Hi! You may know me as woodburner. Or hey, you may not. Anyway, this is a mostly open journal - subscribe/unsubscribe at will, no need to ask permission. :)

FUCKING HURRICANES. AUGH. I am so done with this thing and it hasn't even started yet.

EARTHQUAKE, WTF?! I didn't feel it, but my mom did. I'm feeling kinda left out!

(...Note to Earth: that is NOT a request.)

No. 6 ep7. WELL THAT WAS CERTAINLY A VERY HETEROSEXUAL EPISODE.

( spoilers are very heterosexual )

Okay guys, I have like a bajilionity book quote reviews unquote since the last time I did a book post, but I'm going to post this one separately because it deserves special attention! And by that I mean I want you all to go read it and then COME BACK AND TALK TO MEEEE omg I want to babble senselessly about this book with people so bad. :(

(It's not out in the US yet. I was so excited to get the new Oyeyemi that I ordered it from Europe on Abebooks, errrr. But if you're in the US and want to wait until late September, here it is on Amazon!)

Mr. Fox's frame story takes place in the 1930s. It's about this jerk, St John Fox, who's a writer with a propensity for killing off all his heroines in ridiculously gruesome ways. His long-absent muse, Mary Foxe, shows up to berate him for being such an asshole - he's a killer, she says, and she doesn't want him like this. He protests! He's not an asshole! It's not like he's actually killing these fine ladies! It's all just games, don't you understand, it's not like it means anything! So Mary challenges him to another game: they each take turns ensnaring each other in stories - stories that ignore the constraints of time and location and reality - where they play the main characters. Through this game Mary hopes to teach him a lesson. Eventually, Mr. Fox's wife, Daphne, gets involved, thinking he's having some kind of affair.

You guys, THIS BOOK. It's really great. It was also very familiar to me on this uncanny, semi-subconscious level - like, YES, I recognize this, these things, they're in my head too! It has been many years since a book touched me on such a personal level. I think the only book that's ever been more eerily familiar to me than this was The Etched City. (...Although I hasten to add that the two books are not particularly alike at all. I do think there's a good chance that if you like one, you'd like the other, considering they're both from the weirder side of the tracks, and they're both very good.)

Helpful note: It helps to be familiar with Bluebeard/Fitcher's Bird/Mister Fox/other fairy tales following the Bluebeard motif going into this book. Also, Reynardine.

My quote review unquote from goodreads:

Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I don't know, I don't know, I don't knowwwww. The more deeply a book touches me, the less I know how to say anything about it. My reaction to this book is kind of like how I feel when I look at the moon; I'm full of all these senseless impulses, I want to eat it, I want to breathe it. It should be cool and bright in my mouth. Every word is luminous and strange and wonderful. I want everyone in the world to read it and love it like I do and talk about it so I can consume all their thoughts, too.

I know this tells you absolutely nothing about what this book was about. How am I supposed to convince people to read it? I just don't even know how to talk about it. It was a novel, and it was also a collection of short stories, and it was about a lot of things like love and creativity and muses and Bluebeard and the nastiness (and laziness) of the tradition of killing off heroines for dramatic impact. It was also wonderful, and you should all read it and talk about it so I can eat your thoughts.

Incidentally I almost wish I had waited for the US hardcover to come out and gotten that edition, because although the Picador edition is made of what looks and feels like high-quality materials, it's designed somewhat poorly so you have to almost wrestle the book open and pin it down to read it, and now there's all this wear on my copy when I'm usually really gentle on books. I don't really mind when this happens with a really cheap paperback, but this wasn't cheap. But if I had waited, I wouldn't have been able to read it for another whole two months, and that would have been TERRIBLE. What if I died tomorrow? Then I would have lived my whole life never having read this book. Horrors!

