quietprofanity

(Sorry, the_red_shoes, it was 47nite's idea.)

It's the first letter of MY name anyway, so I dig it. (I've never met a Rebecca in the media that I've really liked though, I think. It seems to be a popular name for villains and those bitchy girls who had nice nails and made fun of you in high school.)

1. Comment on this post.
2. I will give you a letter.
3. Think of 5 fictional characters whose name starts with that letter and post their names and your comments on these characters in your LJ.

( See below ... I didn't expect this to be so comic-book heavy )

I ... hope all of this made some sense. I got super-loquacious, I guess.

Midori Days
( Read more... )

Touch Me, I'm Sick
( Read more... )

V for Vendetta
( Read more... )

I also read Interfaith Families, which I still have to mull over, and Mini-Marvels: Rock, Paper, Scissors, which was very cute. ("Arrow Man not Bill Cosby.")

I really hate it when I hate transgressive fiction. Someone says "fuck" a lot in a story and if you have the gall to criticize anything in it, be it the plot or the characterization or whatever, the fact of the matter is you REALLY just can't handle how they said "fuck."

I thought of writing this review with jillions of curses and disgusting references to sex and violence to stave off such criticisms, but ... nah, fuck it. I used to be a goofy 12-year-old writing South Park fanfiction and I remember always making a severe effort to curse a blue streak and make reference to sexual acts I did not actually understand fully. When I moved on, those words and actions now demystified, I told myself, "OK, you saw how far you could personally go with being vulgar. But being vulgar is mostly a gimmick and you won't get anywhere on that alone. So move on and use bad words at the level you personally feel comfortable." So I've gotten myself well set into using profanity when *I* feel it's needed and not trying too hard. (Thus my screenname.) I don't need to change that shit just to prove a point. :-P

( Theme of Wanted: 'I love myself. I totally rock. When I go to the movies I feel up my co --' OK, OK. Review time. )

So I'm almost done with Wanted and unfortunately I don't like it, especially the art. I really want to explain why I don't like the art, but that might require pictures. Pictures with big red marks on them going "very poor, see me!"

I don't have a scanner ... my parents do, but it might take me awhile to get up there. But ... my anger is great. Would it be more in the moment to strike while the fires are hot?

Tell me what you think.

[Poll #1232908]

I insist this poll is only somewhat less stupid than the "Is my shirt awesome?" that LJ uses as an example.

EDIT: The votes have been cast! And ... made obsolete. I have acquired pictures through ancient, sekrit methods, and suited my computer up all GIMP-like and thus you shall soon have JG Jones art complete with hot pink teacher scrawl. I've got, like, 20 pics I want to fix up for you and I'm done with 19. Talk to you guys soon.

Aja - it's coming. No, really.

OK, so my copy of Watchmen is in New Jersey, but I was able to procure another copy for special purposes (i.e. gift) and decided to read it again before I gave it away. That trailer has apparently driven everyone crazy for this book again. Amazon.com is sold out, and when I picked up this one at Borders it was on a display that had obviously been larger at one point but was now depleted. It's a bit weird, since the trailer doesn't really SAY anything, except maybe like, "HEY FANS! REMEMBER WHEN THIS HAPPENED? AND THAT HAPPENED? JESUS CHRIST, IT'S DOCTOR MANHATTAN, GET IN THE CAR!"

Anyway, I decided to give it another read-through. I tried to look at what I wrote previously on Watchmen but it just seems to be "WOW, WATCHMEN RORSCHACH WOW SQUEE!!!" So ... here's the things I noticed the second time around.

( Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? -- SPOILERS!!! )

Why don't we as a society read more short stories? They're good for our short-attention span brains! And who doesn't like a story delivered quickly? When I was in college, I read comic books more than anything else because I COULD get a story in a quicker, easier fashion. My guess is that short stories are hard to talk about without giving away the ending, and also can be depressing. I'll try not to do the former and own up to the latter.

( The Laws of Evening ... You should read this one, Aja. I think you'll like it. )

( Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri )

Oh and ... by the way, I did see The Dark Knight. Without going into any spoilers, Heath Ledger was amazing, Aaron Eckhart was amazing, Christian Bale is still the best Batman. But I do hope the people who ground their teeth over Iron Man's alleged sexism (which I disagree with, but I've already explained why) don't give The Dark Knight a free pass, because I think it was worse (not The Wicker Man remake worse, mind you, but it did annoy me) and I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone complain about it yet. Maybe they're all upset over Dr. Horrible but ... [sigh]. What a shame.

