petronia

1) Maybe on some deep subconscious level, you just read RenRuki stories because it looks like Kurama x Hiei from a distance?

2) I reread Bleach vol.3 over the weekend. I recommend this exercise. Do you know Ukitake is in it? And I only have the French not the original so I can't say for sure, but Isshin words certain sentences precisely as if he knew it wasn't really his son sitting out on the steps. Of course the first time through the series this rates barely a blink of weirdness.

If anyone has already written an essay on the philosophy of Bleach (...I mean, like, Kant and Platonic thymos...yeah), this is where you save me a few hours.

3) P.S. Byakuya has gone back to wearing his macaroni for sures. Sorry!

4) Because I don't have enough guilt in my life, I went back and looked at the drabble request meme from April of last year. I was fairly gratified to realised that I'd filled some of the requests in the interim, if not explicitly. However it turned out Charmian had commented with the following:

You said you wanted to write Byakuya, so why not? XD XD Although I'll be sort of scared if it's like the idea you were telling me about.

Failing that, the 11th Division. Humor/cluelessness.

I wrote 11th Division but I have no memory of what crazed Byakuya-centric fic concept I could possibly have related to Charmian back then. It's sort of haunting me now. o_o

5) Your lips are like a crimson thread
Howl's Moving Castle fic, by

obakesan. It is a very nice feeling to finish reading a book and log online to find someone on the flist has written a fic for it, almost luxurious. XD Usually when a prose work is called "poetic" what is meant is a stylistic - syntactic? - quality, but there is such a thing as poetic conceit as well, and this piece employs it.

Out of the Diana Wynne Jones books so far I like this one best; it is also the most unabashedly shoujoist. XD It feels as if it's intended for a slightly older audience, but perhaps that is just because the protagonist is not a child. (DWJ's trick of getting one to see the "real world" from the wrong end of the fantasy telescope is something else. I had to work hard to flip it in my head and picture meeting Howl as an over-educated under-employed charming do-no-gooder in a Welsh pub.)

6) Watched Syriana in ahem Oscar review copy rip. The Village Voice review is pretty close to what I think. There is a film twice as depressing as Brokeback Mountain, and three times as dry (I suspect if one doesn't have a basic working knowledge of the financial sector/oil industry/Middle East politics, say from regularly reading the Business and International News sections of the newspaper, one would simply fail to follow - my sister didn't, and she's not what you'd call a dumb moviegoer). But as my mother said, the good thing about America is that Americans are willing and able to make unflattering movies about themselves. Well. She didn't say "good", she said "odd". But I think it's good. XD;

I really wanted to see this mostly because I learnt tricks from selfsame scriptwriter in Traffic. XD Syriana is even better at cramming information into the seams - infodump voiceover! - and forcing the viewer to employ intelligence in dot-connecting, but there's too much tangle and not enough skein, and (I realised in my own writing) too many strategies of abbreviation can make for dry results. Boy can they make for dry results.

7) Still waiting on the

ljarchive fix. >_>