15dec2023

Given all the complaints, I thought I'd mention some stuff I do like, and to celebrate that 日本語 support, how about some アニメ？ So here we are, (some of) my favourites:

• ピアノの森 The Piano of the Forest About a boy living in a single parent home (in the red light district, with all that implies) who finds a mysterious piano only he can play in a nearby forest; bears the distinction of a) containing my name and b) being a title I can actually type directly, rather than cutting and pasting. It's a relatively conventional story of boy overcomes odds in his sport (or art) but really well done. Netflix
• ヴァイオレット・エヴァーガーデン, Violet Evergarden Set in an alternate, steampunk Europe during and after ‘The Great War’, it follows the eponymous heroine who, used as a weapon during the war, must learn to adapt to civilian society, which she does as an ‘auto memory doll’ —a transcriber and editor of people's feelings that she types into letters. I spent far more time than I probably should've trawling through the internet to figure out the writing system, which is pretty cool, so there's that extra pleasure for those of you into fonts, conlangs and the like;)
• わたしの幸せな結 My Blissful (or Happy) Marriage—I've mentioned this one before; it's the last of my three recces on Netflix. The rest, Crunchyroll.
• 魔法使いの嫁 The Ancient Magnus’ Bride —another one of those cold powerful types who takes in an abused girl or young woman. As it turns out, the half-fae magnus doesn't really have a clue what being human (let alone marriage) entails, so his student, herself gifted with magic, must teach him. The magic system is evidently based on celtic ritual, and several commenters far more familiar than I with it have commented on how much they find it refreshing.
• Even more ick-sounding, ひげを剃る。そして女子高生を拾う。 After I was rejected, I shaved and took in a teenaged Runaway is about a salaryman and the sixteen year old girl who moves in with him, which absolutely sounds like a recipe ripe for fan-service, pedophilia, and abuse. It's not; it's a surprisingly sweet story, given what looked to me like a pretty realistic depiction of the trauma the female lead has suffered when the story opens. I binged it in a day and it bears the distinction of being the only anime I rated, I was so impressed.
• Speaking of fan-service, その着せ替え人形は恋をする, (literally, The Bisque Doll falls in Love, but changed to My Dress-up Darling) is about two passionate young artists (or perhaps artisans): the male protag is apprenticed to his grandfather to learn how to make hina, the hand-painted dolls put out on Girls’ Day; the female lead is into cosplay, but doesn't know how to sew. Neither wishes to make their unusual passions public to their fellow high-school students, but he's willing to help her out, since he sews costumes for the dolls his grandfather's shop sells. This story does indeed have fan-service, but as a couple of commenters pointed out, it has ...consensual fan-service. I thought about it, and realized yeah, actually it was. It's also a delightful slow-burn romance. I happen to have Emperor and Empress bisque figurines, as well as a mild interest in コスプレ/cosplay, so this one was a lot of fun for me.
• アンデッドガール・マーダーファルス, Undead Murder Farce This one's for all you League of Extraordinary Gentlemen fans, or folks who enjoy Neil Gaiman retellings (such as The Study in Emerald that I referenced yesterday). Set in the same period as the other two stories to which I compared it, it features The Cage User, 輪堂 鴉夜/Aya Rindo, a Heian woman turned yokai whose body has been stolen; her devoted maid carries her head in a bird cage; they're accompanied by a half-oni swordsman who wishes to escape the madness and premature death his oni heritage will eventually impose him, just as Rindo wishes to escape her immortality and die. Ostensibly part of the mystery/detective genre (Rindo is the detective, her limitations forcing to act rather as Mycroft Holmes) there's lots of fun references to famous literary characters of the era while the trio travels around in search of the man who stole Rindo's body. It's well-written, the art is great—I'm especially fond of Rindo's character design & the gorgeous outro—the chemistry between the three leads is snappy, there's nicely executed but not too gory fight scenes, and a banging soundtrack.

Wow, I still have ideas, but this is getting pretty long and I'd like to discuss my current fave in a bit more depth. And If anime isn't your thing? Well, have a reasonably cute gift with some truly friday-fugly levels of image editing in the background.

14dec2023

For those of you wondering why on earth I would feature such disparate topics as pizza recipes and fabric dyeing, well, today's intro was s'posed to tie all that together. While celebrating the fact that the site finally supports kana and kanji.

But the original version of this page, which I wrote some two and a half years ago got reworked. I removed the silly pizza reference (& it was very silly—if you're going to make an argument for cultural purity, citing a European food with New World ingredients isn't, perhaps, the best example, especially not one like pizza which has a ton of perfectly valid interpretations besides the classic Italian margarhita—though the reference to shibori stayed).

