Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in teenybuffalo's LiveJournal:

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Sunday, July 5th, 2009
12:04 am	By Gad, sir, you are a character, indeed you are You know what I haven't done often enough?  Mused about gay gangsters, that's what.  Time for a book roundup post. Lately I've been reading a lot of detective stories (Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett) and hardboiled fiction (The Postman Always Rings Twice: why hello there, disturbing sex scenes, somehow I'd almost forgotten you existed).  This is one of those areas where my tastes have changed since I was a kid.  I can distinctly remember being alternately bored and frustrated by all three authors, but now I like them a lot.  ( Spoilers for Maltese Falcon. Gunsel gunsel gunsel gunsel RABBIT RABBIT. ) (Comment on this)
Friday, July 3rd, 2009
12:05 am	Another long day at the big sack of birdseed You know what is currently running through my head?  The voice of Boris Karloff, singing "I've Got A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts".*   I would say, "WTF, my brain?" except that he actually sings it very well.  Thank you for your input on the last post, everybody.  Now that it's a few days later, I'm not nearly as overexcited about the whole bone(s) of contention, but I'm glad I did bring it up in the first place.  Short answer: I went ahead and shaved 'em, because what the heck.  Right now, I have a curiously numb feeling about the ankles, and it's because I'm like a cat who has cut off her whiskers.  There's no insulating layer of fuzz between me and the legs of my jeans anymore.  Still, it's a nice change of pace. Unfortunately, my bones of contention and I aren't going to be able to go to Readercon this year.  Work and a Revolutionary War reenactment are conspiring to keep me away.  I'll be looking forward to reading everybody's con reports and living vicariously through you guys. Something incredibly cute happened at work today.  Just after I arrived, this family walked in who had apparently visited the shop earlier in the day.  A forbidding-looking mother and her young son and daughter.  "Is there anything I can help you with?" I asked them, trying not to do the singsong-talking-to-adorable-kids voice that I use sometimes.  The mother said sternly to her daughter, "Talk to the lady."  The little girl, who was tiny and growing tinier by the second, said, "Um, when we were in here before, I took this away with me because I thought it was for free."  She held out a slightly crumpled bookmark and looked guilty and huge-eyed.  I thanked her very politely for bringing it back, and said that it was okay, it was a mistake anyone could make.  She put it back in its place--no harm, no foul (except that her mother still looked like a thundercloud).  Then they all walked out.  You know what the kicker is... I went around the counter after they had gone, to look at the display from the customers' side.  It's a Big Box O' Bookmarks, with the various prices in big letters on the front.  And, under that, in faint red pencil, the store's cash register code for ringing up bookmarks: #FREE.  The little girl made a completely honest mistake.  It even said FREE.  Poor kid!  I have to remember to put white-out over that tomorrow. *This never actually happened, as far as I know.  Though his character did sing something in The Bodysnatchers. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, June 27th, 2009
1:53 pm	Procrastinating This afternoon I'm going to pack away my modeling table and put most of my supplies in storage.  I've been meaning to do it for weeks; I need all the room I can get. For the foreseeable future, I'm putting aside the whole Linden Designs effort.  (Remember that?  It's been ages since I even talked about it.)  Maybe I'll sculpt a few things when I have the time.  I still want to make those blue rose hairsticks for rushthatspeaks , and if anybody else has commissions, I'll try to fulfill them.  But for the most part, I'm not going to be doing polyclay work.  It was fun, but it was a stopgap measure for me: something creative and fun that I could do while I wasn't able to write.  Now I'm writing again, and that's how I want to spend most of my free makin'-stuff-up time. Not sure what I shall do with linden_designs .  I never put much stuff on there, so perhaps I'll just delete it. One nice side note is that photographing my own stuff made me get competent with a camera.  I want to keep taking photos, maybe get a little better at it. (Comment on this)
1:52 am	Happy birthday, Mr. Lorre! He's all right! (Comment on this)
Monday, June 22nd, 2009