Okay, okay, spoiler. I can't help it.

( Read more... )

Watchmen trailer is growing on me, by the way.

So, given that Twilight is on everyone's lips, I actually considered buying it. To the point where I went to Borders totally planning to buy it, was actually WALKING AROUND THE STORE WITH THE BOOK IN MY HANDS, but I felt my 80+ books at home practically screaming at me, "WHY? Don't you love us? Don't you LOOOOOVE US?" and I couldn't do it. Thoreau in particular would have been mad at me. So ... I will not be sporking Twilight.

I'm also not sporking Sabriel, even though on reflection I like it less and less but will probably still read the sequels out of inertia ... Well ... there's not much to spork, besides that scene where the guard goes "You seem like you have a hard life." And Sabriel's like, "Yes, I have led a hard life." That was kind of unintentionally funny on reflection. I'm very, very, very much planning to spork Kimagure Orange Road when I finish it. Partly because I'm pissed at myself for spending all that money and time on it (and I'm not even HALF-WAY DONE!), but mostly because I want to give the stupidest female anime character EVER the tongue-lashing she deserves. Although I'd like to learn how to take screenshots before I do that. The sporking will be useless unless we can make fun of the bad 80s clothes. (Particularly Kasuga's. I think my favorite was the pink shirt with rolled-up sleeves and the gray vest and the thick, yellow tie with black stripes.)

Boy, I love-hate Kimagure Orange Road. I love-hate Kimagure Orange Road so much I totally forgot everything else I had to talk about ... let me think.

***
Here's a good subject, James Frey. I still hate James Frey. I hated him ever since I read that Smoking Gun report and was joyful when Oprah slapped his lying ass down. I see a lot of people rushing to his defense these days with all this "He is an artist! That's what matters! Oprah was a mean, mean, mean pants with too much power!" Dude, please. The guy is a tool. Fuck the lies about his prison sentence. The guy appropriated a local girl who he never knew's tragic death for his own persecution complex.

And, oh look, he's still doing it. It wasn't me! It was the publisher! It was my agent! I wanted to call it a novel! They were just mean! NORMAN MAILER LOVES ME! Shut up, tool. You're a tool. You were a tool before you revealed yourself to be a liar when you gleefully picked on David Eggers to puff up your ego. So fuck off, tool. TOOL!

And the reviews for Bright Shiny Morning (a title which sounds like it would be better suited to a Anna Quindlen or Elizabeth Berg or a Ann Patchett novel. No disrespect meant to the ladies when I say that. I'm still planning to read their books and there is nothing wrong with being girly. But when the author is all "I AM KEROUAC! I AM HEMINGWAY! I WRITE MEN BOOKS! FOUR HUNDRED BABIES! AAAAARGH!!!" I can't help but smirk at the irony.) are kind of funny.

Esperanza, a Chicana from East L.A., forgoes a college scholarship after being embarrassed at a high school graduation party over the size of her thighs. Eventually she takes a job as a maid for a tyrannical white woman in Pasadena, only to fall in love with the woman's son.

That's nothing compared to the story of Dylan and Maddie, two crazy kids from Ohio who come to L.A. with only their faith in each other to sustain them.

After nearly 300 pages, living on $20,000 they've stolen from a vicious drug-dealing motorcycle gang, Maddie turns to Dylan and says: "You know how I read all the gossip magazines while I'm at the pool? . . . And they're all about these famous people, actresses and singers and models and stuff. . . . Well, I think that I want to be an actress."

"An actress?" he asks.

"Yeah, I want to be a movie star."

How do we reckon with a novel in which the desire to become an actress is treated as original and organic, in which the only Mexican American character is a maid?
-- David L. Ullin, Los Angeles Times

Imagine the movie Crash rewritten as a pastiche of Tom Wolfe, Bret Easton Ellis, and Jackie Collins — and you get a sense of the frustrating experience of reading this slack, self-indulgent mess.
-- Thorn Geier, Entertainment Weekly

There are four main story lines. One concerns a $20-million-a-movie married superstar who is secretly gay. Another involves a teenage couple who run away from home in small-town Ohio to work service-level jobs in L.A. There's also a mildly demented homeless man who finds purpose when he meets a meth-addicted runaway. And there's Esperanza, a maid who makes a love connection with her psychotically mean boss's nice, nerdy son.