Instead of kvetching about sashiko, I thought I'd rag on the hapless artist for the graphic-novel adaptation of Neil Gaiman's A Study in Emerald. Credit where credit is due:

• the chapter intros—old-timey-style advertisments, e.g. the Strand Players, Vlad Tepes’ exsanguination, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, etc—are nicely done and add to the atmosphere besides being a fun callback to the era's gothic literature;
• the watercolour-style colours with a sort of pen and ink overlay (which I presume are actually computer generated), rendered in a dark palette, match the theme and atmosphere of both universes;
• Lestrade's rotund character design—in my opinion the best in the book, though very inaccurate (he's described in the original books as a ‘little sallow rat-faced, dark-eyed fellow’ and given how otherwise faithful Gaiman has been to the canon I presume he retains his original form in Emerald) not least because it points up the importance of giving your various characters readily identifiable silhouettes—I can think of at least 3, mebbe 4 characters who could be interchanged on this front, but Lestrade is immediately identifiable;
• all in all, it's been awhile since I read this story (enough that I'd forgotten the ending) but for the most part I felt the art did a good job adapting the story.

Granted, I was neutral on Watson's character design, positively loathed Holmes’ (though I understood why the artist made the choices he did) but the part that really grated my cheese, so to speak, were the cab horses.

Holmes and Watson were always taking cabs hither, thither and yon, and indeed cabbies play a particularly important role in both the original ‘Study in Scarlet’ and this, Gaiman's Cthulu-Holmes crossover. Horse-drawn carriages were an important part of Victorian London!

I could (mostly) forgive somewhat involved errors, such as putting a whippletree in front of a single horse (instead of a pair, since the point of this device is to smooth out multiple horses’ pulling) or the weirdly shaped shafts, missing horse collars, feed bags that made no sense, but the shadow torso of a 2nd horse on one page, let alone the hind legs that bent the wrong way—horses’ front legs have ‘knees’ because that joint bends forward, like human legs—but their hocks, like the hind legs of a dog or cat, (or our elbows) bend the opposite way, were just plain unacceptable. And those unspeakable pasterns! (Think ankles.)

Arrrrgh! Nails on blackboard!

Ok. I suppose the artist didn't make the decision to call himself Eisner award winning on the back cover. But I sure wish he'd take even twenty minutes to figure this stuff out—it's not like there's not lots of animal anatomy out there, and if you can do stick drawings of the bones underneath, bob's your uncle in getting this stuff most of the way there.

Yeah, if I had to do perspective drawings of cities or vehicles or other machines, I would be equally screwed. Still disappointed....) Oh and the story? Well, it's Gaiman, who clearly knows his way around the Holmes canon, so, you know. It's good, and as he so often does, good at subverting your expectations of that same canon.

Now that I've got rid of all the reasons to actually post this page, here's some phlox in rain.

13dec2023

Ooooooh, I gots a politics crossed with feminism “rant”. Sort of. It's really more an acknowledgement of the gift of understanding the younger folks in general and the f2s in particular have given me.

Lemme explain.

So I should be making beads right now, but I have this habit of “reading the newspaper”, i.e. favourite blogs, while having a hot beverage and a snack. (Went all out, coffee and a choco-cherry baked good from a friend, instead of the usual tea) and stumbled across this post by Mano Singham about Susanna Gibson, most of which is an excerpt from a politico interview in which she attempts to hammer home the importance of consent.

Specifically this is the woman who live-streamed consensual sex acts with her husband; live-streaming is supposed to be once-and-done, like snapchat (I didn't realize this) but of course, if your computer displays it, it can record it, and some asshole criminal did, because she specifically did not consent to being recorded.

She happened to be running for political office, specifically the House of Representatives, which is pretty tight politically, and lost by only about a thousand votes—which she likely wouldn't’ve if the crook hadn't shopped this video to the Washington Post (so glad I'm not paying them money right now...) who published the story.

Gibson notes that 90% of women millennials (in the US, presumably) “don't care.” Even women up to 40...50 just aren't wound up about it. (I wonder what the age divisions of men are...) I'm at least a decade older, and you know what? I don't care either, in fact, my attitude is, you go girl. Share your joy with others into that sort of thing.

I'm re-reading Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow for an online book club and one of the things the psychologist and researcher states flatly is that, once our ideas change, we pretty much forget the state of mind before that change; well, he's absolutely correct, which is one reason I've been inflicting my old crap—not for all of youse, but me —so I can remember what I thought, felt, believed back then. Whenever ‘then’ might've been.

