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Fri Jul 4th, 2008
06:22 pm - "I can see clearly now"
See, what I like about my physically exhausting work is that physical exhaustion works the way drinking or drugging do but without the nasty side effects. In the moment of clarity that comes before the senses shut down, you see exactly how one could write a Discworld/ Woxin crossover. All it needs is a plot to go around it. Well, and more info on the kingdoms of the Sto Plains, which I don't want to get from spoilerful wikipedia, so, more background reading.
But some day...
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Thu Jul 3rd, 2008
08:24 pm - Making Money
Whatever Pterry may or may not have known about Japan when he wrote Interesting Times, he now knows a lot more. I shall cherish the sight of Lord Vetinari taking 17 seconds to finish a Jikan no Muda puzzle.
( Cut for Moist thoughts )
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Wed Jul 2nd, 2008
12:54 pm - Had To Happen
Discworld fic. Vetinari/ Vimes, what else. And probably done before by someone else, because it's so obvious when you think about it.
ETA: Why does rich text format have to be called rich text format? Now I have a Word file called vetinari rolling on the floor. Laughing, presumably.
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Tue Jul 1st, 2008
02:03 pm - Canada Day Serendipity
We recall that there's a difference between the pleasure of buying books to read and the pleasure of buying books to buy books, yes? This may be the latter, but time will tell. ( Cut for Lots )
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Mon Jun 30th, 2008
05:27 am - Summer of our discontent
There's 'teeth-grittingly cutesy' and then there's 'bitch I will keel joo!' Unless found in the mouth of Bertie Wooster or Papuwa-kun, 'chappie' belongs on the right-hand side of that ledger.
Window fans bring in cool air. They also bring in the reek of those stinky trees with the waxy yellow-white flowers, that smells exactly like 'asthmatics stay indoors' air pollution.
Tomorrow is a holiday and I have nothing to do on it but try to avoid sudden explosions in the street.
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Sat Jun 28th, 2008
10:13 pm - Going Postal
Damn, what a good book. I thought nothing could replace Vetinari vs Vimes in my affections, but Vetinari vs Moist is a winner.
Only trouble with mainlining these books is not remembering what happens where. Is it in Men at Arms that Vimes arrests Vetinari, or somewhere else?
(Reading in the front bedroom by the window on this humid afternoon while the surprisingly cool breeze blew in and grey argosies of washy clouds floated past, the bit of my brain that wasn't in Ankh-Morpork was seeing forgotten bits of Japan, streets in Ueno or fields in Shizuoka. Must be the repetition of 'moist' that did it.)
( Shoutout to mauvecloud )
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Fri Jun 27th, 2008
08:21 am
Am still reading (slooowly) The Study of Forbidden Kanji, and come across this gem. The author says he isn't going to deal with current Chinese slang for sex and genitals and so on, because
( Nazenara )
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Thu Jun 26th, 2008
09:35 pm - That Flow, that Flow, that (mh!) good Flow--
--that Flow gonna rise some day.
So I get my paycheque and its pittance, and it isn't raining, and I do have an hour at my disposal, and I have the bike as well...
( So I go spend money )
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Wed Jun 25th, 2008
06:37 pm - All we like sheep, as my father regularly said about the roast leg of lamb
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
( You all know me: 'Just nattering about books. Just... nattering about books' )
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Tue Jun 24th, 2008
11:45 am - Wretched excess
I have a perfectly good copy of Thud. British-Canadian paperback, bought new from independent Book City and not scuzzy Indigo or amazon, and thus not merely good but virtuous. But I have a preference for hardcovers, and when I was told the blue'n'white used bookstore on Bloor had Pratchett in hardcover I went to look. They do. The American edition (and remaindered, not second hand.) Which bought, and read during last Sunday's thunderstorm. The typos are as WTF as they're reputed to be, to the point that certain sentences make no sense at all. Figured at some point I'd do a reread from the paperback and correct the text: because I still prefer to read in hardcover.
Erm. Was there again today. They have the remaindered British Thud in hardcover.
Which I haven't bought.
Yet.