These stories have two things in common. One, they take place in L.A. Two, they are all clichés. Frey has less fear of cliché, or of sentimentality, or of stating the obvious, than almost any other writer I have ever read. He literally writes as if he personally discovered that show-biz people are fake, homeless people can have hearts of gold, love can bridge any divide, and people go to L.A. to watch their dreams die.
-- Lev Grossman, Time (And he LIKED the book.)

This video review isn't bad either

***

I'm over half-way through my Savage She-Hulk trade, which means, according to my arbitrary system, I'll allow myself to buy comic books again. I'm kind of looking forward to it, even though Marvel recently crushed most of my hopes and dreams with the Spider-Man bullshit.

But oh well, I have lots I'm looking forward to buying and reading. Black Hole, the rest of Urusei Yatsura, A Distant Soil looks like something I should go back and pick up. Yeah.

I'm going to try to make a habit of buying a series all at once or at least in a close approximation to "all at once" so I'm not like, "I know that series!" but in reality I've only read two books of it. And I'm kind of ashamed now that there's anime and manga I have not finished for OVER A DECADE! AARGH!

I'm getting better. At least the anime list is depleting, too. Almost ... halfway ... through ... KOR ... must ... keep ... going ...

Weirdly enough, I don't know what anime I would want to watch AFTER all this stuff. Probably just try to finish some old dinosaurs. Not all of them. I think I can quit giving in to the Tenchi inertia.

***

I have a personal essay I should be writing. Why am I not doing it? Bad me! Bad, bad, bad me!

***

YouTube doesn't like me ... or Google doesn't ... anyway, they've both ganged up on me. Maybe later we'll be friends again. OK, see ya.

Yanno, Lovecraft was a racist, but I've yet to see Mythos fans try to convince people to read his work by hitting them with On the Creation of N--ggers.* I've certainly never seen them go to a forum dedicated to civil rights in sci-fi or horror literature. Usually the pitch goes, "Hey, check out these super-creepy books about fish creatures ... but watch for the cats with the racist names."

To clarify, other than the Spawn #10 issue with Cerebus as a guest star and bits of Reads before the urge to throw up set in, I haven't read Sim's work. To clarify further, I PLAN to read Sim's work sometime in the future. Not this year. Maybe next year. At least until I've read some Conan and Elric novels so I can get some of the jokes in the first volume.

I approach reading this series with trepidation, like I approached reading Lovecraft with trepidation and I'm also steeling myself to read R. Crumb's stuff. But I have to say, posts from people who DON'T agree with his views on women but talk about his artistic talent? Those make the idea of reading the series actually kind of interesting and exciting.

The posts about how RIGHT his views are and how despite how Sim labels women subhuman void-leeches who should be ashamed of himself he's not really a misogynist because he acts polite to women in real life. Um ... NOT HELPING. You are not bringing deserved publicity to a misunderstood creator. You are being a dilweed. You are being a very LOUD dilweed and if you think you're inciting me to read the work by pitching "More dilweed-ness but now you have to pay for it!" you're dead wrong and you're making it worse for both yourself AND your hero.

Yes, you have the right to your views, as feminists have the right to theirs. But just because you re-state those views ad nauseum does not mean you will change their minds on this. They want to read it, they'll do it on their own terms, and you're probably just going to have to live with that.

Also, please to stop berating the people who say the views would impact their enjoyment of the work so that when they do read it you can then beat them up for not "understanding" it.

And, no, you can't comment here. Go talk about how this is ignorant Feminist-Marxist hate speech and how I'm just a "Simogynist" (which seems like it would technically mean Sim-womanist etymologically or something) on your own blog.

*(Although, when I went looking for that poem somebody put it up on the Stormfront forums. Still that's a for racists-by-racists thing.)

1.) Marvel, in the interest of you getting constantly beat up and screamed at and wanting to seem like a good person, I must say this: please for the love of God find better PR. Referring to your customer base as anonymous nerds is really not a very nice thing to do.

2.) I'm happy for all the people who are pleased with the preview pages of Brand New Day. But despite Dan Slott ... taking a look at them, I'm really not. I don't see a lot of originality and the "Oooh, isn't it fun how retro we are" feels forced and not genuine fun, like the Spider-Man/Human Torch mini was fun. And Harry Osborn really acts nothing like the Harry Osborn I read ever. The guy was never Rico-Suave-the-chick-magnet, and you're never going to be able to explain the nonexistance of Normie to me as anything other than I-Killed-My-Best-Friend's-Baby-For-My-Old-Aunt-Yay! Also, OMD looks like they really didn't care. Based on these two factors, I think Marvel is putting out a faulty product and refuse to buy it. Also, to me, my Spider-Man is officially over. I say that as a statement of fact; I'm not screaming at Marvel or anyone who likes the new changes. You can take that as you will.

