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| Monday, November 16th, 2009 | | 4:36 pm |
It's alive!
Computer is back, repaired. Seems to be okay. Logic board *and* graphics card failure. Marvelous. I may write something perverted in celebration. :) Current Mood:  pleased | | Sunday, November 15th, 2009 | | 6:05 pm |
Computer Died
Hopefully I'll be back online this upcoming week. *sigh* It's always something. :) Current Mood:  aggravated | | Saturday, October 31st, 2009 | | 12:20 pm |
Review of Haruhi 2nd season (spoiler warning)
Review of endless eight: Holy shit was that boring. I watched all of them, sort of meditating while doing so. The good: Great visuals. The bad: Aside from the utter waste and tedium of creating 8 nigh-identical episodes, the real pisser is, all of that and the payoff is that Haruhi wanted to do homework with the SOS-dan? She held them suspended in time for 600 years for THAT? Come ON. Lame. I'm not saying she and Kyon should have gotten all love-love, but....fuck it, yes that IS what I'm demanding, after the endless hints. Sometimes ya gotta go to the logical conclusion. Review of the boredom of Haruhi: The good: For starters, it's not endless 8. The bad: the art is very generic, though not bad really. It looks like K-on! which makes the girls very cute, but not in a distinctly Haruhi way. Overall: The whole 2nd season felt like a fanfic version of the first season. That's really the bottom line. Not a bad fanfic, but nothing like the utter quality of the first season. I was a bit pleased by the darker hints dropped in the last few episodes, but after all that wasted time it just comes off as a tease.
If future Haruhi releases don't measure up, I'm going to have to write the whole thing off as a could-have-been. Sad. :(
Current Mood:  contemplative | | Thursday, October 29th, 2009 | | 4:58 pm |
Finally saw the first "new" NGE movie
Finally got around to seeing it, with friends to boot. Wasn't what I was expecting. I was expecting an actual new version of the story, perhaps keeping the best "show piece" shots from the original anime, like the details of the angel attacks etc. Not like that at all. It's a shot-for-shot retelling of the entire TV series, with much more elaborate CGI, art and animation. Gorgeous visuals. Amazing how well the original structure holds up. Looks great in its full-realization version. Hm...let's break it into positives and negatives, from my personal perspective: I liked/was impressed by: - the visuals. Looks fabulous. At least the big-scale scenes did. - The music and audio in general was exactly the same, but that "same" still defines flawlessly awesome, so it holds up fine. The music of NGE sounds "classic" to the point where it seems odd that at one time, you had never heard it before. It's like you've always known it. I disliked/was unimpressed by: - the fabulous 3Dness of some of the visuals makes the flat, manga-like shots look REALLY flat and manga-like, to the point where I sometimes found it almost jarring. - the story suffers a bit from being recut for compactness. It's like watching the series on fast-forward, where the speed is just enough for it to feel a little off. Like watching those old films where everyone moves herky-jerky. Neutral point: shown in such a fast-forward fashion, some of the subtlety really is ground off the plot: the whole situation Shinji is thrust into is clearly insane and heavily rigged from behind the scenes, that much is obvious even to the vast majority of the characters involved, with the possible exception of Maya. She's just too sweet and innocent to be that self-aware. I refuse to believe otherwise! :) Overall my reaction is pretty neutral: I was impressed (as expected) by the visuals, so a mild plus. Since it was a pretty much 99% faithful retelling of the original story, shot-for-shot even, I was disappointed in the story aspect, mildly, so a mild negative there. The sped-up feeling of the story is another mild negative, only countered by the fact that this is NGE damn it, so we end with an overall feeling of, "Yeah, glad I finally got around to watching it." Not that impressive Gainax. Another couple of fanboy generations and you might have to actually come out with another totally awesome anime rather than just keep milking this one. :) Current Mood:  awake | | Friday, October 23rd, 2009 | | 3:14 pm |
| | Thursday, September 3rd, 2009 | | 10:04 pm |
Long Discussion Thread You Might Be Interested In
A bit of a clash of ideas between myself and Terdwilicker: http://terdwilicker.livejournal.com/23672.htmlI'm the Liberal, he's the Conservative, roughly speaking. Hippie vs. Gun Nut etc, whatever two poles you want to use. :) Warning! Controversial topics contained therein, such as politics, drugs and firearms. Proceed with caution. And if you feel like adding a comment, try to be constructive, please. No attacking either him or me. In a proper discussion, you should only attack positions, not people. It's an interesting exercise, using verbal logic and a bit of emotion without succumbing to the urge to use extremely pointed metaphors and needlessly inflammatory language. My post-mortem on the discussion: it feels a little unfair to analyze him right here in public, but it wasn't a private discussion so I guess I've got the right. I agree with quite a few of Terd's points, but I don't agree with his positions. I won't rehash the substance of that, it's right there in the actual exchange. What was interesting on the meta-level was how Terd seems to have a distorted understanding of the term "Hypocrisy". He uses it several times, each time incorrectly. He seems like the sort of person that prides themselves on their logic, but I found him to more emotional than logical. He also seemed to projecting an attitude of superiority onto me, whereas to my perception it was him who seemed to feel that he was superior, judging from the emotional tone of his language. I found this paragraph to be very