Sweeeeet

TRUFAX: the rise in the Canadian dollar has more than wiped out the increase in shipping costs from Amazon Japan removing the economy option. 10,000 YEN is now only 85.50 CAD! And the books still arrive in 48 hours. XD

• Steel Ball Run 11-12
• GetBackers 39 + The Last Piece: last of the series, sobsob - d'you think, if one ran a blind_go/subrosa_tennis-like challenge for GB, it would be a success? Then we could mutter darkly about BNFs in this fandom too!
• Fullmetal Alchemist 16
• Maiden Rose 2: though either I haven't read the last half of volume 1, or I just have no memory of it. >_> Actually I tend to think of this series as Mirage of Blaze without the idiocy. Or too much of the idiocy, anyway.
• Crimson Spell 2
• Finder no (howtheheckdoyoureadthis... Ryoshuu?) i.e. Viewfinder 4. I can't believe I waited so long to place an order that the HK arc came out in tankoubon. Probably the first time in my life procrastination has saved me money.
• Amato Amaro: GOD FINALLY.

In other news, my sister read the HP7 leak but I couldn't really be arsed. All I have time for this week is SSBB submission vetting. This means I get the paper copy first, though. XD

Movie reviews to come too

Two Worlds, by Eildon Rhymer [Dark Is Rising series, PG13 thus far]

marici suggests this in sesame_seed's comments as an antidote to the apparent travesty that is the movie trailer (which I haven't watched; I think I'll go ahead and spare myself the pain, if no one minds XD).

When I was of tender years, I had a Thing for Bran Davies. I was reading (or more likely re-reading) the series at precisely the age at which one first starts to notice boys etc., and I have a theory that whatever you see/watch/read in those pre-teen years you fixate on, like a baby duck. Pretty much every quirk or kink I have is traceable to something I read or watched at age 10-11. The above story is Will/Bran, so it's kind of like discovering that the guy you had a crush on in the sixth grade and his bff from back then are, like, totally doing it. Or what I imagine it'd feel like, anyway; very little chance I'll find out for real. XD

In any case they're not totally doing it. It's good old-fashioned UST- and dew-drenched shounen-ai set in Oxford, which is probably the best mode to adopt if one is going to do something like write Susan Cooper romance fic (even if I don't believe, when you get down to it, that Will Stanton of all people would mope so much**). The story is complete and being posted in daily installments. The author claims an eventual R rating but I'll believe it when I see it.


** I say this but then the question naturally becomes, how would you characterize him? I have a very vague memory that Chrissie actually asked me to write Dark Is Rising fic at one point, and I was like, uhhhhh in what sense.

Two more to go

Ghosts of Cité Soleil: some of the best cinematography and editing I have seen in a documentary, which is impressive considering it's about armed gangs in Haitian slums (chimère, the ghosts of the title) immediately before and after the fall of Aristide in 2004, when the country went to Hell in a fast-moving handbasket. Basically the filmmaker picked up a camera and followed two of these inner-city gang chiefs around for months, documenting their dreams, loves, feuds, family, music, politics... The miracle is that he managed it without stopping a bullet with his body. It's beautiful, insane, and insanely-beautifully moving.

It was a head trip to read half of The World Is Flat, then go and watch a film in which an Uzi-toting Haitian gang leader who styles himself '2pac' calls up Wyclef Jean in his kitchen, on his cellphone, to spit freestyle accompanied by his jeep radio. These guys are trilingual - in French, Creole, and gangsta rap. Thug life! None can deny, that is how they roll. XD;; They're whip-smart, too, enough to see the big picture, but out of options from beginning to end.

13 Beloved: working stiff with an aged mother and an overdraft loses his girlfriend, gets his car repossessed, and is downsized to boot. Then he gets a call from a purported reality game show offering him an astronomical sum of cash if he can successfully accomplish thirteen tasks. The first task is to kill a fly; after which it descends rapidly into dangerous, disgusting, and morally murky territory. There's a guiding principle to the seemingly random tasks as well, which doesn't come entirely clear until the end.

Very dark, thought-provoking, extremely hilarious. As a bonus, contains the first remotely believable server-hacking scene I have seen in the cinema. Highly recommended if you like films like Fight Club, though considering it's a Thai flick, the chances of a Hollywood remake are considerably higher than of it making its way to a multiplex near u. ^^;