3.) While I do think attitudes of unconscious sexism prevail at Marvel, the BND preview pages and the OMD scans really seemed like a swipe at fanboys more than anything else. People who don't become superheroes become bitter basement dwellers or loveless billionaires ... or they live in their mother's house until they're 30 like slugs ... Marvel is totally misandrist, yo. :-P

4.) I've been reading back issues of the Gerry Conway/Len Wein on Marvel Team-Up compulsively since the news of this broke. Peter was a total jerkwad to Gwen. Poor girl threw herself over him and he basically abandoned her constantly and up until she died he believed she was having an affair with Flash Thompson because they talked a lot. Peter's lame. :-( Mary Jane totally made him deal with his shit. But now Mary Jane is gone. That's also lame. :-(

5.) And it makes me wonder ... what the hell do we REALLY want out of girl/boyfriends of superheroes? It's an odd balance. If they're wimpy and/or treated like dirt (like most girlfriends), their presence is a drag. If they're jealous of their beau being stronger than them (like most boyfriends), it sends a crappy message. If they get caught all the time, it sucks. If they can fight back all the time, it makes the villains look like less of a threat.

I don't know ... if I started my own superhero, I'd almost want them to be a- or presexual by this point. (Kid superheroes ARE fun ...).

6.) I wish I could have had a "Whatever Happened to Your Friendly Neighborhood Webslinger?" instead of "One More Day." But then they would have gotten Kaare Andrews to write it, because he's inexplicably the guy you go to when you want to reinvent Spider-Man. And Kaare Andrews has always sucked.

7.) I have a nuns calendar at work despite being Jewish. ... Calendars kind of sucked this year. Oddly enough, the calendar has some Jewish holidays on it. But not Hannukah. Or Passover. Rosh Hoshannah and Yom Kippur. Odd.

8.) I finished watching Otome wa Boku Ni Koishiteru. Odd for a harem anime based on a dating sim game where you tried to screw the girls that the transgender lead actually does not seem to harbor a romantic interest for anybody. I liked this show, though; it was compulsively watchable.

I also liked how even though the guy (dressed as a girl) had to save the fellow girl from sexual assault, the other woman was there running around and calling for help so as to alert people to their presence. Good example of what to do!

I liked most of the cast. Takako was my favorite character. She was the prettiest and surprised me by not being a total witch. I like when an anime hints toward a stereotypical characterization and turns it around. I was surprised at Seion's small role -- the advertising pics seemed to hint that she was the love interest. She had an interesting backstory, though; hearing that was what really engaged me in the story. If I was in the game, though, I would bang Ichiko the ghost, just for the bragging rights. Plus, she's got a toe-over to annoying but manages to stay on the endearing side. Mariya is kind of a bland tsundere. Kana and Yukari are quasi-Loli DO NOT WANT!!!!

As for the lead himself ... eh. But he was more interesting than 99% of male harem anime leads. I think he makes a really plain girl, though. I don't see why everyone was so impressed with him ... or why he used to wear a one-piece bathing suit as a wee lad. Sometimes people don't think. (See: Marvel.)

9.) Noir, which I also watched recently, was probably a better anime, but it didn't become compulsively watchable until the sixth disc. That's kind of lame. Oh well, I had lots of fun watching the sixth disc.

Feminist blogging made me more conscious of the crap that show got away with, though. I don't think they consciously thought about going for hotness over practicality. (They sometimes DID wear sensible outfits, like when they went to places with a harsh climate. And their outfits weren't exactly fanservice-y. Also, the naked lesbian kiss was between two flat-chested girls (not Mireille, who has a much more womanly figure).) I just think they ... didn't think about it at all.

Also, women in refrigerator warning. But I don't really care because it has the best line ever in a series: "If love can kill people, surely hatred can save people." The actress who originally says it said, "It's my favorite line because I don't believe it at all."

10.) I loved The Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell to little tiny pieces. It's patriotism without the rage and with lots of fun about being nerdy. GET IT!!

11.) The Iorek Byrnison/Aslan Shortpacked! strip was funny, but kind of unfair, considering that His Dark Materials is basically the anti-Chronicles of Narnia. To then complain that Aslan never gets attacked is kind of disingenuous. Yes, people are hypocrites, but it's on both sides. Like the Colbert Report reference, though.

Okay, bye.