illuminating: "Its the superiority thing you keep doing. Liberals are the way they are because it makes them feel superior, much as Conservatives do. Both like telling themselves they're better than everyone else. Liberals say it because they Feel Guilty. Conservatives do it because They Know They Are Right. Both are wankers. I'm a Pragmatist, like AZ. We've both seen the real darkside of mankind and know just how close it lurks in all of us. We don't believe in the fuzzy happy utopias, period. They just aren't possible when you have people full of lurking evil to populate them. " He projects "superiority" on to me, I guess because I seem to be a Liberal and that's what Liberals do, in Terd's world. What is interesting is that the underlying emotional tone of his various exchanges to me was dominated by the two messages he mentions here: he was effectively constantly shouting at me to feel guilty for the "evil I was responsible for", perhaps because since in his mind I am a Liberal he thinks I would be vulnerable to that as an attack, and he also seemed to "Know He Was Right" as he put it, which in my mind seems to indicate that on some level he acknowledges that he is a Conservative, which by the idealogical positions he holds he certainly is, just as by position I'm very Liberal. So essentially he's suffering from a bit of Cognitive Dissonance, which is probably where he gets the distorted understanding of what "Hypocrisy" means. Do you see the equation? Since he "Knows He Is Right", I am by definition "Wrong", but since I keep denying that, I am being a "Hypocrite". Except that since he's got a bit of Dissonance there, in that he doesn't want to think he's a Conservative, since they are wankers, which means that he has to give me a bit of a chance to argue with him, in order to keep up his self-image. So he's calling me a hypocrite when he really wants to go, "You're wrong!" But he's smart and logical enough to know that that is being outright unreasonable, so it creates a tension which is eased by the unconscious Dissonance. Get it? Again, thanks for the discussion, Terd, it was very useful on several levels. Current Mood:  productive | | Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 | | 8:42 pm |
Out of my cave, pimping Lord Raa
Your fiend has written some minor Kasumi/Ranma smut: How’s THAT for Love? Chapter 2:http://www.fanfiction.net/s/2880954/2/Yeah, I know, I haven't been posting lately, been busy with other things. Hasn't been much lemonyness appearing to post about anyway. *shrug* Oh: if you need diversion, get Plants vs. Zombies: http://www.popcap.com/extras/pvz/ Hours of fun! For the whole family! Especially if you are terminally fond of the sound of Zombies croaking, "Brains....." :) | | Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 | | 10:02 pm |
*sigh*
I'm remembering one of the reasons I stopped writing. It's hard effen work. Papering over the spaces between the ideas is often tedious. Vast amount of dialogue and description need to be written. And unless it feels just right, I won't let it go until it does, at least roughly.
Daydreaming is much easier. :) Current Mood: irritated | | Sunday, May 31st, 2009 | | 10:40 pm |
Pretty good HP/Dresden cross
Beyond Grave Peril: http://www.ficwad.com/story/82414 Doesn't have the extra style of nuhuh's fic with a similar start, but it's pretty good. Lots of magical combat. There's just something about the Dresdenverse that I love. It's comfortable and comforting to me, I don't know why. Certain writers seems to grok it the same way I do and it makes for great reading. HP crosses seem to work really well with it too. Current Mood: pleased | | Saturday, May 30th, 2009 | | 1:59 pm |
Star Wars names
"Kit Fisto"...porn star or Jedi master? :) Current Mood: amused | | Thursday, May 28th, 2009 | | 2:58 pm |
| | 10:37 am |
Haruhi-sama
First ep of the new season is out, subbed: http://www.animesuki.com/series.php/1448.html
Also, a hilarious Haruhi cartoon series:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RI7PzjBh2Vo
That was the first ep, to watch the next one and so on, just click the top link under "Related Videos" on the right.
Thanks muchly to Dsojourn for the tipoff. Current Mood: awake | | Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 | | 12:51 pm |
Orwell and writing
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/1 0/1984-george-orwell Years before, in the essay "Why I Write", he had described the struggle to complete a book: "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist or [sic] understand. For all one knows that demon is the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's personality."
Then that famous Orwellian coda.
"Good prose is like a window pane."
| | 6:05 am |
Irritating Writing Flaw #435: No idea of proper emotional tone
Very very common in the lowest grade of fanfic, but it amazes me how this particular flaw can persist even in relatively decently written stuff. Every character is overexpressive, ie "shocked" at every minor event, they "pale" or "blush" at even the most trivial emotional cue, like burning their toast. Or they are underexpressive (which usually involves heavy, repetitive use of words like "calmly") though typically I find underexpressiveness is limited to the main character, I guess because being eternally stone-faced is considered to be "cool". I'm not sure of the source of this flaw...maybe the writer is young and/or inexperienced with people and thus has no idea of how human beings express emotions? Something like that. Current Mood:  groggy | | Friday, May 1st, 2009 | | 7:34 pm |
| | Sunday, April 26th, 2009 | | 6:09 pm |
| | Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 | | 9:22 pm |
| | Friday, April 17th, 2009 | | 5:49 am |
A Rule
The best artists are always the most perverted and conversely. Current Mood: amused | | Sunday, April 12th, 2009 | | 12:27 pm |
| | Monday, April 6th, 2009 | | 4:40 pm |
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