Petronia

Because I'm flying to Philly very early Wednesday morning for a conference. As per its history of always my laptop has chosen to break down precisely when I need to use it outside of the house: first the external battery expired, then (after I replaced it via ebay vendor and an extended saga of Canada Post being unable to read a correctly printed address) the internal battery - or so runs the going theory, unless anyone can come up with a better reason why the clock would have slowed massively and EVENTUALLY STARTED RUNNING BACKWARD before Windows stopped booting altogether. I could be stuck in a Doctor Who ep, but I doubt it. If a frood inna bow tie shows up and sonicks it back to life I'll let you know.

Which is all to say, I don't have the tracklisting, because my laptop won't turn on. XD; I just played a bunch of Libertines tracks, though - and oh yeah, My Little Airport's cover of "What Katie Did". The internet hoops I had to jump through to get hold of that shiz.

102.3FM Radio Centre-Ville Chinese-language music show: name TBD (Tu 10:30-11:30PM)

Episode 10: March 30 - Silk Road music, The Libertines
right click to download
listen streaming here

1) Laptop died again. It was a mistake to even think of the thing as Ed - but it looks so much like Ed. XD; Small, red and black, powerful but noisy, prone to overheating. Much like Ed it knows its responsibilities and keels over only after the crisis has resolved (read: finals period), but once in the shop half its components will need replacing. Again. Tomorrow I harangue Dell's customer support.

Parents bought me a Nano for Christmas. As it is a precise shade of orange I named it Schuldig; we'll see how that goes. With a bit of luck all it'll do is make psychic songcalls.

2) As usual I've signed up for a bunch of cards via the flist, but can't reciprocate due to lack of time and funds. ^_^; I want to post some fanstuff over the holidays, though, like an informal advent calendar... Have a few items in the queue but suggestions are plenty welcome. XD

3) Caught Quantum of Solace with sororial unit. Am also reading The Alexandria Quartet, finally: or rather, maltreating the lovely jewel-like language in my hurry to understand WTF is going on, though the trail of crumbs is clearly going to end in a Schrodinger's Box. (Now I grok why sub_divided found it so fatal that the Books of Albion opened with a Durrell reference; Libsdom was all hypertextual Interlinear, not massive but friable.) Will post again when done. It goes well with Leonard Cohen's Ten New Songs, which actually features an extended riff on Cavafy. XD usomitai accused me of turning everything to Leonard Cohen. I could probably construct a FST for these books, but not fast enough to take advantage of December's theme.

Other books and movies but will review the lot in a separate post I guess.

4) JAPANESE FANART OF BANDS (thank you cerisier)! Some of whom practically look more like themselves drawn than otherwise. Though it occurs to one that - historically - shoujo manga conventions evolved in large part as a framework for the representation of coltish moppy-haired British boys... yeah.

Earlier than I'd expected - was given an estimated ship date near the end of September. It's red and black and very slight for its class, but I didn't name it Ed. XD Pictures and review that is actually informative, not going to bother myself ahaha.

Vista seems wretchedly slow, more so than on my sister's XPS, but I haven't finished setting up. Will probably have to disable a bunch of crap.

***

FMA progress: finished volume 14 last night, now it will have to wait until I can order the missing volume 15 (semester-start liquidity crunch). The idea of following the story at a rate of three tankoubon per year seems mildly insane - what if the X-Files had shown one new episode a month? More of the Conspiracy(tm) would fall out of the sieve that passes for my current brain than would enter it. But I've never been very good at serialization.

I horribly miss the JoJo fandom but there's not much I can do at this point other than make the occasional WTF-face over SBR and write vastly extrapolated fic. D: Should make a poll specifically for JoJo fic. Or just finish summarizing Stone Ocean, finally, since scanlations for that seem to be going nowhere. Hmm.

...Maybe I should fall back on Occam's Razor and call the GB challenge comm getbacksubrosa?

***

OH AND ALSO I'm going to Bebel Gilberto + Forro in the Dark on Saturday. This could only be awesome!

Some days ago my home computer caught a worm which proceeded to install a spam virus, so I was treated to the annoying sight of mystery emails outbound through my antiquated filter. Now it's freezing unpredictably at startup. I can't be arsed to cleanse the infection when the hard drive needs a reformat this badly so reformat it is. But it's extra work, and my installation disc of WinXP is so old (and so much of the hardware upgraded) I expect any number of things to stop working afterward. I owe various photo memes, music etc. but it may not happen for a while, depending. ^^;

It's only worrisome because I think it may have been idling on IRC that did it - that machine is essentially unprotected against threats newer than 2003 but it's dial-up and receives no email so there're not that many vectors for infection. It'll have better security once I get it up and running again.

Anyway, onto fandom talk that is less boring:

1) Everyone by this point knows I've been watching Ouran High School Host Club, I just haven't been blogging about it. Haven't read the manga as decided I could live with the vision of anyone who was this traumatised by revelations from the Utena fanbooks ("Oh, the pointing hand? We just wanted to make sure you noticed those bits of the scenery. Spent time drawing them in and everything. ...Miki's watch? Yeah, he uses it to time things. Look, at one point he forgets to stop it and it runs for the entire episode haha do you see what we did there!"). Besides series like this are always more random at the beginning than later on, and anime allows for reorganisation.

( More... )

2) Over the past several months I also watched Jewel in the Palace, which sucked up as much time as you'd expect from a 70-episode drama. The innovation of the series is portmanteauing several fields of appeal, I think, as follows:

1. old-school shoujo of the Ace wo nerae, Glass Mask (poss. Yawara?) type, where the spunky heroine ganbarus a lot to get ahead in her chosen field, plus well-born rival, love triangle, etc. Why is this sort of thing not being written anymore? Have all the female readers gone over to shounen now that WJ's discovered fanservice?
2. food pr0n. If I'd been watching by myself I would totally have been rewinding and taking notes. YOU ARE THE WEAKEST LINK IN THE IMPERIAL KITCHEN, GOODBYE.
3. political intrigue as per the regular run of Asian historical TV drama. More absorbing than most historical dramas, in fact, given that the script goes both "upstairs" and "downstairs", embroidering at will for maximum narrative effect. XD Reminded me of Dumas at times.

