Petronia

Books:
Plugging away at the Borges interviews. The interviewer dude is très French.

EDIT -- back to the Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish thing. (A boring Saturday morning spent in queue at the walk-in clinic.) Of the three main "paths," I'm most enjoying the exophilosophy series -- unsurprisingly as it falls in line with the Carson, etc. The same names crop up, except instead of the topic being love, or God, or time, it's aliens. (Man, after all that Borges I was dying to know what Berkeley thought about aliens!!!) The story path starts slow but eventually goes off in an interesting direction. The porn path... is not for the easily triggered. XD; Personally, I'd've preferred less conflation of "exophilia" with exploitation, but the link is wrapped up in a logical argument. Can't fault the writer for imaginativeness, anyway.

Comics:
All the Captain Marvel I had lying around (up to #11), one of Erin's volumes of Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. (so... lots of Monica Rambeau), the first Avengers Assemble hardcover.

I'm not a hate-reader, but I gotta say, when I see ppl complaining that they don't like Filipe Andrade's or Emma Rios's art I'm like, YOU ARE WRONG IN A COMMENT SECTION! ON THE INTERNETS!

Movies/TV:
I've been getting an attack of sore throat/randomly spiking fever, sometimes exacerbated by other bodily dysfunctions (lower back pain, inflamed gums...), every month or two. The least-bad thing this could be is a recurrent sinus infection, in which case it's a pretty special one since my nose doesn't get stuffed up, and also I thought the antibiotics for the root canal infection that gave me stomachache (the drugs, not the infection) had taken care of the sinus issue, but that shiz keeps coming back like Ultron. The latest new symptom is tinnitus. :D :D :D So no, it was not a good winter, and this is starting to bum me out. In the meantime, I was afflicted with the inability to brain and so watched an evening's worth of JoJo. Think I'm on episode 11 now? 12? JOSEPH. Why are you flawless.

EDIT -- went and saw The Great Gatsby with the family, for Mother's Day. ( Spoilery for moviemaking, not for plot. But you know the plot. )

Books:

Finished On Writing and went back to the other Borges essays collection, which continues to be better. But in general Borges turns out to be a good critic, in that he is not only insightful but makes you really want to read the books/authors in question, many of which/whom I had zero or even negative previous desire to read. XD (He is also the sort of critic, of whom I've encountered a few in music writing, who persistently relates new work to his own top ten favourite artists regardless of whether the latter are well-known and generally well-regarded or not. This is neither a good nor a bad thing per se, but it's a thing.)

Started Mythologies, which turns out to be a bit 101 for me (Barthes wrote it as a 101; another one of those books which would have started life as a blog, today). That is, dude was making his audience think about daily life, pop culture stuff they would normally not have tried to analyze intellectually, but said culture was that of 1950s France, i.e. I have to reconstitute the past in order to revisit it. I mean, I had no idea there was French pro wrestling in the 50s, did you? XD Also, everyone overanalyzes pop culture for signs nowadays. You've won, Roland.

Comics:

Usual serialization stuff. Read The Thanos Imperative which was the big cosmic arc before the current thing; so big that they probably had to soft-reboot. And the concept is rather clever.

( As I keep mentioning I'm fascinated by the thematic underpinnings of all this )

I realize I've argued myself into the position that Peter Quill is basically Lawrence of Arabia. XD; Though, I've only just described what's going on in the comics -- all this is text, occasionally infodump text even, barely extrapolation -- so maybe they intend to go there. "We turned him blond because we felt like it" seemed rather thin, I have to say.

TV:

More JoJo. Up to episode 6. The weirdness is ramping up, but hasn't coalesced into a gestalt (my experience, which seems to be similar to everyone else's, was that this happens around Caesar's introduction). It's like the delicate moment when a mess of eggs turns into a custard.

* If you of the flist have a book in print and I haven't bought it... it's now because I forgot rather than because I'm broke. XD; Also, Jhegaala and Victory of Eagles. I'll get the Paarfi ones from the bookstore, they were there last I checked.

* The most recent volume of Steel Ball Run I own is #12 and #20 just came out. Also WTF is this and why is it on Gallimard, sad'lgj;gfdkgh Araki stans have a tough life of it. I finally got around to watching Gaga/Beyoncé's "Telephone" video while picturing Hirohiko crying manly sensitive tears through its 9 1/2 minutes. I could break it down painstakingly but if you care it'd be obvious, and if it's not obvious you won't care. So. XD;;

( The damage )

( Stuff to buy next round )

( Stuff to get from the bookstore )

I think I will sell off some of my older books, no way is all this coming with me when I move. = =+

1) Came back to huge pile of mail. XD Thanks for the CD, Thien - I think it may have been stopped at the border, so glad it arrived in one piece. ^^;; Thanks for the cards, mbp and quixotic_sense and tsutanai!

2) The major revelation of the weekend may prove to be that 90s teenpop is back - back like 80s pop came back. BACK LIKE BACKSTREET. My brain's a flexible object but the sight of a hundred or so MBA students in their late twenties breaking into the Boys' dance from the video spontaneously and in unison has done something irreparable to it. That was the third and unscripted dance-off of the weekend. Unfortunately I was still relatively sober at the time, but that soon changed.

3) I apologize for, um, accidentally doing that to Bing. WILL TRY HARDER NEXT TIME. My strategy is to blame the whole deal on my sister, who has an illustrious history of inflicting me with RPS fandoms (that I usually get away with not mentioning on LJ); the really annoying thing here being that The Libertines are, in a nutshell, the Mirage of Blaze of bandslash. One can only wish that actual Mirage of Blaze had as much fic as this thing turned out to have, but I know exactly how deep (shallow) that pond is. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: there are fewer more distressing sights than that of the NME getting its yenta on.