11:11 pm	Everything's better with gangsters I've been reading a lot of hard-boiled fiction lately and watching a few b&w thrillers.  Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett deserve their own post, but here are some of the movies in brief. Little Caesar Plot: Rico (Edward G. Robinson) steals stuff, shoots people, and wears increasingly more snappy suits.  Then the cops finally get him.  ( Good bits: ) The Big Sleep Plot: All women everywhere want to make love to Philip Marlowe.  Some people get shot and poisoned.  One of the women is played by Lauren Bacall, who finally succeeds in getting Marlowe's attention.  Everybody smokes a lot. ( Good bits: ) And on that front: Casablanca Plot: Half the population of Europe are trying to flee the Nazis via Casablanca.  Some of them make it out alive.  All women everywhere, plus Louis, want to make love to Rick. ( Good bits: ) Key Largo Plot: Johnny Rocco the mobster takes over a hotel in the Florida Keys in the off-season and exploits and terrorizes the people there for his own benefit.  Unfortunately for him, one of the people is played by Humphrey Bogart.  There are only two women in the movie, but they both want to make love to Humphrey Bogart.   ( Good bits: ) To Have And Have Not Plot: Humphrey Bogart is awesome and everybody loves him.  Somewhere off in the background, World War II is happening.  Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart smoke at each other and trade brittle, witty banter.  All women everywhere want to make love to Humphrey Bogart, except for the hotel manager's mother, and even she is probably nursing a secret crush. ( Good bits: ) (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, June 19th, 2009
11:01 pm	Movies: "Crime and Punishment" and "The Man Who Knew Too Much" We don't have a TV at my place.  If I want to watch a movie, I put it on this computer, or use my parents' laptop if a bunch of us all want to crowd around a screen.  You can't find everything you want on DVD, though.  So I've been having an ongoing midweek film session.  If I have a Wednesday or Thursday with nothing else to do in the early evening, I toddle across town to Arkham Women's College and use one of their viewing rooms to watch an old VHS tape from the video store of something obscure that I can't get on DVD.  (Sometimes, if I feel like living dangerously, I bring a bag of pretzels, even though the sign says No Food or Drink In Library.  What can I say, I enjoy life on the edge.) Crime and Punishment last week, The Man Who Knew Too Much this week.  The first was more fun, but they both had their moments.  About The Man..., it didn't really click for me.  I didn't think much of the acting.  The kid was good, though.  They should have given her a lot more screen time.  Most of the good guys seemed weirdly unconvincing; when their daughter has been kidnapped, I don't buy flippant humor and slapstick fight scenes.  If the idea was to keep the overall tone light and exciting rather than to be realistic, I suppose it succeeded at that, but I still didn't quite buy most of the characters most of the time.  It also featured Peter Lorre as a slithy tove.  ( Spoilers. ) C&P was the 1930s black and white version with Peter Lorre as Raskolnikov, directed by Joseph von Sternberg.  It was outrageously unfaithful to the book.  It was the pulp-fiction thriller version of C&P written by screenwriters who have only read the Cliffs Notes rather than the Dostoyevsky novel.  And it was wonderful.  I raved about it a little the other week, but it's worth saying again: the movie is full of stuff that should have happened in the book.  One of the reasons the book is such a wrench to read is that there keeps being no emotional crisis, no catharsis.  There is this murder, whereafter the murderer can't enjoy himself at all; he was an anxious, miserable young sod before he killed the two women, and afterwards he's still an anxious, miserable young sod. Not in the movie.  Oh, boy.  In the movie he's a clever and conceited youth with a huge sense of entitlement, who has pictures of Napoleon and Beethoven glowering from his bedroom walls.  (The soundtrack was full of pointless quotations from Beethoven's Fifth.  Like a lot of other stuff in the movie, it was very funny and I don't think it was intended to be funny.  Every time anything of any significance happened, DUH DUH DUH DUMMMM!)  It's amazing what a spot of first-degree murder will do for your inner man.  Raskolnikov gains a sudden bizarre burst of confidence, wherein he marches down to his publisher and demands a better contract, then goes out and gets his sister unengaged to a guy who looks like Pooh-Bah.  If P.G. Wodehouse had written Crime and Punishment, he'd have come up with someone like Lorre-as-Raskolnikov.  I read somewhere that Peter Lorre had always wanted to do a film version of C&P, since he was a fan of the book.  He certainly could have found a screenplay with more literary merit, but he couldn't have found a funnier one.  It's appallingly oversimplified, but it's so charming that I forgave it much.  It's as if he's said, "Screw subtlety and sensitive performances, I did all that in Mad Love and now I'm going for some antiheroic slapstick."  (Oh, and PL has very short hair, unfashionably short for the 30s, brushed straight forward.  I thought, "Hm, this must have been right after Mad Love," and, by gum, I found out afterwards that I was right--he was growing his hair back in just as fast as he could.)  ( Also spoilers, plus more fangirling. ) (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 18th, 2009