The bad: I'm not at all prone to disliking characters for being annoyingly perfect, virtuous, talented, etc., so if Janggeum gets on my nerves as much as she has over the course of the series I imagine she would drive people I know into frothing rages. XD ( Cut for implicit spoilers. )

What saves the character for me is the actress. She's not stunningly pretty, nor even the prettiest in the cast by far, but pulls off the unaffected likeability necessary to a character when the rest of the cast is perpetually occupied in singing his/her praises. *g* It's not hard to see that a man could fall in love with that smile. Which brings me around to Lord Min (or as I call him, Mr. Swordfighting Quotient), who is totally the fourth reason to watch this series. Watch, as he battles ninjas, busts up espionage conspiracies and works in the library! He supports her career choices because her self-realisation is as important to him as his own! I was on the floor. Shoujo love interests are not normally what you'd call realistic but this is not the usual run of shoujo love interest.

Besides after we finished watching Jewel we misguidedly started watching Stairway to Heaven and holee shit that is an hour of my life I'm never getting back. orz If Janggeum makes Haruhi look good what is there to say about the heroine of Stairway to Heaven, at least Janggeum has the horse sense to give back as good as she gets when she's fucked with.

3) Re: remixing fic - I love the idea, but to get the most out of the execution as a reader it would have to be a sterling remix of a fic I already love, and I can't remember it happening yet. Were talking at some point about currently stratospheric standards for what a remix is expected to accomplish - in dance music [1], I mean, but I think the attitude's carried over in my head. Possibly I'd have to personally run a remixing project where the signups are ficcers-I-know, rather than by fandom or whatever. [2] Or yanno, feel free to rec me your favorites. XD

[1] Speaking of which Justin Timberlake's "Sexyback (Linus Loves Remix)" is the first buzzy electrohouse I've loved in a long while. And this Tom Novy Ibiza dub thing isn't half bad either! High standards, see. marej, this is definitely not breaking the disco ball where I live. XD

[2] Not that this would be a ploy to get my own fic remixed or anything. Nothing of the sort.

"Following the screening, Miike returned to the stage for a question and answer session with a Japanese film critic whose name I was unable to catch. The critic misleadingly described the film as a "gay horror", but Miike explained that his concept was to place characters based on Yabuki Joe and Rikiishi from the venerable manga/anime "Ashita no Joe" in a prison setting."

DOT DOT DOT

This is 46-okunen no koi, in case you're wondering, the one with Ando Masanobu and Matsuda Ryuhei. Supposedly on the quiet artsy end, not the pulpy violent one, but...

(Here is a Miike Takashi bloggish column thing if anyone wants to read it. Yes, it's amusing.)

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Thanks to everyone who commented on the last couple of music posts. ^^ I just worry sometimes, like, "Would you like me to post something else? Really if you'd like me to post something else, 遠慮しないで、just say the word!"

In other news, Flash class is cancelled today due to instructor's cold, so the course will be extended for one week - but if it hadn't, I'd've only had two weeks to complete the final project. O_O;; *works furiously*

I like what we've been doing, though: the classes are conducted at breakneck pace well beyond the paper curriculum, and there's a lot of emphasis on achieving specific effects with little headache-reducing tricks, which is what "mastery" of these hulking and labyrinthine MacroDobe design software suites is all about.

I have actually been writing this entry for three days. ^^;

( fake cut to setlist )

( Bell Centre )

( She Wants Revenge )

( stage props )

( minimal techno &&& the fans )

( Martin Gore: the man, the music, the hat )

( Dave Gahan &&& the art of stadium rock )

I didn't have to reinstall Windows. Um.

LOL?

( Noted for posterity. )

The lesson here, of course, is never to turn off System Restore. I had it off on Gord's, is why I had no choice but to reinstall even though it was booting.

To be honest I find it quite soothing to talk to Dell Technical Support in India, but those poor guys are so straitlaced by their script that when you end up with one who actually uses lateral thinking to help solve your problem the effect is not unlike conversing with a robot that suddenly develops a soul. Thank you anyhow, "Jay", whereever you are! If I do get a survey I'll be sure to give you top marks!

(Ced, obviously I am still buying you dinner but it will go to early next week as Lo's birthday is tomorrow. *g*)

You have an Excel sheet containing hundreds of email addresses. Now you need to send an email to each of those addresses, i.e. use it as a mailing list. You'll definitely have to do it again in the future.

What's the best course of action? >_>

EDIT -- There does seem to be a way to do it with Mail Merge (which I've never used). Failing that, there's a shareware plugin.

AAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHH

...Okay. (This will only be of interest to dipping_sauce but) I've pinpointed the problem: something's corrupted msimg32.dll, which is a library of elemental GUI functions. Over the weekend it went from working to "not found". Even when I run Windows XP repair from the CD, essentially reinstalling Windows, it refuses to copy that one specific file.

Programs that do not consider msimg32.dll mission-critical work fine. SmartFTP is one of them. Thus everything is currently being backed up to a temp folder on the Dansanna site server in preparation for me reformatting the bloody hard drive and starting from scratch, because I just cannot be arsed. Now taking bets on whether I can get the scanner to work afterward.

Should never have turned off System Restore. (But that was necessary to get Norton working after Danny overwrote it. So really this is all HIS fault. >:E *casts about for scapegoats*)