Backlogged in everything

Death Note I & II: an improvement on the original series, actually. Stuck to the manga storyline when it was good, removed the parts that were boring/superfluous, and made changes to tighten the dramatic arc as necessary. Well-cast and acted. Watching these reignited my love for the series somewhat, or at least reminded me of why I liked it so much in the first place. ^^; If the manga had ended the way the movies did it would probably still stand among my favorite series. This does happen sometimes with screen adaptations - mangaka on a deadline follows his/her nose all over the map, anime writers sort it out in retrospect - but for some reason I wasn't expecting it in this case.

Even so the second movie was 2 1/2 hours long and convoluted as heck. The audience kept thinking it was going to end and making false starts at applause and/or getting up to leave. It was a very enthusiastic crowd, though: Fantasia usually is, but I got the impression most of the people were there on the strength of a couple of episodes of the anime, or of the director's resume (Godzilla, Gamera), i.e. came into it spoiler-free. I suppose if one were a real DN manga fan, one would've downloaded and watched the films ages ago. XD;;

There was a Q&A session at the end with the director (dressed memorably in a colorful alphabet-patterned shirt and lemon-yellow trousers), his translator, and a fanboyish actor who played one of the American FBI agents. The questions were haphazard as these things tend to be but the guests loved to talk and spouted on-set anecdotes with no lead-in. From this we learnt that Godzilla's teeth were recycled for Ryuk's model, that Fujiwara Tatsuya was indistinguishable from nice!Light even when nominally "off", and that Matsuyama Kenichi insisted on Japanese sweets in the second movie (there was a directorial decision to have L consume Western imports only in the first film - come to think it must be a difficult role in that respect, if it were me I'd never want to see a chocolate bar ever again).

I'm reading Wikipedia and it says Nakata Hideo is making a movie about L's backstory. Was going to ask if this was a figment of some crazed fan's imagination but research indicates it's not. ^^; (Funnily enough I was idly pondering L's past as meitantei, in a "I would cross it over with PSoH just to see L and D do dessert and discuss life as an initial" way.)

OotP movie review

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: non-Fantasia of course. I liked it a lot - it may be my favorite movie thus far - but I think I'm in the minority on this! ( Cut in case anyone is worried about spoilers. )

In other news, T is putting together an FMA cosplay group for Otakuthon. I >_> in advance (since my hair is now too long to do any character except Lust, and uhhh that outfit).

Now reading the manga I got off Sakki, up to volume 3. This... moves pretty fast. I forgot how much I like Scar; nowadays as well as liking characters because they fit my "type", I like some characters as characters, because they're unusual in some way.

fabulous_papaya - got the books and CD too, thanks!

&SSBB;

Two days til deadline: entries are trickling in. Two stories so far that are more suitable for October (my bad - for some reason it didn't occur to me at all that I should have timed the "dress-up" issue to coincide with Halloween), one story that is... eminently suitable for July. HAHAHA.

The story length issue: really, there's a grand total of 4-5 regular SSBB contributors who are affected by this, except the impact is disproportionate if they are wordy as well as prolific. XD (I did a bit of stats crunching, and a full 3/4 of all SSBB contributors have only written one or two stories for the zine. But people who contribute many stories are also more likely to contribute long stories - there isn't anyone who's written five or six 3,000-word pieces.) Out of those affected, a couple have said they like/need/want the incentive to scale down. Some readers prefer shorter stories, others feel more is always better. So probably the key is greater flexibility. My editing time is at stake too, of course. XD

This is what I came up with: right now, SSBB does the equivalent of giving everyone a potential "slot" in each issue. So let's equate that slot with one LJ entry. Now the writer gets the option of occupying two LJ entries, at the cost of giving up her "slot" in the following issue. So over both issues, the word count averages out. For the wordy-and-prolific, this retains the incentive to edit downward insofar as possible, but offers more flexibility for the story to breathe when required. The onus is on the writer to split the text and make sure both halves fit in a single entry.

Posting this over here in case someone comes up with a reason this wouldn't work that I overlooked. XD