1:11 am	Film yak --Mystic was great fun.  I got to spend all weekend singing away and making up verses with redcolumbine .  I'm still in denial about its being over, actually.  Fortunately for me, the MIT Chantey Sing is coming up this Sunday (2-5 p.m., as I recall; comment if you want directions).  I can get my fix of good loud choruses in public.  I haven't had nearly enough chances to sing lately, and it's mostly because I haven't taken the trouble to go out and find them. --Tomorrow I have to go back to work after a week off for the Festival weekend.  Bah.  But on the other hand, on Saturday I may have the time for a kayak trip.  Man, that'd be fun.   --I bought a cell phone!  After putting it off for some months, I finally did it.  For some reason I can't quite define, I was very reluctant to purchase one.  But it had to be done, and now I'm very glad I've got it.  I won't be using it every day, but as nineweaving  once said, it's like a signal flare, for use in emergencies.   --Hey, you know what I think I'll buy?  A box of those red highway flares where you stick them upright and light the end to warn away traffic.  If I ever got the car stuck in the mud or had a flat on the highway, they'd be useful for safety.  Plus, bright red sparks are cool.  (My Uncle Alanson was a pyromaniac.  I never met him; he was actually a great-uncle by marriage, and he died of natural causes some years before I was born.  But he had a spectacular reputation on account of once setting fire to a field in back of his house.  His wife and neighbors found him setting the dry grass alight with matches and staring at it with a big, maniacal grin.  "Lannie?  Why are you doing that?"  "Hunh?  Oh, it's fun."  "Hadn't you better stop before it spreads?"  "Uh.  Yeah, I guess so."  He was the nicest, most law-abiding fellow otherwise.  My mother and I both take after him, despite not actually being related by blood.) --I've been watching a lot of gangster movies lately with my parents.  That's one of the places where we can coincide.  I don't like their modern-day action movies, they hate my monster/horror/supernatural favorites, but these days we all like black-and-white crime movies, gangster flicks, noir in general.  We watched "Little Caesar" the other night, "The Big Sleep" tonight. --That reminds me.  I've been thinking about film noir.  It's a smashing genre name, isn't it?  Just sounds like a nice portentous phrase to put in the subtitle of your term paper.  It's French, so it must be meaningful.  You can even pluralize it as "films noirs" and astonish your less worldly friends.  And what does it mean?  Hunh?  I ask ya, what's it mean?  I'll tell you what it means.  It means a movie with: These things: ( O Turpitude, where are the charms that felons have seen in thy face? Time's called at the Criminal's Arms, and there isn't a drink in the place. ) Thus we see that a film can be a film noir and yet not actually be good or enjoyable.  (Will the students in the back of the classroom please turn off their cell phones and attend to the lecture.  Thank you.)  A lot of noir films are good and enjoyable, not merely because they contain the elements above but because those elements are used well.  And yet highbrow criticism will have it that any old gangster film is a film noir because it contains those elements, and that therefore (here's the tricky part) its being a film noir makes it automatically good.  All b&w crime thrillers therefore have the opportunity to scoot in under the umbrella of respectability and approval offered by the term "film noir".  I'm not saying they shouldn't.  What I am saying is that we need terms of highbrow respectability, to shelter other genres we like.  What about early horror?  I ask you.  What about '30s Universal monster movies?  What about movies with big bouncy rubber bats on strings, where the dry ice swirls moodily about the actors' ankles?  What about early silent films where Count Orlak loads twenty coffins onto a cart and then drives away in fast-forward, leaving the audience in inappropriate gales of mirth?  What about films with the same cute little cobbled main street which appeared in about fifteen different monster movies, starting with The Wolf Man?  What about films with a huge, ghastly monster who has been so folk-processed through time that he appears totally innocuous to us today, yet was state of the art for his day?  What about Lon Chaney Jr. covered in yak hair, damn it?  Where is the shelter of artistic merit for films about monsters who look like Bottom the Weaver?  (Sorry, Larry, but you do.) Wait.  I have it.  We will call classic monster movies film yak.  (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 15th, 2009
11:10 am	Much-overdue limerick for hatofhornigold There was a young pirate with guile Who captured St. Thomas's isle Disguised as a tourist; And sang them a chorus, t- o finish her voyage in style. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 8th, 2009