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Sat Jun 21st, 2008
09:56 pm - Woxin WTFery
Watching last DVD. Could never remember what happens to Agent Of Wu! Jie Zi Bao. Discover that his end is shrouded in similar mystery to Brute 2's. I'd suppressed the fact that what we actually see happen is this:
( Cut for the unviewed )
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Fri Jun 20th, 2008
09:46 am - The black dog
"There's Grant*," someone says, and I look out the front window at work, and there indeed is Grant, taking Sophie to the daycare around the corner. Two year old Sophie is several yards ahead of him, riding on the back of her little black pet dog. Which she doesn't have, of course: their real dog was large and heavy and brown'n'white.
There are always babies or toddlers somewhere in my dreams, whatever the dream is actually about, but almost never ones I really know. This is at least the second time for a Sophie dream; the last one had her aged closer to the schoolgirl she is, with a pink plastic bicycle helmet. Dr. Jung...?
The dream that followed the black dog one was about eating little cakes in a small crowded confiserie in an English department store, with people trying to take over my table and even crowd me off my chair.
*names changed, obviously
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Tue Jun 17th, 2008
09:30 am - Mh yeah well
Under the subheading Did Not Need To Hear, Neil Gaiman is reading Samuel Delaney on writing. He says, I was just struck by this paragraph from one of the letters -- to someone who wishes he or she was a writer, but probably isn't. And I thought, I should put it up here for all the people who write to me convinced that they would be happy if only they were writers. ( Cut for despair )
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Sun Jun 15th, 2008
09:36 am - Oh, piggy piggy!
It was a week of postal happiness. ( Cut for greed )
It was not of course a week of credit card joy, but really, only the equivalent of three meals out with wine and tip.
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Thu Jun 12th, 2008
06:39 pm - Tempus fugit
It's the 13th in Japan? Then happy birthday, ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) kagenami! May the next year be better than this.
Am discovering the sad fact that if you don't use it, you lose it. 'It' in this case is reading Japanese prose. Time was-- time being 2005-- I could trundle along fairly happily through the 12 Kingdoms novels, which have a rep of being slightly difficult. Now I'm stumbling through やさしい竜の殺し方, 'How to Kill Gentle Dragons', a YA fantasy novel, which was recc'd here. So far I have yet to encounter any dragons at all, gentle or otherwise, but so far isn't very far. I'm not even sure that the title isn't intended to be 'The Gentle Art of Slaying Dragons.' Whatever, we do at least have our requisite fantasy silver-haired purple-eyed character, though with the current brainfry I'm not actually sure if he's in fact either.
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Wed Jun 11th, 2008
07:40 am - The crack of dawn
And there are people who advocate getting rid of daylight savings? Madness. That would have the sun rise at 4:30 this time of year, which means I'd be up at 4. You know who gets up at 4? Tofu makers. No one else should be awake at that hour except the insomniacs like me who're about to go to bed.
Three days in a row awake before 6, two of them at 5 am. Awake. Unable to get back to sleep because my body says "Light! Look there's *light* in the east! The birds are singing! It's morning!!" Ohh for the wintertime when 5 am was the middle of the night and I got more than 5 or 6 hours rest (it doesn't have to be sleep-- an hour or two's float in the dark will do just as well.) And my eyes weren't too tired to read Japanese the rest of the day.
Because when I'm not too tired to read I can divert myself with ( these sites )
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Tue Jun 10th, 2008
09:16 pm - A bloody and a sudden end/ Gunshot or a noose
Arghities.
Yanno. Yanno. There are mangaka who devote their time (or possibly their assistants' time, if they have assistants) to drawing flowers all through their backgrounds, or the detailed patterning of a kimono, or even, in the good old days, scenes filled with buildings and people. Hirano Kohta devotes his time (or his assistants', which in his case he hasn't got because the English manga includes his desperate advert for same) to drawing piles 'n' piles 'n' piles of BODIES. Mutilated, stabbed, shot, bayoneted, garrotted, casually dismembered and above all BLEEDING bodies.
And a few corpses as well.
You'd think it'd get to him, yanno? ( But at least he's not responsible for the translation )
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Mon Jun 9th, 2008
08:03 pm - The babies are growing into their suits
Did you know Paul O Williams writes haiku and tanka as well as door-stopper fantasy? I just discovered that one of my favourite haiku is his:( Cut for poetry )
So here I am looking at the rebarbatively violent Hellsing manga, and I read ( Cut for CAPSLOCK OF DOOOM and idiotic by definition song lyrics )
And at once I think
a) Pterry's Death
b) ohhh god- 'rotten.' Like 'rusty'- something the Japanese say and we don't
c) hey that sounds like ( this, from the same notebook where I wrote down Williams' haiku )
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Sun Jun 8th, 2008
10:01 pm - Wimps
Oh my god it's over 30! Get back in the house!
