I am making an effort out of principle

[petronia]

Apologies for turning the LJ into a play-by-play of the hours I spend every day procrastinating on music streaming social networking sites. It's the only way I have to show a life sign til the first week of December... Expecting mass defriendings more or less. XD;

It's been an odd few weeks. The day after the U.S. election my mother was in the hospital. Eventually they found nothing massively wrong with her (get a flu shot guys, it's a piece of work this year) but early hypotheses ran the gamut from leukemia to meningitis. Had mentioned this to a couple of people as well so for closure's sake - she doesn't have MD either. It's something similar but rarer and less damaging/irreversible. No idea if it's less hereditary. XD; A few decades is adequate notice at any rate; one doesn't attain St.Vier levels of cool by cutting corners.

Then there was the Toronto case competition trip, which was stressful in its own right. LOL @ being locked up for eighteen hours overnight with a dysfunctional team! Flying Porter was fun, though, as were the marathon venting sessions with not!Sai back at the hotel room (in a masochistic way). The weather on Thursday was brilliant, I got to hang out with Dave, and there was time for a bit of shopping (hats, 7-inches, egg tarts). Then it was straight back to Montreal and the stamping out of multiple fires.

I'm still happy about the results of the election. The major insight I've derived from the experience is backward - finally grokking what Bush supporters were on about in the post-9/11 years. I could lay out why I believe Obama is/was the most logical choice for President but logic has nothing to do with it at the core: I trust the guy because I think he thinks like me. Even if he gets it wrong it'd be how I'd get it wrong in that given situation, grosso modo, give or take. It's dangerous emotional partisanship but heck I've suffered enough in the past eight years to eat the cake and damn the calories, and I'm not even American. XD

In any case the administration-in-waiting gives off reassuring signs of realpolitik, so. None of this fluffy idealistic nonsense. XD; Possibly on some level what I want these days is for various LoGH characters to be in charge, but.

As is probably evident I've been listening to a lot of Blur lately. This is basically laziness: dudes have 20+ albums' worth of music between them and their solo/side projects, and are acceptable stylistic stand-ins for a dozen other acts (two of which are David Bowie and the OSTs to Katamari Damacy). It's like deciding to read every Stephen King novel ever written - who needs recs? Besides which Damon "Asuka" Albarn and Graham "Rei" Coxon fully sate my need to mock everything I'm interested in and then some.

Comments

[perseid.livejournal.com]

Possibly on some level what I want these days is for various LoGH characters to be in charge, but.

Lol, I concur.

Good to hear life's not kicking your ass too hard (I think) =)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

It is kicking a little less than this time last year (though only because I'm studiously ignoring certain aspects such as THE JOB SEARCH XD;).

[uminohikari.livejournal.com]

It's a good chance to learn about new music though! :D

...I can never think of an intelligent comment to your entries ._.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Aw! It is good to know someone likes the music though, I keep thinking it's tl;dr. XD;

[astrael-nyx.livejournal.com]

I trust the guy because I think he thinks like me. Even if he gets it wrong it'd be how I'd get it wrong in that given situation, grosso modo, give or take.

Yes, this is somewhat how I feel as well. I actually trust him and his choices for staff; I trust them not to go mad and crazy with power; and I don't mind as much if they do scale down the size of their election promises. The tax cut thing is one of those election promises that won't be fulfilled (reason: economy in crisis, acceptable), but I accept that they might be able to do so down the road and am willingly patient for it to occur.

Somehow, I "feel" they're more transparent and that they will be more honest than the Bush administration ever was, e.g., Guantanamo, Patriot Act, etc. Maybe it's more than a feeling because I'm certainly hoping my optimism won't be misplaced.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

(Tried answering this before but the new LJ servers died) Dude is the only politician - ever - of whom my opinion improved over the course of an election campaign rather than the opposite; surely that must count for something. XD;

[petronia.livejournal.com]

...And I dunno, I actually sat there for about ten minutes trying to formulate what it was that reassured me about Obama before giving up and hitting post? I think because a lot of it doesn't seem reassuring when written down, like the sense I get off him of a coldness at core, a detachment. Put it this way: Bill Clinton, a smart guy whom I admire, had a real problem disciplining himself when faced with temptation - which given his record in office was arguably a manifestation of a wider difficulty in seeing the forest for the trees, picking one's battles, and so forth. Obama wouldn't even have been tempted by a Monica Lewinsky. He wouldn't have looked twice, and I don't mean because he's in love with his wife; I mean because it would have seemed to him to be a stupid-ass course of action.

Stuff like that. Mind you if the guy got on the wrong course he could do a lot of damage. But unlike with Bush you wouldn't even know it was the wrong course, because he'd have convinced you. XD;

[supplanter.livejournal.com]

... please expand on the evangelion parallel. o.o

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Ahaha idk, by some fluke this band built itself along moé anime lines despite being about something else altogether? Much like Evangelion. That's the parallel. XD; The bassist is Misato I guess.