10:57 am	He went for a little walk!      Uberwald... is based on all the classic horror movies you can remember, most particularly those made by Hammer Films, when no coach could go faster than five miles an hour along a suspiciously familiar road without shedding a wheel, half the population were nubile 18-year-old girls and I swear there was one very large, ornate, floor-standing candlestick that appeared in every movie.  In the one-and-sixpenny seats... I must have watched Christopher Lee die in a dozen different ways.  I learned that turning into a heap of wind-blown dust need not put a huge crimp in your life plans.       Thus Don'tgonearthe Castle was invented.  It has, of course, running water in the moat, a whole slew of things that could be easily converted into religious objects, and a big window facing the sunrise with insecurely fastened curtains.  It was clear that Dracula was quite a sporting fellow.  It was all a game.      A world away from the Slasher movies, the Hammer movies were, on recollection, quite domesticated, and as stylized as a mummers' play.  You knew exactly what you were going to get, including the candlestick.  Hammer Horror was set in Uberwald, where blood is bright red and you don't get too much of it... --From Terry Pratchett's notes to "The Art of Discworld". Likewise, an added pleasure for fans of early Universal Horror films is the game of Spot the Prop.  The Universal Studios equivalent of the large floor-standing candlestick is this one satin-covered eiderdown that the props keeper must have liked a lot.  So far it's been seen on Lucy's bed in Dracula and the bed of What's Her Name in The Mummy while she's having flashbacks to ancient Egypt.  Other recycled props include an overstuffed tapestry chair and an overstuffed Edward Van Sloan.  I suppose the poor guy can't help having a boring voice, but he appears in like five different monster movies, and plays pretty much the same Van Helsing-style character in all of them, and he puts me right to sleep.  Oh, well, not all old character actors can be Ernest Thesiger. Oh, and I watched Mummy last night.  It's exactly like Dracula, except with mummies instead of vampires.  Oh, and it's better than Dracula, because it has Boris Karloff as an umpteenth-level cleric.  I've got a crush on him, now, too.  Well, who am I kidding, I had a crush on him in the Frankenstein movies, but I never realized it till this film.  It's THE VOICE.  Well, it's everything else about him as well, but he has this splendid rumbling voice that makes the floor vibrate when he whispers.  Oh dear me.  This is a man who can switch from modern-speak into an old-fashioned cadence, like the Hindi-speakers in Kipling, with lots of usage of "thee" and "thou", and not sound silly.  This is a man who can walk around in a silly headdress and an ancient Egyptian kilt and still look like a ferocious SOB.  Presence?  Truckloads of it.  He just quietly looms up and pwns everybody else on the screen. Also, there is a heroine with a little more gumption than the average screaming chick.  She's not as cool as Yvonne from Mad Love, but she is funny and spunky and you can reasonably believe that the men would find her attractive beyond the fact that she's hot.  This is always a problem for me in movies with one token woman whom all the men adore and the monster carries off.  I have a hard time figuring what makes women attractive to men.  Quite often, the Scream Chick doesn't have much personality; she's just sexy, end of story, who cares about anything else.  This makes the men seem pretty shallow, because the story then revolves around their risking their lives for someone who's kinda one-dimensional.  One of the reasons I liked Mad Love, speaking of which: Yvonne had a lot of charm and character, and the film took care to give her clear motivations for everything she did.  It wasn't obtrusive, it was just a lot of little background stuff.  I felt that I would have liked her if I'd met her socially.  You got to see her talking to her friends, loving her husband, enjoying life, and then trying to hold her marriage together and protect her husband while he was injured and his sanity was heading down the tubes.  The film was her story, more than it was the mad doctor's.  She had a normal life outside the horrors of the plot, and you could see why her husband loved her and why the doctor was obsessed with her.  Things like that are important, and when you see them done right you don't forget them. On a much shallower front... It's remarkable how little the girl in The Mummy wears, given that it's 1932.  This is the dress in which she spends a lot of time.  And this is her ancient Egyptian outfit.  Hello, Ankh-es-en-Fanservice.  I think the Hays Code was invented for movies like this (and the Theater of Horrors in Mad Love).  Dialogue that I liked in The Mummy: Old professor #1: What does the inscription on the lid say, Professor? Old professor #2: "Death... Death and eternal punishment to anyone who opens this box.  My curse will strike to the Underworld he who breaks the seal, who dares to behold what lies within." [Miniscule pause] Eager-beaver graduate student: Well!  Let's see what's inside it! (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, June 6th, 2009