View all my reviews

Other things I am watching so far this season:

Dantalian no Shoka - This pretty much has no plot to speak of so far, but it's so atmospheric and the music is so pretty that it doesn't need one. I mean, I kind of don't know why they bothered with a plot at all - just random scenes of Dalian being cute and Hugh being charming and the occasional book-monster running around with pretty backgrounds and lovely music would have been fine. It sort of lulls me into this mellow, blissed out state. I get drowsy watching it not because it's boring, but because it's so soothing.

(...I suppose I should note here, lest you get the wrong idea from all my talk about it being soothing, that this is a horror/mystery show with some fairly gruesome scenes? Idek okay.)

Oh! And ep 4 had Dalian being a BL fangirl. Also ship wars. And another BL fangirl going all Misery on some poor author's ass. And Dalian deciding to write fix-it fic when her precious gay pairing had a cop-out straight ending. BL FANGIRLS. ENGAGING IN SHIP WARS SINCE THE 1930S.

Mawaru Pengindrum: Continues to be bizarre and entertaining and incredibly stylish, although I want more Himari! Ringo is interesting and all, but...


Aaaand I just discovered that Natsume Yuujinchou S3 has already started broadcasting! Somehow I missed that. Just watched the first 2 eps, and it continues to be the cute, whimsical and languid show the first 2 seasons were.

Along with No. 6, that makes FOUR ANIME SERIES worth watching this season?! UNPOSSIBLE. Oh, anime, how I've missed you. ;_____________;


Shows that I have watched which I don't really recommend:

Blood C: This is the latest installment in the Blood franchise (Blood the Last Vampire, Blood +, etc.) I've watched 4 episodes of this so far and it continues to be dead boring, and yet somehow I just keep watching more? Idk. The one good thing I can say for it thus far is that it has some really awesome and creative monster designs.


Mayo Chiki!: I only watched 5 minutes of this. Seriously, anime industry, you are pissing me the fuck off. You give me one of my greatest kinks - A LADY BUTLER, FOR GOD'S SAKE - and make her the heroine of a show, and you make the show a piece of disgusting moe crap. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU.

So like. A week or two ago I watched the first few episodes of No. 6 thinking it was going to be yet another crappy excuse for slashy boys, because sometimes those are fun, right. But then it was like. WHAT. DID I JUST WATCH. THIS IS ACTUALLY LIKE. GOOD?!! Also: EVEN GAYER THAN ADVERTISED, HOLY CRAP.

No. 6 is a futuristic dystopian sci-fi (with serious BL aspirations) crossed with an episode of Fringe (also with serious BL aspirations), running in the famous noitaminA time slot. Also, why aren't you watching it right now. Seriously, what is wrong with you.

Premise: When Nezumi (Rat) and Shion are both 12, Shion loses his chance at the high life by helping Nezumi, who'd escaped from a correctional facility, evade capture. In return, when Shion later gets into seriously deep shit, Nezumi shows up to save him. (He knows Shion's in trouble on account of his ARMY OF ROBOTIC RATS THAT SPY ON THE CITY FOR HIM.) Oh yeah, and there are also creepy parasite wasps that hatch in your body and cause you to age and die in a matter of minutes as they burrow out of your neck. Idek.

Here's the opening, which is awesome.

This is Nezumi.



He's a rather violent chap who's in a CONSTANT HAM-OFF with the ENTIRE UNIVERSE (which, as moonsheen pointed out, he wins by virtue of having his VERY OWN ARMY OF ACTUAL ROBOTIC RAT SPIES), and waves his arms around so exuberantly and grandly it's a miracle he doesn't put someone's eye out. He's also a Shakespearean actor and literature nerd. I feel this explains so much about his personality.

( Mildly spoilery evidence )


This is Shion.



He's a sweet kid. He's the naive and sheltered genius type. If you can ignore the fact that he reacts COMPLETELY INAPPROPRIATELY AND FEARLESSLY to life-threatening situations, you might be tempted to think him the only sane character in this show. MISTAAAAAKE.



(There are no sane characters in this show.)

So anyway, last night I watched ep5 of this show, and I legit cannot interpret this narrative as anything other than a romance anymore. I mean.