4) I played the stuffing out of Up The Bracket over the past week, which really only has peripherally to do with item 3 and more to do with being in the passenger seat of cars more than usual, including the 12-hour round trip with a driver who will only listen to rock. Also, having to wake up at 6 in the morning. This interspersed with The Pipettes, like lime after tequila. All of which got piled on top of the mental essay on Beirut, hauntology, etc. until the structure began to totter on the brink of tl;dr collapse. The sort of thing that would happen to Suze all the time, then she would post, like, a gnomic one-line conclusion followed by "DISCUSS". EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Tommy february6 still wins the Derrida sweepstakes. DISCUSS.

5) Since no one showed any signs of scanning it for my benefit, I went ahead and bought the January issue of Jump SQ so I could read the new Kishibe Rohan side story. The first ten pages are possibly the most godly ten pages of manga I've ever translated - that is, I haven't yet, but I will. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Rohan is an awesome rock star, but the worst real estate investor of all time.

1) I figure I can manage three at worst and four at best of the following:

• School and part-time work
• Editing SSBB
• Having a life offline
• Having a life online (i.e. blogging and commenting)
• Writing

The first two items are not really negotiable, and Writing has kind of been getting the shaft this whole year, so the other two will probably, ah, see a drop. ^^; Fair warning and all that.

2) Happy birfday to moderntime, and happy incredibly belated birfday to jantalaimon. XD;;

3) Every day in every way, JoJo parodies on Youtube keep getting better and better and better. This is a fandom with too much free time on its hands and not afraid to use it. (Of course the same people will up stuff for other fandoms, such as this. Where is that song from btw, it's... not bad. XD;;;)

4) I finished watching the second half of Nobuta wo Produce last night - or rather this morning - after having come to the conclusion that an all-night marathon was the only way I was going to make time for it. Not the fault of the show, which is just as enjoyable and brilliantly written as everyone says it is (and only 10 x 45min episodes). The script is fresh, deftly characterized, and humane, and makes the direction and acting that much better. And magic realism! There's a lot else that could be said about it but I'd have to take each episode apart. XD Would foist on people in RL but I'd have to find direct downloads of a subbed version, or better yet a batch torrent. Or maybe just watch it with French subtitles on Youtube. XD

(I hold "Seishun Amigo" in high enough regard that I'd use it as a ringtone, which is saying a lot. My phone doesn't even do MP3 ringtones. XD; Does anyone know how to get a MIDI or whatever version?)

5) Also watched some anime with T: 2 episodes of Black Lagoon, and... 6 episodes of Texhnolyze. IT'S THE MILLION-DOLLAR MUSKRAT!!! I had to get that off my chest.

6) Patrick Wolf on October 5! ...I forgot to write a review of the Bebel Gilberto concert, didn't I. ^^; Pics to come shortly.

LAUGHING. Candidate for biggest nerd-out by members of the "respectable" scientific community since Planet Xena. But think, it could have been worse - the researchers could have insisted that their discovery be illustrated in moe-chara style. LIGASE-TAN WILL BIND YOUR SYNAPSES WITH LOVE.

Those of you who're Ph.D.-tracked, I'm looking at you.

In other hilarious news, apparently there are Viewfinder side-stories out? ( Love Prize 3, Naked Truth Zero )

Other updates: ( TRC 159-165, Holic 139-144. Contains spoilers. )

I've also read up to FMA vol.11, halfway through. Am however missing vol.15 which stands to become a problem in the near future. ^^;

Link back to Part IX, for reference.

( LONG. Be grateful that I'm not threatening a DVD commentary, at least. XD )

***

Whenever I finish a fic I experience a bizarre fandom resurgence, like I have trouble letting go of the characters in some sense. Usually I read a lot of other people's fics (which is why a communal event like blind_go is so much fun), but in JoJo this is pretty much impossible, so I end up reading Japanese fanartists' 4koma instead. They have plots like "someone stole Giorno's pudding out of the fridge, suspicion falls on all"; it's pretty awesome. XD

SBR #27 is up. These are SOUL'd OUT songs, aren't they, should've seen that one coming. (It occurred to me to search the video on Youtube and ahahaha something looks decidedly familiar. orz Also I guess Araki didn't unilaterally decide to dress Shinnosuke up as the wizard out of Granado Espada, they did that themselves.)

Gyro and Johnny have changed clothes! Michigan winters are no joke.

Actually I read four chapters in a shot - #24-#27, pretty much a tankoubon in itself. Uh. The plot holes are kind of glaringly massive (why don't these powerful and fearless stand users take Valentine on themselves?? if it were me I wouldn't have a hope or expectation that Lucy would rise to the occasion, the odds are too slim), but I was suitably distracted by the Conan Doyle lesbian porno. Not words I would've associated JoJo with previously, but so it goes. Porcelain shepherdesses! Decadent library books! I'd kind of missed Italians-with-pasts-of-tragic-melodrama, too (particularly serendipitous since I'd been re-reading Privilege of the Sword all day). A Swiss Guard of all things, this time.

Hot Pants is a Bride of Christ, I think; reste à savoir how literally Araki is going to interpret that. My guess is very.

Next: catching up on TRC/Holic, as per usual. XD

I don't want to take ficbit requests (that never ends well) but I need to write something, so it's the personal fanon meme. XD One character per person? I don't even know if I have personal fanon for most of my characters, so I guess we'll find out.

(Off to see PotC3, will continue later~)

This section alone is 4,400 words. :0 Warnings for, um... Rohan-tasticness?

[ Parts I-IV. ]

[ Parts V-VII. ]

( VIII. )