12:11 am	How thou'rt translated The Wolf Man and The Cat People make an oddly appropriate couple as movies go.  I'm not just being cute with the titles, either.  ( Lots of opinions about <i>The Cat People</i> ) I didn't actually cry over this movie, but my heart has been aching about it for the last few days.  It hurt, but in the very best way, because it got to my own demons.   From what I hear about the sequel, Curse of the Cat People, it has very little to do with the first movie.  Since everything is deeper with haiku: Val Lewton's sequel Has no curse or cat people: The egg cream of noir. Oh, and I have all sorts of opinions about The Wolf Man, too.  Tomorrow for those. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009
2:06 am	The things I watch so that you won't have to This is a PSA for any fans of black-and-white movies on my f'list.  You will do well to avoid Waterloo Bridge.  I just got through watching it, and that's two hours of my life I won't get back.  IT STANK.  The plot goes like this:  ( Sigh... ) Why did I even check out this movie again?  Oh.  Right.  It was the only film besides The Wolf Man to feature Maria Ouspenskaya.  She was incredibly cool, and after Wolf Man I wanted to see what else she'd done.  Well, she was good in this, too.  Unfortunately she plays a vicious-tempered old ballet teacher who has ten total minutes of screen time.  Not worth it at all, even for diehard fans of character actors like Ouspenskaya and C. Aubrey Smith.  (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 1st, 2009
1:23 pm	"Merely admiring myself. I am an author." "You look it. Move along." Oh, right--I promised you Crime and Punishment and zombies, didn't I?  Well, for anyone who was puzzled by my last entry, this is what I meant to address.( Spoilers for a book that came out 150 years ago. ) And on a completely different note,  I've been watching excerpts from the 1935 Crime and Punishment with Peter Lorre as Raskolnikov, and it looks... well... bizarre.  The way that a really uneven Film Of The Book can be disturbing and yet fun.  They seem to have packed it down from a long, sprawling moral drama into a short, fast-moving thriller.  The old pawnbroker gets a lengthy scene that makes us hate her--y'know, so we won't feel bad when Raskolnikov gives her the chop.  And I think they try to give Raskolnikov a clearly-defined motivation, give him a lot more fun stuff to do, and generally remake him into the kind of antihero you can laugh and cry with, instead of the depressed young lump of misery from the book.  Of course, he's also played by Peter Lorre, so he has to have a chance to play with people's lapels and invade their personal space.  I'll suspend complete judgment until I've watched the whole film in order, but so far it looks misguided but fun. You have to watch this one sequence.  If you have ever read Crime and Punishment, please, please watch this.  It's wonderful.  It's so wrong, but I love it so much.  The scene in the book bears no resemblance to this one at all, but, you know?  That doesn't matter.  They ought to have done all this in the book.  It's like Dostoyevsky as played by Harpo and Zeppo Marx. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 30th, 2009
4:08 pm	Crime and Punishment and zombies PAWNSHOP HORROR: STUDENT MURDERS  OLD LADY WITH AXE (He had the axe, not the old lady) Isn't it wonderful having enough time to read just for fun again?  But I thought I ought to read something that would also broaden my mind, so I chose Crime and Punishment.  (Also, admittedly, I want to watch the Peter Lorre movie and I'd feel bogus watching a film of a classic if I hadn't first read the book.)  I think I expected it to be incredibly dull and contain long authorial tracts of no bearing on the plot, kind of the way Notre-Dame de Paris turned out to be very little about Quasimodo and Esmeralda and very much about architectural archaeology.  Then again, Moby-Dick has a very poor ratio of plot to content, and I love it anyway because I enjoy Ishmael's voice and Melville's weird outlook on life in general and the whaling industry in particular.  Such being the case, I was willing to give Crime and Punishment a try.  Oh!  Also, I remembered asakiyume 's recommending it to me once, so I wanted to try and see what she'd seen in it. ( Well, I loved it. ) (Comment on this)
Thursday, May 28th, 2009