( They are... dancing... together. At the end of the world. IS THIS THE REAL LIFE. )

This show. THIS SHOW.

Okay, when I heard Ikuhara (Utena) directing + Hoshino Lily (BL author) doing character designs + cute... little... penguins? Doing odd jobs around the house? I didn't know what to expect, but somehow this is... EXACTLY what I would have expected.

SO IS THE FIRST EPISODE TOO EARLY TO BE EXCITED ABOUT THIS

B/C SRSLY THE ENTIRE EPISODE MY FACE WAS A CROSS BETWEEN "oO" and "8DDDD!!!" AND IF YOU KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT ME THEN YOU KNOW THAT THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT I LOOK FOR IN MY ENTERTAINMENT

TRYING NOT TO BE TOO EXCITED

...FAILING

OMG NEXT EPISODE WHERE

O hai! Back from (unintentional) hiatus (again)!

O all-knowing f-list/circle, can anyone tell me if the recent edition of Dragon Sword and Wind Child released by Viz Media contains illustrations? And if these illustrations are in both the paperback and hardback version? (I ask the 2nd question b/c I noticed that the cover image for the hardback on Amazon mentions "illustrations by Miho [unreadable]," but the paperback version conspicuously does not.) Also, if there are illustrations, how many?

(I'm trying to decide whether to buy the book, see, since I've already read it from the library - but the library's edition is from 1993 and has a kinda meh cover and no illustrations, and if the Viz edition has illustrations I'd like to see them.)

((I would have just asked Viz Media, but their contact page only has a snail mail address wtf Viz Media it is 2011 and I am looking at your website ON THE INTERNET.))

So the other day I dreamed that I engaged in an epic battle with Ray effing Bradbury to save my friends.

He had kidnapped them! With magic! Because they had read his books, he managed to put them under some magical hypnosis and compel them to crawl down this twisty, narrow tunnel into his UNDERGROUND LAIR. ...Which was a cozy library where he was just chillin' in a wheelchair by the fireplace with a comfy blanket over his legs.

So anyway, I crawled down after them and challenged Mr. Bradbury! And okay, so the battle wasn't really all that epic, it was more a low-key sort of magical battle of wills thing, utterly lacking in fireballs and lightning bolts, BUT IT WAS STILL AWESOME. And I beat him!

So then, as we took our leave, we stole a bunch of his books - his books, the ones he had written - each taking an armful. My two friends crawled out before me, and Mr. Bradbury called after me, saying, "You know, I'm just going to get a hold over them again if they keep reading my books!"

Well, I thought this was kind of presumptuous of him, and I didn't want him to get too full of himself, so I said, "How do you know we're planning to read them?"

"What else are you going to do with them?!" he laughed.

He had me there. Annoyed, I muttered, "Yeah, yeah, whatever," and crawled out. (Perhaps I should have told him we were going to burn them. Give him a nice apoplexy!)

Once out on the street again, my two friends and I got into a car. The friend sitting in the seat next to me opened up a book and started reading. I reached over and slammed it shut. "You idiot!" I said. "At least wait until we've got some distance between him and us, or he'll just have you right back down there!"

"Oh, right..." she said vacantly, as if she'd been so intent on reading that that thought had never even occurred to her.

I head-wheeled, realizing that this was going to be a never-ending problem.

Conclusion: Take care when reading Ray Bradbury, for he is an evil mastermind who will take over your brain.

Watch me only fill one square... again. On the upside! Original fiction is allowed this year! SO MAYBE...???

Trying to brainstorm possibilities for the squares... tbh I'm kind of meh or drawing a blank on a lot of them. And there's enemas, which I can't write for at all, which means there are three line bingos right out. (HAHA, look at me, assuming I could ever get a line bingo! HILARIOUS!) And man, I don't think I'm even grasping the concept of vanilla kink.

