quietprofanity

How did I not hear about this controversy? (Picture here.) Or is it not a controversy but just something Wills made up? Whatever. You're all fired.*

I would have gone with "Loch Ness Monster" too, actually.

I kind of want to rant about some annoying buzzkill "Watchmen will suck and if you're excited you suck" pre-movie downers, but I don't feel like it and it's really not more deep than "Man, why you have to ruin my fun?"

Still, I resent the implication that because I'm looking forward to this I don't think deeply about the book and probably skipped the text sections or whatever. Bah. Also, Jesus, do you know how often Hollywood fucks up all-text classics? Like maybe how the most famous version of Wuthering Heights cut out half the book? Come on, now.





*The LoEG fandom is hiring. OMG! Part one of Century comes out in April. ARE YOU EXCITED? I AM TOTALLY EXCITED!

It's weird how Gmail refreshes. So today I left my Gmail open and all was perfectly normal and now I just come back to see Gmail and it's like, "O HAI, I HAS A NEW FORMAT!" And I'm like, "Waaaaaaah?"

Not a bad new format, though.

ETA: Oh, and you can change it. [picks pink] Yay, pink! Ever hilarious!

- I finally finished Call of Cthulhu last night. It's gelatinous! EW!
- I faced off against a mouse at work yesterday. I may give the full scoop later. I just want to say that if animal cruelty is a sign of psychosis, I shouldn't be expected to bash in the head of a cute little thing that's afraid of me. Nevertheless, I did get it out of the workplace. I'll keep you posted if it follows me home.
- I started my NaNoWriMo book, and I really hope I finish it because I think I enjoy this scenario more than any other I tried in the past, even that weird psychosexual crime noir in 2006 that I liked but couldn't finish because I had to move. I'm sort of doing something bad in that I'm using an idea I've had for a long time and LIKED, and you're really supposed to be all blank slate for NaNo, but I don't think my idea has much commercial viability, so I'm going with what I got.
- I am so sick of Garth Nix and his bullshit. I'm more than 100 pages into Abhorsen but it already feels too long. I have a determination to finish it, though.
- I didn't so much dig Sarah Haskins' ... er, digs at Disney Princesses. (Well, it's funny, but I think she exaggerates the passivity of someone of them a little bit.) I DO, however, adore her Views on The View. Starring, of course, Goofy Mom, Serious Mom, Embarrassingly Liberal Mom, Hot Conservative Mom and Embarrassing Space Mom.
- Hoping to go to Zack & Miri, Edgar Allan Poe reading, AND Rocky Horror tonight. CAN I DO IT? We shall see!

The scary "We won't let feminism get in the way of our fantasy series!" crowd has been making me want to hide under the couch, but the comments led me to Target Women, which is made of awesome. Funny AND by a woman happy to call herself a feminist. YAY!

----

Read some Oscar Wilde after work today. I have a Complete Works collection, and weirdly enough even though I bought it for "De Profoundis" and wanted to pick it up recently to read "The Portrait of Mr. W.H." So far, I haven't read either, but I did read "Salome," "The Happy Prince," "The Nightingale and the Rose" (and damn, I unfortunately saw the ending coming), "The Selfish Giant" and a handful of poems which I think I would enjoy better if I knew what he was talking about. (I can READ them fine, I just don't know, for example, who the "second Peter" is in "Sonnet on Approaching Italy") I liked "Garden of Eros" though. Wilde was clearly getting his Keats on -- he even mentioned him! (As himself and "Adonais" [sigh!])

----

I like watching MST3K off YouTube, but I've had trouble going back and finishing them. So I've left Pumaman and The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies half-finished. I also tried to watch the Left Behind movie because while Fred Clark's commentaries are fun AND informative, I've been bummed out because now we've been in the room with the Anti-Christ and his masters of evil for what feels like months with little change. (I have to admit I prefer the Rayford Steele chapters to the Buck Williams chapters. Mostly because Jewish World Domination conspiracy stuff makes my eyes glaze over (I'm a BAD elder of Zion) and Rayford's sheer horribleness as a human being is just so much more fascinating.) So I was going through withdrawal and I started watching the movie but I have to confess I had to stop around when Nicolae Carpathia popped up and started talking and DUDE he sounds like Skwisgaar on Metalocalypse! THAT IS SO UNINTENTIONALLY AWESOME! I invoke Rule 34 in celebration. MAKE IT SO, UNIVERSE!