Cuz I've known for years my memory is a sieve, and even when it isn't, it's untrustworthy. This is not any particular flaw in me (well, ok, I'm worse than average, but still within the first standard deviation, I think) but because of the way memory works—sort of like a bunch of points, from which every time you access it your brain rebuilds any given memory. And each rebuild, like a copy of a copy, shifts, with some things being given more emphasis and others less—usually, in a way that's favourable to one's own self-image. Over time you can completely reverse a memory, and isn't that scary!

But in this case I know as a younger woman, reared on quite liberal (certainly more so than today) Roman Catholicism, people, and especially women were absolutely not to be having public (any kind of public) sex acts for the enjoyment of others. Sex was for making babies, and, secondarily, just barely, strengthening the marriage bond. Certainly not for titillating others! One was to be pure and chaste before marriage. (Both my parents were, frex. Or so they claimed, but I'd like to think they didn't actively lie to us.) That was why 80s romances went through all these contortions and the male protags were practically rapists, just so the female leads could be virgins (but still experience pleasure/have ‘good’ sex before marriage.)

It wasn't liberalism or flexibility of mind that changed my views so much as having kids, and being invested, nay actively disposed to believe and cheer on their generation, cuz if my kids were awesome, surely others were too. And they, as Gibson explained, have so much more a healthy approach to sex, based on consent rather than secrecy and shame. Young women own their own sexuality, instead of “giving” it to a man; they exchange it with friends and lovers, consensually. That is what this woman did. I wish her every success in her quest to find (& ideally sue the pants right off) the people, let us be clear here, who illegally redistributed her live-stream without her consent.

Or think of it this way: she made a piece of art, a performance. Now consider how the big media corps defend their IP; the cynic in me realizes she's gonna have a much harder time getting compensated, but this middle-old artist is happy to cheer her on. Lots and lots of money, name recognition and winning her seat next election seems about right.

And speaking of olds, here's some old lady pants, decorated.

12dec2023

Yeah, today's kinda boring, it's one of those me-me-me posts.

• Via the NYT latest crime recces, The Thursday Nite Murder Club series is supposed to be good, and also it looks like it falls into the cosy category. Hm, let's get one...The first book in the series by Osman is, you guessed it, The Thursday Murder Club.
• In their 9 new books we recommend was Courtney Milan's sequel to The Duke who Didn't, The Marquis who Mustn't. The first one was a nice comfort read, so I guess I'll check it out...
• also in the romance category, Melinda Taub’s The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch ...though it's actually in the sf&f category (Martha Well's Witch King also got a mention but I've already read that.)

The link is my take on classic Detroit Pizza, and it's mostly for my own reference. I'll try to have something more interesting, or at least arty, tomorrow.

11dec2023

O hai, sorry about the no-posting for the last month-plus. [I wrote that in July of 2018.] Besides being kind of busy with the class, my E620 body finally crapped out and died. It lasted

[Yup. The post really did stop right there, mid-sentence, so we're back to 2023:] Ahem. It lasted nearly 10 years, which I s'pose isn't too bad, for electronics in general or a camera in particular—my phone and shirt-pocket cameras tend, on average, to survive around 3— if I'm lucky, but I was still annoyed. We now (briefly) return you to 2018.]

I broke down and bought another used body on eBay (the horror—I'm not really very comfortable purchasing used equipment of this type, because there's really no way to tell how much of its service life is left.)

Aaaaaaand back to 2023, for good this time. The “new” used body seems to have been fine (I gave it away, but afaik it's still working), but man I was pissed to discover they'd taken out some of the intermediate f-stops and shutter speeds.

Of course now I've replaced it with the sony, which has the benefit of being the same size and a lot more powerful, except when I upgraded the glass, all of that was a lot bigger. I probably should've gotten the smaller, cheaper lenses, but the big ones do deliver lovely IQ (image quality), I have to admit; and because phones are getting so much better, that serves well enough—usually—for stuff taken casually.

And for studio photography, I have the sony. Or even the little lumix, which is what I actually used to take this image. (Which to be fair is still working fine even though it's now crossed the five year mark, but it's also not as small as the previous round of shirt pockets, so there's that.) Enjoy.

And why yes, I'm finding my old writings waaaaaaay too precious. Sorry ’bout that, but it pleases me on some level, ya gotta find joy where you can, it's my blog, etc. I'm sure I'll get past this phase at some point;)

8dec2023

So a couple of days ago I was afraid I'd finally caught covid (if so, it's not [yet] showing up in tests) and I'm indubitably coughing, so I used that as an excuse to lie around in bed and read, specifically Susannah Clarke's Piranesi, her new novel.