*Yes* 32C /90F is hottish for Toronto, but sheesh. It's not any 37 or 40, let alone an Arizonian or Iraqi 50C/ 120F. (My Iraqi neighbour gets all teary-eyed remembering those invigorating 50C summers at home, especially when he's shivering through a 15C autumn afternoon in a down jacket.) I was in Tokyo the year the night temperatures stayed above 29/ 84 for weeks at a time and lived to tell the tale. Get a grip.
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08:48 am - Hot Sunday
The zombie meme that everyone is doing( Read more... )
Also on last disc of Woxin. Much more painful than the first time. Ohh Gou Jian, how the old scars cripple you. Something I realized before, in the last episodes where he goes to see Ya Yu and Fan Li. What he's doing there, unconsciously but obviously, is acting. I think he means what he says- that he's sorry about Xi Shi, that he wants to mend the falling-out with Ya Yu and Fan Li- but he's acted a part so long, he's had to not be himself to such a degree, that now he can't be natural even with those two. He had to calculate and second-guess for so long that now he can't not do it-- calculate how he looks, how he sounds, how his words will come across, how the other will react, no matter who he's talking to. It makes him look and sound manipulative, and maybe he is. Not by choice but because the manipulation that kept him alive has become a reflex. I'd thought that having Ya Yu with him would give him one place where he could go back to being himself, where he could touch base with what's real; but it didn't work like that.
And it's really, *really* nicely conveyed. Go Uncle Ming. Only, you know, heart-breaking. Only, you know, heart-breaking in a way far removed from the usual bloody tragedy or grinding oppression.
ETA: Sad news, sad news, to old England came. End of Radiofreebanri. So long, Banri and Ensui, and thanks for all the fish. You guys were a riot.
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Fri Jun 6th, 2008
11:37 pm
Uh, fine.
But when did the continuative form start being called the passive voice?
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07:34 am - Today's cull
Why mjj hates SF, as written by someone else. God *yes* to Heinlein. Not that I share the Miles love either. Twerp. Preferred Curse of Chalion for its sodomitical pirates.
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Thu Jun 5th, 2008
12:46 pm - Unseen Enemies
Argh the western defaults are kicking my butt. Today's western defaults that form the shield-ring in my way are:
( Cut for my personal Battle of Maldon )
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Wed Jun 4th, 2008
09:22 am - Grey, grey, it's grey they say, on the far side of the hill
Seattle's weather is currently happening outside my window. Which makes me happy because in two days we'll be having Kuala Lampur's.
And over at fandom_wank there's a threnody thread (one should be able to portmanteau those words-- threadnody?) about Great Unfinished Manga Works. Not just YnM, actually. And much CLAMP bashing.
( Kurotsubaki )
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Mon Jun 2nd, 2008
10:24 pm - Interesting Times
Hm well. I may try another Rincewind Pratchett some time-- indeed, I may already have another Rincewind in the pile-- but I can see people's lack of enthusiasm for him. Not an anti-hero, just unheroic: who thus suffers extremely badly by comparison with morally heroic characters like Vimes, morally complex characters like Angua, and even the Carrots and Vetinaris who are... mh, stereotypes morphed into something else. Fascinatingly so in the latter case. I need a Discworld concordance to find all known appearances of Vetinari's assistant so I can slash the two of them.
( Other thoughts )
music: Tan Weiwei: qian gu yi wang
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Sun Jun 1st, 2008
11:16 am - May stats
( The yuuzh )
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Sat May 31st, 2008
08:53 pm - While the broadband still holds
(Is it my connection or does lj load like molasses in IE?)
Reading Interesting Times and chortling over Rincewind's troubles with tones. This because there was a volunteer at work yesterday who knows some Chinese of one kind and was taking classes in the other. "We had an exercise in talking about yourself and my teacher couldn't stop laughing. Seems I kept saying 'I am an onion.'"