11:42 pm	We are such gentle people, Sydney. (pic from here) My crush on Peter Lorre continues unabated.  Evil, lovable, and funny: three great tastes that taste great together.  This has to be a record--it's been more than a month now, and not only do I still love him, I have yet to see him give a performance I don't like.  Okay, I've only watched five or six movies featuring him, because it's hard to find a lot of his stuff, but that's still a good record.  It's like he's been blessed by Loki.  Hammy?  Yes, sometimes, in the very best way.  Over the top?  Once or twice.  Inappropriately good in the midst of an otherwise lousy cast?  Occasionally.  Dull or uninteresting?  Never.  I could look at him all day.  I also find old, fat, debauched Lorre just as likable as young, dapper, cute Peter Lorre.  (Yeah, I'm in love.)  The problem is that he isn't in anything good in his later years.  I watched a little bit of "The Raven" on YouTube, and there was a fairly entertaining sequence with him doing the voice of the title character, but it goes downhill from there.  They couldn't think of anything clever to do with him once his character appears in human form, so they just have him stand around and be short.  I don't think I like Roger Corman movies. ( Lots about Lorre. ) YouTube has been taunting me with little morsels of all the movies I know I'll have a hard time finding in full.  It's like getting a free sample of the most wonderful old smoked Gouda at the deli, and then never being able to find it for sale anywhere.  This is one that works perfectly well on its own, though.  Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet, fighting on the side of good.  I want a couple of guardian angels like these two. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
6:30 pm	I think we need some light relief I must have linked to these two before--possibly years ago--but it's high time I did again. "Albert and the Lion" by Marriott Edgar. ...So Mr and Mrs Ramsbottom Quite rightly, when all's said and done Complained to the Animal Keeper That the lion had eaten their son. The keeper was quite nice about it He said, "What a nasty mishap Are you sure that it's your lad he's eaten?" Pa said, "Am I sure? There's his cap!" "Albert's Return", by Marriott Edgar. The name of the lion was Wallace, The poke in the ear made `im wild And before you could say, "Bob's yer uncle!" E'd upped and `e'd swallowed the child. `E were sorry the moment `e done it; With children `e'd always been chums, And besides, `e'd no teeth in his muzzle, And `e couldn't chew Albert on't gums. And this one has nothing to do with lions, but I've always liked it anyway... "On Strike", by Charles Pond (made famous by Stanley Holloway) When I lays dahn my tool. I lays 'em dahn, I laid 'em dahn seven year ago over a matter of three shilling a week. Now there's people 'oo'll say, 'Fancy a man being aht o' work seven year over a matter o' three shilling a week.' People what don't understand the principle of the thing, The principle of a fair living wage and that's wot I'm a-standin' aht for. And I wouldn't let my old woman work for the money she do in the steam laundry, Only somebody's got to keep the 'ome up. It would never do for both of us to be aht. And I know an old guy who does this one, and he's hilarious:  "My Word, You Do Look Queer", by Bob Weston and Bert Lee. I've been very poorly but now I feel prime, I've been out today for the very first time. I felt like a lad as I walked down the road, Then I met Old Jones and he said, 'Well I'm blowed!' My word you do look queer! My word you do look queer! Oh, dear! You look dreadful: you've had a near shave, You look like a man with one foot in the grave.' I said, 'Bosh! l'm better; it's true I've been ill.' He said, 'I'm delighted you're better, but still, I wish you'd a thousand for me in your will. My word, you do look queer!' ...I thought of that one quite a bit, after I had bronchitis last summer. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009
1:15 am	With catlike tread, upon our prey we steal Part two of two posts on M.  This one tends to deal with the stuff I actually did like, though.   ( Read more... ) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 22nd, 2009
12:57 am	loldraculas and lolnutjobs Hi.  I have some free time now.  ph33r me. Mad Love: ( Four more under the cut. ) (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 20th, 2009
10:13 am	Gettin' fannish all over again The past few months of "Order of the Stick" strips have kinda left me cold.  Still funny, still cutely drawn, the characters are still likable... but they still seem meh.  The plot's just been chasing its tail in circles, with a few Pyrrhic victories for the heroes that don't really mean much. Incidentally, this may be an occupational hazard for those of us who enjoy online comics.  When I say the plot's been dragging of late, it may be as much my own problem as the strip's.  See... it's happened with Girl Genius, Order of the Stick, Looking for Group, Skin Horse, heck, even Questionable Content.  The process goes like this: 1) Discover brilliant comic with ongoing storyline, which has months or years worth of strips in its archive. 2) Go on archive binge where I read entire storylines, which were originally posted over some months or years, in one single night. 3) Finish the archive and go, "Whoa!  This is brilliant!" and declare myself a loyal fan forever. 