians who base their careers around busting prostitution rings while at the same time spending upwards of $80,000 on hookers. NO. I'm thinking about someone who has naturally moved on from what they never think about. Who doesn't care about what they never think about. And who is never confronted with what they never think about, because it is literally another world away, where babies do not grow on trees and transforming unicorns do not fly through the skies.

...Yes, I'm talking about Twelve Kingdoms. ^^; In a way, Youko's discardal of her past is the most obvious and basic story that can be written for this series. But I was naval-gazing today (actually, carrying last week's naval-gazing over into today) on the intersection between mood and memory, OR IN OTHER LESS PRETTY WORDS, about how totally weird I was four years ago. You know the feeling that something in your past didn't happen to *you*, but happened to someone else? That you were a totally different person back then? And then it dawns on you that your thought patterns a year or two ago were *so different", so completely alien to the way you think now, that you actually can't recall them?

Or take it a step further: you can't remember what it felt like to *be* that person; you can barely remember what *happened* to that person. The memories are there, but without any emotional context, without the context you'd need to understand them. (...like they happened to another person! Quick, where's my "skilled at saying the same thing over and over" prize.)

I'm still not stepping out of the domain of the totally obvious, am I. *SIGH* Basically the idea is to write the story that makes it 100% CLEAR BEYOND A SHADOW OF A DOUBT that Youko's transformation is a universal metaphor. But without being, you know, obvious about it.

...I should just go back to my FFXII fic, shouldn't I. *makes face* But it is SO BAD. I'm not even kidding about this. My idea when I started was to try to write something conventional.

...to Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, and I have to say that this game is AWESOME. XD Apollo Justice is the first "Phoenix Wright" game where you don't play as Phoenix Wright. But Wright does show up, and he is sooooo cool in his new "alternative" profession. I love how he and Trucy (your new assistant) are off-beat but totally cool with it, like they fell off the straight-and-narrow path, but just picked themselves up and dusted themselves off. And I really like Trucy: she's so useful! A USEFUL ASSISTANT, FOR ONCE.

Oh! And I like the new guy! He looks like a little kid, but he's older than Wright was in the first three games. What I like is that he's totally a Wright fanboy, but still totally able to stand up to him. He's got spine. XD I even like the new prosecuting attorney, who, while not as awesome as Edgeworth (who could be?), is still pretty awesome. What I like is his style: he lets Apollo say what he wants, easy-going-like, but succinctly sums up the "relevant" facts for the judge after the flailing is over.

Major logical inconsistencies continue from the first three games, but not to the point of interfering with the gameplay.

( But I might as well mention them, while I have the window open. Spoilers! )

This journal has become like my outlet for recording my work and media conquests lately, sorry about that.

http://kylesmithonline.com/?p=848
Very late, but I forgot to post the link here. Miramax has declined to re-option Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy, so there won't be movies made for Subtle Knife or Amber Spyglass. ;_;

http://selfdivider.com/base/?p=28
Murakami interview in Korean GQ: came across this a while ago, forgot to post the link here. Contains lots of interesting information like a description of his writing strategy: while working on novels, he gets up at four in the morning, and works nonstop until ten! Which is sort of like Emily Dickenson's "if half your work is not done before 10 o'clock, it will not be done" quotation, except, you know, that he has all of it done by 10am.

http://apintrix.livejournal.com/158734.html
Proposes three new seasons. "August" is probably my favorite.

http://rashaka.livejournal.com/
Rashaka's been posting reviews of Death Note dub episodes. Very sharp.

http://kirieda.zdap.jp/
Japanese fanart site: Saiunkoku *and* Steel Ball Run! Link courtesy of majochan.

That was even more random and untimely than usual orz.

Mushishi volume 3: sadly not drawn in as much detail as the earlier volumes. Like, there were places in volumes one and two where I swear you could identify the plants the author was drawing by the shapes of the leaves. With volume 3, Urushibara was serialized in a monthly magazine, and I guess she just didn't have the time for that kind of detail anymore. And now there's backstory and stuff being introduced! Part of what I liked about the anime (and first two volumes of the manga) was that there really wasn't any backstory or overarching plot, it was just these oneshot stories about humans interacting with the natural (and supernatural) world. Still, series continues awesomeness.

Posted two book reviews to bibliophages for the "school stories" theme:

A College of Magics by Caroline Stevermer
Demian by Hermen Hesse

The theme this time is religion. I can't make up my mind what to recommended for it. ^^; What I really want to do is to make a five-item paired book list, like this:

( cut for list )

I would also really like to recommend "Death Comes to the Archbishop" by Willa Cather, but I haven't finished reading this either! I might try to finish before Sunday (the sign-up deadline).

petronia was down from Montreal and I had dinner in NYC three times, spending THIRTY HOURS' PAY BEFORE TAXES on food and transportation. (Pay at the library, that is. I am making more now at Pearson, thank God.) New York City is so expensive: there's "sticker shock," and then there's "if I actually had to pay my own bills, it would be another four months before I could afford another week like this". Hooray for living at home?

( More )

Overall: Ate a lot, spent a lot, drank a lot, fought off feeling like an extremely boring person -- boring not in the sense of "never does anything exciting" (though that's true as well), but in the sense of "doesn't have strong opinions or well-defined tastes". Rationalized that there's no competing with Sabina on this front. ^^; Also, everyone else was older -- 25, 26, 27, 28. If I still have nothing of interest to say at 30, then I'll start worrying. (Although I have worked in a LIBRARY and now work with TEXTBOOKS -- maybe I SHOULD be worrying.) Topics of the day were music fandom and younger siblings in precarious positions: I am a good person with whom to discuss the later, but a terrible person with whom to discuss the former.

In between, hung out with falxumbra and fiendery, started work, wrote (!!) a few pages (orz), finished three books, watched Juno and parts of three other movies, and worked out a deal to stay a few nights a week with a best friend from kindergarten happens to live near Paramus. My brother was home from school this week as well.

Books:
Carlo Emilio Gadda, That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana
Dana Facaros and Michael Pauls, Bay of Naples and Southern Italy
Joe Haldeman, Forever Peace
Thant Myint-U, The River of Lost Footsteps <-- currently reading

I have a job!

...A real one!

I believe there's a John Mellencamp song for this feeling.

^_^v

...ALSO. Meeting petronia and one_if_by_sea this weekend!