( Current manga )
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Fri May 30th, 2008
07:04 pm - Swa þes middangeard/ ealra dogra gehwam dreoseð ond fealleð;
Stayed up till 4 am reading Feet of Clay, marvellous book with an appalling number of typos and failures to close quotes. The American edition, I note. Went to bed resigned to losing the entire morning to sleep. Got up to pee four and a half hours later, as is my habit: and since it was broad daylight at that hour, stayed up. If I could do this regularly I'd be able to squeeze another three or four hours out of the day.
( Random talk of bookstores and tempus fugit )
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Thu May 29th, 2008
09:11 am - "The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles"
I have no hormones left to rage, was my understanding of the process, but they seem to be raging nonetheless. Sadness.
"We met this woman from Montreal," my American housemates in Tokyo said one day. "She really hated Americans. Really hated Americans. Do *you* hate Americans?" ( There could be only one answer to that )
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Wed May 28th, 2008
02:55 pm - The Epicurean contemplates the varieties of pleasure
That is, there's a difference between the pleasure of buying books to read, and the pleasure of buying books to buy books. It helps if I keep that distinction in mind. ( With illustrations from Pratchett )
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Tue May 27th, 2008
06:57 pm - Woes
My mail problems tapered off over the last month and ceased entirely for the last few weeks. Today I come home after six hours to 584 spam messages in my mailbox (in the deleted folder because I tell OE to delete anything with that address) and 1894 messages in Postini's spam filter.
Luckily the web interface has an email addy for my provider. I emailed them. In the meantime 25 more messages turned up at postini and 5 in my mailbox.
Now I begin to wonder if it's personal. Or do random people truly get botted in this quantity?
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Sun May 25th, 2008
09:11 am - Ah, brave new world
This year I know, as last year I did not, that today is the Glorious 25th of May, a fannish trifecta:
This year I actually belong to one of those fandoms. The closed country of my fannish world gradually opens up to the long-nosed barbarians.
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01:23 am
Woolgathering a minute or so ago, I realized I'd reversed the classic Julius Caesar line about 'the evil that men do lives after them/ The good is oft interred with their bones'. But I could swear there's a quote, not necessarily Shakespeare, more or less to the effect of 'let the evil he did be buried with him and let us remember only the good.' That thought if (certainly) not those words. Can't pin it down more precisely. Does that ring a bell with anyone?
( Nazenara )
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Sat May 24th, 2008
09:27 am - The old neighbourhood
Of course there *is* one slight problem to all this mainlining Pratchett. All the main characters are white. Which is fine, but a bit disorienting as a steady diet because it's not what I'm used to nowadays.
( Something... odd )
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Fri May 23rd, 2008
07:49 pm - Pratchetting
You know why I'm reading Pratchett? The real reason? It's because petronia once said "(The Fall of Kings) reads like the retroactive reification of something that didn't exist before Terry Pratchett parodied it." ( Discuss. )
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Wed May 21st, 2008
06:43 pm
So worldserpent says 'Maybe I would read fanfic again if someone wrote a fanfic in the form of some AU Ohnotheydidnt' and then goes on to give her-fandom-specific tabloid style examples. Well, two can play at that game.
( Chinese BBs, eat your heart out )
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09:16 am - Happiness
Over at OTF_W the talk that began with lunch box wank veers off into the stuff imaginative kids get up to, and someone remarksThe last time my daughter broke into an extended song sequence the character she spent 20 minutes singing about (to the tune of John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt) was Canadian cold War era Prime Minister John Deifenbaker. Hope for the future, I say. I know adults who've never heard of Dief the chief. (And the poster *did* spell his name wrong. Just sayin'.)
Plus macros.
( Pill popping generation )
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Tue May 20th, 2008
11:10 am - Problems of translation are problems of culture
Something that occurred to me Saturday anent Kenren's 咲いて 咲いて 咲いて!! ('bloom bloom bloom' if you must have it literally). A problem I've encountered myself. 咲く is a common phrase in Japanese. You use it all the time. Bloom isn't a common phrase in English. Even when we talk about flowers on trees- which we rarely do, compared to the Japanese- common NAmerican English reduces it to a flat 'the whatevers are out.'