Talking point A: Graham Coxon is the most moé 1) real life 2) non-Japanese 3) male celebrity ever. I had to look up the band's Chinese fandom for confirmation that I wasn't flipping out, but I think [digression alert] moé in the otaku purist sense is an objective quality anyhow, not ineffability like the makers of Blood+ insisted it was on their blog. The major component is body language... probably? In Graham Coxon's case it clearly works on people without them knowing why, which I find hilarious.

Talking point B: at the same time as I started listening to their stuff, the band (which had pretty much broken up years ago) started having emotional ilu-after-all-this-time reunion drama. ONLINE.

[cerisier.livejournal.com]

Popping in on an old post to say: yes, yes, and yes to all of the above, because I've been experiencing the exact same thing only at about a weeks' delay. It was ridiculous to look up what was going on online and realize it was something like -- watching a giant realtime roleplay of the standard bandom/popslash/Johnny's feel good fix-it fic archetype. And sjkda;ls my reaction re: Graham Coxon was identical -- "it's not just me, right? there have to be doujinshi out there." (There are.)


Incidentally, while I'm here I should say I'm slooowly moving lj accounts so will be friending both this and carnet from acchikocchi. :)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I no rite! The last time I had this "Erm..." reaction was post-HP7 when the Dumbledore-is-gay thing went down. XD; Thing is I'm desultorily following the Brit indie scene (motto: "incest is the best") as a whole so Blur-related news items have been crossing my desk for a year, and their dodginess just skyrocketed. When the NME outed Graham Coxon's internet identity I had to check out the action for reals. LOLarity... The official forum mod was sensible enough to clear out old threads but there was a mad Chinese fan who'd been capping and translating his posts on Douban, so yeah.

I find it fricking awesome that dude's login on his own forum is "tin hat". When I become a rock star my plan is to spam my own fan forum daily, under the username "rabid shipper". KEEP THEM WONDERING.

The major lesson I have learnt from this is that 90% of what comes out of Damon Albarn's mouth has no value whatsoever. XD Also, don't stand too close to the action when a MAJOR PUBLICITY MACHINE rises from dormancy. My eyebrows still feel singed. XD;;

[acchikocchi.livejournal.com]

I was following the whole Franz Ferdinand/Libertines/etc. fandom (if that's the right word? somewhere in between "actual scene" and "slacken_ties" -- yeah, thanks for that, NME) for a while but fell out of it a couple years back, before all this emotional bonding started up, more's the pity. XD

tin hat? oh now WHY doesn't that surprise me. Shame the webcomic he was in isn't still around, I get the feeling he'd be pleased. XD

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Ha, yeah, I was wandering in and out of slacken_ties at one point too! Then I came back and did the Libs fandom thing over the past year, which is/was nuts and has basically inured me to massive levels of WTFkery. XD; Let alone the NME's propensity for making every feature article more gaymo than it actually is (cf. the Blur one, where it came off like they were holed up in a hotel room announcing their elopement to "Noel Gallagher's back yard").

[acchikocchi.livejournal.com]

*chokes* Think I must have missed that article, or else it got mistakenly filed in the same mental category as "livejournal fangirling" instead of "print journalism fangirling".

Incidentally, re: the Libs, on the Blur forum itself one of the most desired opening acts for the Hyde Park thing seems to be a Pete/Carl reunion. XD

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Ha! And then the lot of them can round out the bottom of the bill for the Smiths reunion. At Glastonbury. XD

the latest example of what I'm talking about (http://community.livejournal.com/shadowpuppetry/16726.html)

It is all like this now. Not much worse than Weekly Jump mind you, but that's not saying much. orz

today's Graham Coxon lolarity (http://forums.grahamcoxon.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=20980)

[acchikocchi.livejournal.com]

XDD Yes, exactly, if this were... I was going to say Nana but the ends wouldn't tie up nearly so neatly (or happily ^^;). Nana as done by Murakami whatshername who did Gravitation, maybe.

sdjkla;ds ohhhh okay, I remember them, the Shuuji and Akira group, right. I SEE WHAT YOU MEAN. Play to your audience, I suppose?

Clearly I need to stake out the Coxon forums more often ahahahaha wow. I. I like the "shooting stockings".

[petronia.livejournal.com]

(addendum to point B: and the cheesy feelgoodness of it all put a crimp on my increasingly elaborate injoke re: Damon Albarn being Sauron, which I'm kind of grumpy about XD)

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

...i get the part about st vier levels of coolness, but what does that have to do with late-onset (possibly) hereditary diseases?

glad to hear about your mother, hope the news continues to be good.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Well, what St. Vier evidently had was MD, and - note for ficcers - it turns out if you have a parent with MD you have a 50% chance of developing it as well. So for a while there I was thinking I had about 25 years in which to figure out how to work this. XD; But apparently only white people get MD ahaha.