At least there's bondange: wrist/ankle restraints which is a huge thing for me... although it's so "could apply to anything" that I don't even know what to apply it to. ^^;;

( html card under cut, along with notes... Or that is, there will be notes when I think of them?! )

Any suggestions?

(I keep wishing I could write fic for Fringe, given that's the thing I'm hardcore into right now, but I can't even imagine what I'd write, smut or otherwise...)

eta: why are the lines not showing up on the html card on livejournal? =_=

---

OH AND I ALMOST FORGOT. Thanks @ everyone for the suggestions on head coverings, etc. I think I'm going with a bandana. It was ridiculously hard to find one (I WOULD THINK THEY'D BE EVERYWHERE???) but I eventually did. Don't know how well it'll work for me, but we'll see. At least it doesn't look totally doofy on me. (I think. I'm so unused to seeing things on my head that it's startling.)

Still don't know what I'm going to do about the mismatched skin tone thing though. Maybe I'll try lemon juice. ._.;

This time in our regularly scheduled idiocy re: YA fiction, we get bonus erasure of... well, PRETTY MUCH EVERYONE LIVING OVER HERE IN REALITY LAND.

"Contemporary fiction for teens is rife with explicit abuse, violence and depravity. Why is this considered a good idea?"

Oh my GOD, shut your FUCKING MOUTH. Sorry if that's too "coarse" for you, but that's really all the response this article deserves, and I am way too enraged to clearly enumerate all the ways in which you are dangerously and harmfully wrong. (A choice quote that pretty much sums up this whole article: "If books show us the world, teen fiction can be like a hall of fun-house mirrors, constantly reflecting back hideously distorted portrayals of what life is." Because as we all know, nobody in real life ever experiences anything truly awful. To suggest otherwise is distorting the truth, y'all.)

I was actually thinking of this exact attitude recently wrt the skirt clutching and fluttering over the ~inappropriate~ material in Holly Black's Modern Faerie Tale series, and in the reviews for a load of different YA books I was browsing. Basically what the argument comes down to is this: if you're a teen in a bad situation, if you're being abused, molested, or neglected; if you're poor and living in slums or trailer parks or on the streets with bums and addicts; if you're depressed, self-harming, if you have an eating disorder or any other serious mental illness; if you've made bad choices, if you're dealing with addictions and consequences and pain and misery; even if you're just an average kid who curses a lot and smokes pot and drinks and parties and has sex and sometimes acts like an obnoxious asshole - if you are any of these things, you aren't real. You don't get to have your own narrative. You don't get to be a hero, you don't get to have adventures. Heroes are good clean Christian folk, whitebread, middle class, and would never have the audacity to come face to face with the "ugly" parts of life, either by choice or otherwise. We don't want to hear about you of all people, we don't want to have to see you, read about you, think about you. You're just trash.

In our fiction, our proper fiction, you do not exist.

...Welp, I guess I did have something to say about that article, after all.

eta: Maureen Johnson apparently started a twitter hashtag in response: #YASaves

eta #2: THE SIDEBAR. I had not even fucking NOTICED the sidebar. A recommended reading list... divided into books that are "for young men" and "for young women." I CAN'T. I SERIOUSLY JUST CANNOT DEAL. MY FACE IS ON FIREEEEEE.

HAY GUYS, what do you do (if anything) to protect your scalp from the sun?

I'm been all slathering myself in sunscreen, only to get scalp burn... I would kind of like to avoid skin cancer of the scalp! But hats! They always look so dorky on me! (Putting aside the fact that hats meant for poolside/beachside wear are often pretty dorky even before the addition of yours truly.) Does anyone have any solutions they think are non-dorky???

Also, does anyone else have a problem with their body darkening much faster than their face? MY ARMS AND CHEST, OMG. Over the past few years, they've been darkening so much more dramatically than my face! Which doesn't even make sense, given that my face gets more direct exposure more often! I've been leaving my face un-sunscreened for 30mins or so, lightening my arms and chest with vinegar, exfoliating like mad, BUT IT'S ALREADY HAPPENING! And I've only been out 3 times so far this season! Idk what it is, maybe my face is just really healthy from all the olive oil cleansing, and thus is more sun-resistant? BUT I WOULD LIKE NOT TO BE FREAKISHLY MISMATCHED.