( Flowery things that grow on trees )
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12:16 am - Woxin rewatch 31-35
( Cut for length )
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Sun May 18th, 2008
06:54 pm - Once a week, another five hundred words
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12:06 pm - Serendipity on a rainy Sunday
Ya see, when a random Saiyuki fan quotes Siegfried Sassoon over at radiofreebanri (and I have to google to discover it *is* Sassoon though I could have guessed WW1 poet, which is the extent of *my* reading) natch you must follow her back to her lj where you find a fannishly omnivorous Spanish woman expatiating (in English, envious sigh) on her top 100 tragic heroes, with reasons why she thinks them so. ( I love lists but I love discussion even more )
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Sat May 17th, 2008
08:07 pm - "Now I am surer where they were going"
I have a Hasui landscape happening out the study window. Pale blue evening sky, tall grey-green trees in the day's last sunlight. Lovely; serene; consoling. Only...
Of all these noted in stride and detained in memory
I now know better that they were going to die,
and *have* known it since the first Gaiden tank came out, because Minekura said exactly that in her afterword. There are tens of thousands of people dead in China, and hundreds of thousands in Myanmar, and that fact has clouded my life for the last few days; and still the foretold death of an imaginary character (who was pretty 'ii kagen' when he was alive) makes the evening seem a little empty.
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Fri May 16th, 2008
12:21 pm - Yes, the devil whispered, but...
Decided last night that life is too short to read Brian Stableford's baggy inflated Werewolves of London, which reminds me of what the Chinese readers here had to say about the happi endo Woxin fic that tells you Every. Possible. Thing. that Fan Li is or might be thinking, all the way through the story. Less is more, guy-- an awful lot more. If I want to practise my speed-reading, there are better things to practise on. Into the giveaway box it goes. (Supposed to rain all weekend. The giveaway box will not be sitting on the lawn in the near future.) ( But. But. But. )
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01:44 am - See icon
Oh, and the other thing whose appeal I don't get? 'Kickass women.'
Maybe it's a Canadian thing. If you have to kick ass you're doing it wrong.
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Wed May 14th, 2008
06:37 pm - Because it must be said
I am not now, nor have I ever been, a fan of vampires. I just don't *get* it.
OTOH extreme loose-endedness has driven me back to my Chinese grammar book where, hearteningly, the sample sentences keep giving me words I've heard in Woxin, like 可是. (Listen, 可是 is a very useful word.) First the context, then the explanation, is how it works. Alas, my grammar book won't give me that set phrase one uses when referring to one's ancestors' spirits, and my wobbly memory won't either.
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Tue May 13th, 2008
07:12 pm - Natter
Finished Men at Arms last night and went right out and bought two more Pratchetts this afternoon- new, not used, which is the sign of a true addiction. I think I read them most for Vetinari; am inclined to agree with the disgruntled American on whatever comm who said, in the middle of a Hilary-Obama debate, The hell with it, I'm voting for Vetinari.
Have also re-begun the rewatches of Woxin disk 7, which may eventually find its way to England. This because I gave in and admitted my sinus infection is a sinus infection and needs antibiotics: and between antibiotics and sinus infection I expect to feel lousy for the next few days, and can feel no lousier watching Xi Shi carted off to Wu to amuse King Dork. If I ever track down a region free player I shall get that Cantonese series and watch it as a corrective. I know Chinatown Centre has it for sure 'cause I saw it there.
(Using my 'Gou Jian with a sinus headache' icon for obvious reasons.)
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Sun May 11th, 2008
07:40 pm
And now that it's the day after mother's day where half the mothers I know live, and never was mother's day at all for some even when it was yesterday, happy mother's day to my FL anyway, where applicable.
Discworld does grow on one. (This is good, because there's a lot of it, and possibly not so good because there's no guarantee it's all as good as the Watch books. The first one I ever tried wasn't.) But I started Men At Arms today in Honest Ed's coffeehouse and had to stop because I was snickering out loud (which Torontonians aren't allowed to do, even in places as déclassé as Honest Ed's coffehouse.) "Dwarfs are very attached to their gold. Any highwayman demanding 'Your money or your life' had better bring a folding chair and packed lunch and a book to read while the debate goes on.' As for 'protect the innocent comma'-- well, more people should.
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03:41 pm - The Way It Should Have Been cont'd
Which does not kick up its A/U heels and behave in a manner inappropriate to its age. ( But I bet it *will* if it goes on like this. )
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