Anyway, it made me laugh so hard I couldn't watch it anymore. Then I started talking Nicolgaar when Chris called me, and he claimed I sounded like Wacko, so for the next minute or so I tried to mangle the Nicolgaar accent into a Liverpool one. I did OK in the end, I think.

---

Oy, 8:20 already? Where does the time go ...

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.

Greetings,

We are writing to inform you that, unfortunately, we have had to temporarily suspend your World of Warcraft account and place a final warning on it.

We have had a problem in our database, it is possible that it is an error, in this case enter in the following link and follow the form:

https://www.worldofwarcraft.com/account/ ?ticket=WB-532580-JHfvy5yMPThayjPYmoyR [[actual link doesn't match -- no surprise]]

Investigation Concluded: 09/01/2008
Type of Violation: Involvement in online trading activities
Consequences for Account: Account suspended for 72 hours, Password Reset and Final Warning issued.

It is with regret that we take this type of action, but it is in the best interests of the World of Warcraft community as a whole, and for the integrity of the game. After your suspension has expired, you will be able to access the World of Warcraft servers again.

To protect the account security, we have also reset your password and issued you with a computer generated one, which you will receive in a separate e-mail. You will be able to change this password at your leisure, using the Account Management feature on our web site, located at: http://www.wow-europe.com/en/

Your password will be sent from noreplyeu@blizzard.com. If you do not receive it after one hour, please add this address to your email address list so that it is not rejected by any spam filter you are using, and reply to wowaccountrevieweu@blizzard.com informing us that you have not received the password.

Please do not disclose your new password to anyone, including Blizzard staff, or change it back to one of your previous passwords as this could result in your account becoming compromised.

Please note that should any further violations of our Rules and Policies occur, this will almost certainly lead to the permanent closure of your account.

We strongly suggest you review our current Rules and Policies to avoid further action in the future, they can be found at:
http://www.wow-europe.com/en/policy/

Regards,

Account Administration Team
Blizzard Entertainment Europe

Since I have never played WoW AND am an American, this constitutes what we call "Epic Fail." Although if I fell for it, that would be TRULY the Epic-iest Fail to ever Fail.

"Stupid dog! All you ever do is bark! You never meow!"

Shit, at least when I reviewed stuff for Sequential Tart which I was prone to hate I made the effort to read all of it, but since she thinks putting on a pair of 3-D glasses included in the book is a hardship, whatever.

(Almost done, BTW -- Stuck in "Crazy Wide Forever", which, yeah, is a bit of a struggle, but otherwise the book has made me really happy.)

My day has come!

lolauthors

I made u a Macro ... Hope I didn't make fun of Plum too much ... I am a new fan and all ...

I was thinking about The Phantom Tollbooth the other day and I ran across this interview with the author of the book. It almost makes me want to re-read it ... some of the things he said are just gold. This is my favorite quote.

Milo's not a dysfunctional kid. He's very typical. I kept having to rewrite those sections because I didn't want him to come across as someone who had these deep psychological problems. He just couldn't figure out why he was being oppressed by all these things. When you think about it, kids get an extraordinary number of facts thrown at them, and nothing connects with anything else. As you get older, all these threads begin to appear, and you realize that almost everything you come across connects to six other things that you know about.

The sad thing is, that last sentence didn't become true for me until college. I don't think it was for lack of wanting to learn, either. I was pretty on top of things in high school. (Although I did pay attention in college more ... there was the whole, "Okay, your parents gave you this, now DO SOMETHING WITH IT" mentality.) Also, thinking about all I didn't understand THEN about The Phantom Tollbooth and how much I enjoyed the book ... and then I compare it to kids who can't understand why Harry Potter and Flat Stanley don't have Cliff Notes ... what a great work that was.

Oh, and here's a clip of the Terrible Trivium that I found on YouTube. This bastard sadly does seem to rule my life at work sometimes.