If anyone has any advice, I'd appreciate it. DX

An ice cream truck just drove by. It was playing... "Jingle Bells." dot dot dot...

So here I am watching BOSS 2, right. (BTW, WHY DID YOU PEOPLE NOT TELL ME IT WAS ALREADY BROADCASTING.



YOU ARE ALL FIRED. okay not really but.)

Anyway, so here I am watching BOSS 2. And then during this kind of tense scene, I go, "Wow, that music sounds a lot like that one song from Fringe!" And then a few more moments pass, and I'm like, "Wait, no, that song ACTUALLY IS from Fringe."

(IT WAS VERY UNNERVING. I missed whole chunks of dialogue due to the weirdness of my Fringe intruding in on my BOSS.)

So like the huge nerd I am, I tracked down the soundtracks for Fringe, and discovered which song it was. ("A New Day in the Old Town," for the curious.) I even played them side by side, and the BOSS bgm isn't even redone with different instruments or anything - they just lifted the track directly from the soundtrack.

And then! While I was looking back through for the scene with the Fringe song! I realized that that one song that had sounded vaguely familiar to me the first time, but which I hadn't paid much attention to, was actually from the 2009 Sherlock Holmes movie!



I lawled. Now I'm wondering whether US shows/movies make a habit of licensing out their music to foriegn shows, or if J-dramas just make a habit of ripping background music from random sources. XD;;

(My verdict on BOSS 2, btw - aside from the random music - is that it's kind of missing some of the heart of the first season, but it's still a lot of fun.)

AS FOR THAT FRINGE SEASON FINALE.

WHAT.

I JUST.

WHAT.

Also: FLAMING BURIAL AT SEA HOW APPROPRIATE IS THAT OH MY GOD IT'S LIKE SHE'S NON-STOP BADASS EVEN IN DEATH

ETA: Wait, now that I think of it, WHAT ABOUT PETER'S & BOLIVIA'S SON?!! Does he still exist? If so, HOW? IS THIS HOW JESUS HAPPENED

So it's time for another THINGS WHAT I HAVE READ post. I've been keeping more notes on what I'm reading since joining Goodreads. Somehow it feels more laid back there, like there's less pressure to write a "real" review. (...Oh, and if you missed my post before, here I am on Goodreads.)

I'm copying these from Goodreads - they're more glorified notes and reaction shots than proper reviews. (In some cases, not even glorified.)

Spoiler: I REALLY, REALLY LIKED MECHANIQUE, Y'ALL. LIKE, REALLY. YOU SHOULD ALL GO READ IT RIGHT. NOW. Incidentally, you should also go stalk Genevieve Valetine's blog (glvalentine), because her bad movie reviews are absolutely hysterical.

( Notes on Mechanique, Huntress, The Ogre Downstairs, The Merlin Conspiracy, Red Glove, Pay the Piper, Steam Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories (ALSO TOTALLY AWESOME BTW), Teeth: Vampire Tales, Akata Witch, and Moonshine. Any spoilers are whited out. )
 

Many thanks to chagrined for the paid time! :D♥

And now I take a brief break from my unending bout of SEVERE UNRELENTING ANXIETY to mention that if you are complaining about how the biology in Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan doesn't make sense, YOU ARE MISSING THE POINT, GOOD SIR OR MADAM, AND YOU ARE MISSING IT SO HARD. Why are you even here? Go read something boring.

(I don't even understand this. Do people complain about, I don't know, tales of medieval knights, because the dragon couldn't possibly fly with wings that size?)

Oh, and I accidentally a Goodreads account. Add me!

(Oh, and leave a comment letting me know who you are, unless you're using the same name on DW/LJ and Goodreads! I know many of your real names, but there are also many I don't know...)

This episode. I just. I can't.