4) Join the rest of the fandom in Withdrawal Land.  No more giant helpings of storyline.  Just a one-comic-at-a-time series of installments, given to us by the creators faithfully multiple times a week ("Girl Genius", "Skin Horse") or sporadically on a slow and maddeningly unpredictable schedule ("Order of the Stick"). 5) Get frustrated and think, "God, this plotline is moving as slowly as molasses running up a hill in January.  Why can't the characters get on with it?" Anyway, this is all in aid of saying that I like the turn that "Order of the Stick" has taken lately.  (Warning: strange and weird spoilers, plus it won't make much sense without the foregoing 654 strips as setup.)  I don't know where we're going, but I'm excited to go there. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, May 18th, 2009
5:17 pm	Caps I've got a writerly question for you guys.  If you see a cap that looks like this, what would you call it?  It's not a "flat cap" because it's bigger and floppier than that.  I've done a Google image search and found a bunch of names, including "newsie cap" and "Gatsby" (though I don't remember anybody wearing a floppy cap in The Great Gatsby, maybe Gatsby wears one in the movie version).  But I want to know what name you guys would use for it, not just what the most widely accepted name is.  This is one of those fiddly little things that you never notice till you try to put them into a story.  If I wrote a character who wore a cap of this type, I'd need to know how other people think of them, because saying, "...and he put on a muffin cap.  Not a beret, you know the kind, it was tweed and had a little brim on the front and a button in the center and it was sort of sewn in wedges..." just isn't going to neatly and unobtrusively call an image to the reader's mind. In the 1930s version of The Maltese Falcon, Wilmer wears a really ridiculous muffin cap, but unfortunately I can't find an image.  (Too bad.  He was played by Dwight Frye in that one and was jolly disturbing.) Edit: I take it back.  There's a photo of Wilmer on here, about 2/3 of the way down the page.  Feast your eyes. (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 17th, 2009
12:19 pm	Two down, two to go I handed in my papers for the internship, and for the History of the American Revolutionary Era course.  If I haven't talked much about that one, it's because the squeaking wheel gets the grease--the other courses have annoyed me, but this one was pretty good, and the teacher was consistently entertaining and informative.  She wasn't quite as cool as Professor Freddy, but she came close. My last paper and my only real honest-to-God final exam are both on Tuesday afternoon.  Then the semester's over.  Today is the MIT Chantey Sing (2:00 to 5:00 at the MIT Sailing Pavilion, in case you're in the area), but I can't go.  I have to bone up for the History of the Caribbean final.  This makes me mad.  I'm doing the right thing, but I'm still sore about it.  redcolumbine , sorry to miss you.  I'm there in spirit. It strikes me that I've been making very heavy weather of finals this semester.  I mean, all the griping I've been doing on here, for starters, and that includes this post.  It seems it ought to be easier to do well.  Admittedly, it's my first semester in a long time spent as a full-time student, and I've got the job at the store, too.  But even so, I thought I would handle the coursework more easily.  I wish I were a really brilliant student; heck, I wish I could reach Agatha Heterodyne's state of hyperconcentration; and I wish that I were better at balancing schoolwork with my real-life pastimes and the time I want to spend with my friends.  It seems easy for other people to do all that, but for me it takes a lot of effort.  I mean... I study hard, I put a lot of time and brain into it, and (sub Deo) I get decent grades.  But from where I'm standing, it looks as though a lot of other people get good grades, too, and with very little effort.  You would think that they just glanced lightly over the course materials and then reached out and plucked an A like a ripe plum. Common sense tells me that it can't be that easy.  School must drive other people up the wall, too. One thing this semester has taught me is that I learn much more easily when I pick the subject and study by myself.  I'm a born homeschooler, I guess, and it just feels right to set my own guidelines.  When I'm done with the semester, I'm going to write a paper on the U.S. Exploring Expedition of the 1830s, and I'm looking forward to it.  Right now, one thing that's helping me study Caribbean history for Tuesday is the blissful knowledge that I never have to sit through another class with the professor ever again.  [Long rant about how annoying this teacher is, redacted.]  Now, it's like I've come to the subject fresh, and I can be my own professor and guide myself through the materials.  Speaking of which, back to work, Teeny!  See you guys in a while, hope you're having a good Sunday. (5 Comments |Comment on this)