From 2020.

F2tE called it a “covid novel”, but that, actually, is a coincidence: if I'm understanding the various sources I read about the author, she's been working on this since roughly her last book, which came a couple(?) of years after her stunning debut, the 2004 Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, itself begun in 1993. —I loved the writing, setting and fantasy (not to mention footnotes!) in Strange but loathed the two main characters, who were, so far as I could tell, petulant, whiny, selfish, and self-absorbed—just generally insecure, unpleasant people; and one of my weaknesses as a reader is that I have a really hard time reading stories where I can't identify with the protagonist.

Her new book, at perhaps a quarter of the length, is also a fantasy, but where Strange was expansive, with a huge cast of characters, Piranesi is written in first person, and thus from the point of view of the titular main character who sees very few. More than one reviewer—and I failed to keep track of all my links, but I know they included material from The Guardian, the Chicago Review of Books and especially Tor.com—mentioned that, if at all possible, it's a good thing to go into this work mostly blind.

I was lucky in this respect, because f2tE had read and enjoyed it, and hadn't said anything about really unpleasant protags. (Moreover I did actually read some reviews when it came out, but that was three years ago, and I'd forgotten a good deal, except that they were favourable, and there was this sense of loneliness). For me, the book was a brand new hardcover, as fresh as the new library branch where I found it, which just opened earlier this year—it's beautiful and most of the books are clean and brand-new, like the airy building in which they're housed.

But it's much further away than the century old downtown branch I visited for twenty years, closed because of water (& lead paint) damage, (from flooding, which was in the context of this page...ironic) and which I miss deeply. Anyway. Piranesi is a gorgeously designed book, embossed with copper foil, and a very cool faun playing pipes on the cover. There's a note about the elegant & entirely appropriate font, and some six or seven blank pages at the end—quality you hardly ever see in books anymore, and very much in keeping with the idea of a book inspired by etchings of fantastical roman ruins.

Which leads me to the bits that I think would be helpful to know ahead of reading this book, variously mentioned in the sources I read, above:

• the prints of Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Gee, here's me with the art history minor, and I didn't get this one—he did two sets of fantasy etchings, based on Roman ruins—check out especially the earlier, melancholy ones, though the later darker ones are cool, too. A few minutes with Google set to image search will give you the idea.
• C.S. Lewis, The Magician's Nephew. I remembered the main character, Diggory, and his friend Polly, but wish I'd recalled some other character names and a bit more detail, as there are callbacks to this novel. Not a spoiler, Clarke quotes Nephew right at the beginning, and if you're a bit quicker on the uptake (or have a sharper memory) you will make a fun connection thereby; familiarity with the basics of the first Narnian chronicle, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe would also be helpful—i.e. knowing who Mr. Taumnus and Lucy are; also the lamp-post, the Witch's magical punishment for characters who displease her, etc.
• Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner —the wikipedia article provides some helpful context. This one's a bit more of a stretch, in my opinion, but there are certainly some concordances, and this really-not-very-long poem is well worth your time regardless. I was given a quite possibly antique edition with what I believe are full-sized versions of those Dore engravings, which, like Battista's, are splendid, so missing out on that was another way I felt a little dumb.
• There are likely many other tidbits, but keys to them are right in the text, which doesn't have those lovely, lovely footnotes of Strange, but makes up a bit, by including some bibliographies.

Oh, and I guess the Plato's Cave references are so self-evidently obvious no-one's bothered to comment on them. —Not that I know very much about that, either.

(Finally, and quite by accident I realized the main character's language and simplicity reminded me of another character, Three, in the last two murderbot novels (by the series’ internal chronology; i.e. Network Effect and System Collapse) which also deal with some similar themes, despite being action packed space opera, as opposed to ruminative explorations on the nature of fantasy. Unnnnh, also that Wells’ Witch King had some interesting parallels with regard to setting, especially during the watery climaxes of both books. Whether Piranesi had any influence is hard to say, but I was pleased to figure out why my rather wayward mind connected the two. —The fact that I've been kayaking in rather weedy waters all summer probably had something to do with it;)

But as folks have also observed, Piranesi is a book that pays re-reading; so if you haven't the time or energy to research these, um, influences? concordances? coincidences? just check them out after you've read the book—the layered revelations will still be waiting upon reread;)

And, as water—waves, tides, and currents—and the dangers it brings, are part of Piranesi’s world, a watercolour sketch of a lighthouse seems appropriate.